A pretty warm day, but a great turn out, and a fun race - even if I'm so stupid that I forgot my running shoes at home. That's a special kind of stupid folks. Anyways...Me, Elizabeth, Grum, and Kree were all signed up and luckily for me Nick & Al showed up to do some spectating and Nick had an extra pair of shoes...otherwise I would've reluctantly ran barefoot.
I was part of the first wave for the .5 mile swim, and unlike past races - I didn't wait until literally everyone had started swimming, and I didn't swim on the far edges. The swim course is on a pond and the route is shaped sort of like a horse shoe. I switched between the backstroke and freestyle throughout the race, and feel like I did an ok job of that. I'm still not able to maintain the breathing for the freestyle - and although I don't get tired, I just start hyperventilating. Throughout the swim I ended up kicking a few people, getting kicked, and hitting people in the back of the leg by accident. I'm still not used to all that, but I don't get rattled and panic - I just pop my head out of the water and apologize. I have no idea why. No one cares. I don't even care. All in all, it was one of my better swims and I finished in 16:42 - an improvement of 2:08 over last year.
Once again though, I feel like I sucked horribly during the transition. The results page doesn't show transition times though, and so I'm not sure how bad I sucked, but I'll go ahead and assume it was about a minute too long.
The bike portion was a tale of two halves. The first five miles felt pretty solid - I stupidly didn't wear the garmin, but I feel like I was easily averaging 20+MPH. Unfortunately, the second half of the course has a few stretches of consistent hills that killed me. And to make matters worse, I'm pretty sure it was terrible because I don't know how to use my bike. At around mile 7 I was churning uphill trying to get in a lower gear when a girl flew passed me and said, "try not to change gears while your standing"...I'm going to guess that's fairly common knowledge - so while I felt dumb, I appreciated the tip because as she was flying past me I was looking at my chain that I'm pretty sure was about to come off. I took the advice though and sat down and went through the gears. So the second half didn't go well, but I was fortunate enough to get a good tip at probably just the right time.
I came into the transition area with my quads killing me. Probably an ok transition time, but I had to spend some extra time tying Nick's 11.5 shoes extra tight on my 10.5 feet. I went out of the transition area with a really short stride. I was passing people though, and so I just kept moving and hoping my legs would loosen up. I finished the first mile in just under 7 minutes and had finally started to loosen up. Unfortunately at around 1.3 miles, the run enters a trail in the woods that goes basically straight uphill. I actually felt really good in the early sections of the trail, but it was so narrow that I couldn't pass people. And then when I did try and side step the trail to dash ahead, my foot would shift around in Nick's big shoes and I thought I was going to eat it. When I was finally able to get a little bit of room to breath I was at the final hill on the trail section, which is a tough uphill of ~100meters and really an area where I wasn't going to gain much ground on anyone except people who decided to walk the hill. So mile two was a sucky 8:10. Really sucky. After exiting the trail, we turned right onto the road heading downhill before taking a left on the homestretch. I was able to cautiously stretch my legs on the downhill, but once again it wasn't a comfortable feeling with my feet sliding around. After passing probably 20+ people during the run at this point, the first person passed me at the base of the hill. Since I was still remaining cautious at the bottom of the hill in Nick's big shoes, this dood was able to put a little bit of distance on me. I could see the finish line from the bottom of the hill though, and picked up the pace enough to be able to pass him with about 150 meters to go.
Overall, I'm mostly disappointed. There's no reason my run should be that slow. Yup, disappointed.
Results: http://firm-racing.com/result_report.asp?RID=750&type=1
Nice job by Grum, Kree, and Eli though!
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