When I walked outside my apartment this morning, the air smelled like spoiled milk. Weird.
Anyway. In other news, I am now officially a triathlete!! Woohoo! The race yesterday went great, and I am so excited that I did it. I finished in 1:56:56, under two hours(!), number 1214 out of 2374. I’m especially proud of my performance in the swim, where I totally kicked butt, finishing in 18:40 to rank 439th out of all 2374 women. If you’re interested, my complete time breakdown (swim, transition 1, bike, transition 2, and run) is here. As you can see from my run time, my legs were pretty much dead after the bike.
So we all got up really early yesterday morning to head to the race site. The traffic was bad, and I was afraid we would miss the start, but we got to the starting area about 5 minutes before the gun, and as it turned out, we had to wait for a while for our wave anyway. With the exception of the “elite” women who were placed in the first group, everyone else was organized by age, from oldest to youngest. This meant that Cari and I were way back in waves 20 and 21 (out of 24 total), and with 5 minutes between wave starts, we ended up sitting around for a while. Here’s what we looked like before starting:
The oh-so-stylin’ swim caps were to distinguish between waves, and also to make everyone more visible in the water. Everyone had to wear one. Note that we even got our numbers written on our arms and legs–how hip and cool are we?!?
Anyway, Cari started, and then 5 minutes later I started, as you can see in the picture below. I’ve heard that some people get freaked out in the swim, especially if they’ve never been in open water with a lot of other people. Becca was volunteering as a “swim angel” and can confirm this (her job was to be in the water with a foam noodle and help/encourage/swim with anyone having trouble).
I didn’t freak out, as I’ve swum in lakes and in pools with lots of other people before, but I was surprised to see how surreal the whole swim portion seemed. I mean, picture this: you’re in this lake, the water is really cloudy and you can’t see more than a couple feet in front of you, you can’t see the bottom, you have no idea how deep the water is. What you can see is just this ugly shade of green fading to black, and an occasional arm or leg or bubbles from someone kicking in front of you. And you’re often getting bumped or kicked or elbowed by the other swimmers, and the current is pushing you off course. So it was pretty weird, but not scary. I just kept swimming. I’d been planning to do mostly freestyle interspersed with some breakstroke resting breaks, but I quickly found that it was easier to steer clear of other people and stay on course if I just swam breaststoke, so I did that almost the whole way.
So I got to the end of the 0.5 mile swim and got out of the water and we all had to go up a hill into the transition area. I sat down on my towel, put on my shoes, then shorts and shirt, grabbed my helmet and sunglasses and headed out on the bike course. Even though I’d driven the course last weekend with Leila and Alex, the hills felt much steeper than I’d imagined, made worse by the fact that the gears on my bike somehow got knocked out of alignment (probably from being on the back of Cari’s truck the whole way from Houston to Austin), and I couldn’t used my 6 or 7 lowest gears, first because using the lowest gear on the back while on the middle cog in the front made the chain fall off (this happened twice before I resigned myself to just not using that gear), and second because the front derailleur wouldn’t knock the chain up to the biggest cog (lowest gear). Grr!! As a result, I had to get off the bike and walk up the last portion of the two biggest hills. If my stupid gears had worked, I probably could have finished 3 or 4 minutes faster, but c’est la vie.
Anyway, the uphills sucked but the downhills were awesome. I got going as fast as 30.9 miles per hour at one point! Cool. Anyway, I finished the 12-mile bike ride and went back into the transition area. I spotted Chris watching from the fence at the end of the bike course, and then Becca was standing on the other side of the fence near my bike rack, so we chatted briefly as I racked my bike and took off my helmet, and then I headed out on the run course. My legs were completely jelly after going up and down all the hills on the bike course, and so I walked almost the whole first mile. But as I walked I started to feel a bit better, and by the third mile I was jogging most of the way except for a big hill at about mile 2.5. But finally we came around a bend and I could see the finish line about 3 tenths of a mile ahead. I jogged down the road through a long tunnel of people cheering, and saw Becca cheering for me, and even was able to put on a burst of speed at the end to overtake a couple people. It was so cool to run past all these cheering people! And then I was done! Chris was right at the finish line taking pictures, but I was so elated to be done that I totally didn’t see him at all. Oops. 🙂 Here’s me crossing the finish line (the clock time is from the start of the first wave, that’s why it says 3:14 even though I finished in under 2 hours and Cari finished in 2:12:20):
And here’s Cari:
And here’s Cari and me after the race with our finisher’s medals:
So that is the story of the triathlon! I’m so pumped that I did it, and I definitely want to do it again next year. There are some more pictures of us going through the transition area, but Cari hasn’t downloaded them off her camera yet, so I’ll post them when she does.
Woohoo!
