Pre-race thumbs up. Click the picture to see my Facebook gallery. :)
Okay, so this is very, VERY late, but life has been interesting and I haven't been able to type this up until now.
I have to say, I was MUCH more relaxed before this tri than I was the first one, even though the swimming part still scared me a little. I figured there was no way it could be worse than the first time I did it, especially since the swim part was 300 less meters, and the bike (which I was massively confident about) was longer. My goal for this tri was to be faster than 18 MPH average on the bike part.
The day before the tri, Kimberley got a hold of me and invited me to carpool to Boulder with some girls from her Tri group, and I agreed. This pushed my wake up time back to 4:15 AM. I forewent the prerace shower and just had some breakfast (yogurt with raspberries and cereal) and ran out the door to drive to the home of a gal named Shaudin. She and her husband are the owner of a giantic van and a four-bike trailer hitch bikerack, so she volunteered to drive herself, her nextdoor neighbor Margaret, Kimberley and myself to Boulder. We stopped on the way to meet up with another carful of triathletes (and have some Starbucks), and then we were off.
We got to the reservoir a little early, but that gave us ample time to unpack the van, get setup in the transition area, get marked, and empty our bladders before getting into our wetsuits. I got a different suit this time by Blueseventy, but I'm not sure I liked it. The neck was pretty tight, and it made my arteries bulge out all scary-like. One of these days (hopefully soon) I'd like to just own a wetsuit. In the long run it's going to save me money, make it easier to do training swims, and keep me from having to run across town to reserver/pickup/dropoff a wetsuit.
I was in the second swimwave (pink caps this time), which ended up with a ten minute delayed start (they sent men under thirty, then men over thirty before us). It was really sunny at the reservoir, which excited and worried me at the same time. I was glad that the sun made it all feel way less ominous to me than the Windsor swim, but the reflection off the water was pretty bad, even with my tinted goggles. Once we were swimming, though, spotting the buoys wasn't too hard.
This swim cource was basically just two 90ยบ right hand turns, like a big square out into the reservoir. I got all the way past the last buoy before I needed a break and took a few seconds on my back to calm my breathing down. I was a little nervous going in, but not scared at all once I was out in the middle of the water. I think my problem at this point is that I'm still swimming too hard. Someone told me (belatedly) that they hardly ever kick until the end, whereas I kick pretty strong the whole way.
Climbing out of the water was way easier this time around too, beacuse the beach is sand and just a gentle slope, rather than the hard shore at Windsor Lake. As I was running to the swim exit arch, I heard them announcing the names of everyone crossing the line as the top ten swimmers in our heat. I was literally in shock when I heard them say my name, the tenth person to finish! Turns out I did the 500 meters in 8:23, which puts my 100 meter pace at around 1:40. I'm still surprised I could go that fast! Goes to show what adrenaline can do for you. :)
However all that kicking bit me in the ass when I got back to the transition area and I got a massive Charlie horse in my left calf, which made getting my wetsuit off and bike shoes on interesting. It also made my T1 time longer than I wanted at 4:36.
But then I was off on my bike, the part of the race I was most excited about. I felt great about my swim, and started flying on my bike, until I started hearing a strange noise, and noticed that my front tire had gone completely flat. At this point I hadn't even made it five of the 17 miles. I found a safe-ish place to pull off and started getting my front tire off, which proved to be a pain as I hadn't done it before on that tire. I pulled out my spare tube and got it installed and aired up, then finally I was back on my way after losing probably between 10 and 15 minutes replacing the tube.
Then things started getting strange again, and a survey of my tires showed that my REAR tire was now losing air. I had no more tubes, so I jumped off and aired it up, glad to see it was at least holding air. The air in the back tire lasted about 2-3 miles tops, so I kept having to get off and repump my tire with my hand pump. One nice lady stopped along the way and gave me a CO2 cartidge filler that made the refilling easier, but it only lasted that one refill and it was back to the hand pump after that. I tried to pull off every time I passed a checkpoint with police or volunteers posted, so I could avoid getting killed by the highway traffic.
Finally, one hour, twenty-four minutes, and thirty-six seconds after I'd started the bike ride I made it back to the transition area. At that point I was just proud that I'd managed to finish, though I was disappointed in the time it took, as I'd been hoping for something closer to fifty minutes.
But there is a lesson learned here. Back when I first planned to do triathlons, my friend Shirley said that I shouldn't even necessarily bet on finishing my first race, because something could happen and I could get two flat tires on my bike. At the time, I thought there was no way that someone could be that unlucky. Obviously I know better. Next time I'll have at least two spare tubes with me, and different expectations.
By the way, I wasn't even the only person in the race that had this happen. The gal who actually won as highest fundraiser had two flat tires as well, and she had to finish with one or both completely FLAT. Also, I'd originally thought that my back tire problems were due to the patch I already had on that tube leaking, but it turned out to be a completely separate puncture. I'm just lucky that way, I guess. :)
At that point I was exhauasted, hot, filthy from bike grease and road dirt, and the last thing I wanted was to run 3.2 miles. But after my second transition (1:21, not bad!), I was off on the 5K run. For some reason, this 5K was WAY harder than the last three I'd done. I'm not sure if it was beacuse of the heat (every other 5K I'd done before this had been in overcast, cool weather) or because, as I discovered later, I'd completely forgotten to take my maintenance asthma medication AND my allergy pill in my hurry to get out of the house on time. I felt like I was sucking wind the entire run, and even had to fast-walk some parts of it, because my lungs were aching. Even with the walking, I managed to finish the run in 31:53, which was only 90 seconds slower than my last tri with my pace only being 43 seconds slower at 10:31. My final time for the race was 2:10:48.
I keep thinking that, if I'd been able to keep my bike pace up like I'd wanted, my final would have been closer to 1:35, but really, the bike problems were part of it. Sometimes things don't cooperate, and getting through them and finishing was a success for me, even if I didn't get the time I wanted. I really enjoyed the race despite the issues, and I can't wait to do another one. In fact, there is a similar sprint in September on the same course and I'm about 99% I'm going to do it, just because I loved the first one so much.
I wasn't even the last person on the team to cross the finish line, which made me feel a little better. Though later on I found out that Margaret had been in a bike accident and hurt her leg a little (she managed to accidentally hit a dead deer on the course, trying to avoid some other cyclists - scary!). But there was lunch and beer awaiting us, and I partook in both. The beer was really good, and I had one of the best brownies ever in my sack lunch. :)
Kimberley and I tried to get well deserved massages as well, but the line was long enough that we never managed to get them before we had to leave. We headed back to Fort Collins in Shaudin's awesome van where we parted ways with hugs.
Like I said, this triathlon was so fun that it didn't matter how many things went wrong. I enjoyed it so much that I wish I could have the chance to do it over again without the bike failure. Maybe in September I'll have a different story.
Thank you to Rob, by the way, who asked about how things went WEEKS ago. Sorry for the delay in posting this. :)
