40 minutes of icing (knees and shins), a huge tex mex lunch, and a two hour nap later, and I'm feeling almost 100% recovered from the triathlon this morning. My friend Anne and I competed together, and, if I don't say so myself, we both kind of kicked some you-know-what.
I was a little daunted when we left the house at 5:45am and it was already 81 degrees and sticky hot (yet still dark), but as the sun rose, we found that we had full cloud cover and it lasted just about the whole race. So, despite the humidity, it was not nearly as searing as I had expected.
Overall, the race was great. The worst part was just waiting around for our heat (dead last) to start!
The swim was awesome. As I expected, it was my strongest leg, and I was super psyched to find out that I placed 75th out of over 1500 people with my swim time (15:42 for a half mile). I also gave it all I had in the bike race and am pretty happy about that time, especially because the bike race was the biggest wild card for me. I thought I'd get somewhere between 45-60 minutes, and I wound up with a time of 46:35 for just under 12 miles, so I felt great about that.
The last leg was the run and, no surprises here, it was definitely the most challenging for me. I walked 40-50 yards at the beginning and then walked the water stations, and I felt like my pace was just crawling. But after my initial little walk, I told myself I'd jog it in if it killed me (minus those water stations) and I did. I managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other up the huge hill at the end, and then did my best to sprint the straight-away, finishing with a 5K time of 34:39. With my transition times between races added in, my official finishing time was 1:50:01-- killing my goal of coming in under 2 hours.
After today, I just might be a triathlete! It was such a fun race, and I genuinely enjoyed 2/3 of it (the swimming and biking.) The run was painful, but if at least part of the race didn't require me to really dig down and push through some pain, I would have felt disappointed that I could have done better. I really think I might have to try an Olympic distance triathlon (about twice the distance that we did today) one of these days!
Here are some pics of our day:
Our heat starting the swim
Anne finishing the swim strong!
Me, wrapping up the bike leg
Me, super excited to see J and trying to muster the energy to spring the last few hundred yards
Jumping in to finish the last stretch with Anne-- she's looking fantastic in this final stretch!
Yayay!! Go you!
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