Don't you just love checking things off lists? Especially big things on lifetime lists, and especially when you realize that you actually rather enjoy them and want to add them right back on the list to do again? Yeah, me too. What I’m trying to say, is that Sunday’s triathlon was AMAZING!
Over the last month and a half I have swam 4,375 yards, biked 73 miles, and ran 18 miles. That sounds like a rather exorbitant amount of “exercise” to me, but I have always wanted to do a triathlon, and I figured it was the sort of thing you sort of need to prepare for. The race was in Monticello, about an hour and half from Vinton, so me, Bob and Erin drove down the night before and stayed with some of the wonderful people we had met on our project in Hopkinton. The mornings before big events are always rather nerve racking, but this seemed particularly so. We dropped our bikes at the first transition area the night before, but we still had to leave around 6:15 to get all our transition things set up and catch a bus to the starting point. I laid out my towel, filled my water bottles, rolled up my socks to make them easier to slip onto wet feet, and had my helmet ready to go. Over the course of my training I had set a few goals for myself. Namely: Finish- that one was immutable. One way or another I was crossing that finish line. Once I was confident that this could happen, I decided I needed some sort of easy, attainable time goal and 2 hours seemed like plenty. Over the last couple weeks, however, when I started adding up my training times, not accounting for transitions and fatigue, it looked like it would be cutting it pretty close. At that point I decided I needed an easier secondary goal so I decided I just wanted to be in the top half of the finishers. I must be more accustomed to ranking myself academically as opposed to athletically, because when I got there and looked around at the physiques my fellow racers reality slapped me in the face that suddenly seemed absurdly ambitious. That led to my final goal: pass four people. I am happy to say that I achieved three of the four goals with flying colors. I finished, I finished in 1:54:07, and I passed 18 people in the process. I placed 141 out of 177, putting me squarely in the bottom fourth, but I have a theory on that—since this was the first ever Camp Courageous Triathlon, it seems plausible that the people who would have heard about it and/or been interested were mostly people who were already into tri’s . But that is just a theory. (Oh, and a note on the passing goal, I’m pretty certain I passed a few people in the swim portion, but I was much too busy attempting to breath to mess with counting, and I feel a little bad about counting the 12 year old I passed on the bike, but I defiantly passed him, and there were two guys that I only passed due my excellent drink while you run skills and they promptly repassed me as soon as they returned to their pace, but hey, I did technically pass them.) So here’s how the whole thing felt. The swim was scary. They let you seed yourself (so I headed straight for the back of the line) and they waited 5 seconds between each individual. That was really nice and cut down a lot on the dreaded “kicked in the face” scenario. Between the nerves and the adrenaline and the asthma and the not being able to see two inches into the water, I pretty much couldn’t breathe. I have been really proud of myself for the progress I’ve made in my side breathing, but the open water really threw me and I could only make it a few breathes before needing to stay up longer to get my bearings straight. I ended up side stroking for about half of the 500 yards (yeah, I know, real cool) but my 11:43 swim time is actually about a minute and a half faster than I think my practice swims were. I spent over three minutes in the first transition. I figured trying to get my breathing under control and my feet actually dry was worth an extra minute or so. About a quarter mile in, I tried to down shift and suddenly I couldn’t pedal. That was more than a bit disconcerting, but after clumsily swerving around for a few yards and nearly taking out a volunteer, the chain popped back into place and didn’t give me any more trouble for the rest of the race (16 miles in all). My bike time was 1:06:06, about 8 minutes faster than my last practice time, and it felt great. It was fairly flat (hmm, a flat road in Iowa, weird) and curved thru lovely fields and tiny towns. It was a beautiful day and you could see for miles and there was no place else I’d rather be. But then came the run. The bike to run transition has a pretty bad reputation as your leg muscles try to adjust to their new task. Sure enough, my feet felt like large, wobbly chunks of lead and my knees and hips like rusty hinges for the first half mile or so. Oh, but let me back up for a second. When I hopped of the bike in second transition, after a few seriously wobbly steps and some not so discrete laughing from the volunteers, my legs just couldn’t stop moving so I just tossed my bike on a rack and kept running thru the transition area. That led to a T time of 36 seconds which was, drumroll please….the overall third fastest transition time!!!! Yep, pretty much a pro. Ok, back to running. The course was an out an back run down the same road you had just biked in on. It was completely straight, with no shade, and you just ran to a sign then turned around. I’ve always been a fan of loop routes myself, but I don’t think I’d actually realized the psychological effects of the anticlimactic out and back. Almost as bad as a treadmill. Regardless, I ran the 5k in 32:29, only slightly slower than my normal running pace, and I was able to run the whole way. I assumed I would be absolutely dead by the end. I assumed I would fighting back pain and just willing myself to finish. Not so. I was still smiling and sure, I was totally exhausted, but in a healthy way not the “wow, everything in my body thinks I shouldn’t have just done that” way. That’s the response I’m used to, so this was a nice and welcome surprise. Bob and Erin also did great and we are all pretty proud of ourselves for actually going thru with it. I saved one of the best parts for last. In case you felt bad about not being there to cheer for us, don’t worry, that part was covered. Somehow we pulled some strings to get permission to take the van that far so at 6 in the morning, four of our teammates and one teammate’s roommate piled in the van with some highly encouraging posters and showed up to cheer us on. It was so great to have them standing at the finish line cheering us on and witnessing such an awesome personal achievement. It really meant a lot. It also meant that we all got to go back to Hopkinton for a lovely lunch with some of the people we had worked with. We ate pizza in the gym that had formerly been our home and caught up on all the small town happenings including the recent damn break and subsequent flood. It was so good to see them. We drove home and I spent the rest of the day working on a mural. Each team gets a chunk of wall for them to represent themselves and we chose to immortalize our beloved dashboard buddies.
It's not quite done yet, but for just a couple days of work it's coming along quite nicely. It was actually rather fun to be painting again. It’s been so long, and after working on it pretty much all afternoon yesterday and all day today I’m having some serious flashbacks to my college days. I kind of miss it. At the beginning of the year we did a physical training baseline test involving push-ups, sit-ups, and a mile run. Today we repeated it for comparison and, despite yesterday’s exertion, I still dropped almost half a minute from my run time. It was a nice close to great and challenging few days. Tomorrow we have our last one day service project (I get to do trail work), the next day is graduation rehearsal and awards banquet, and by noon on Thursday it will all be over. Surreal. Alright, well, thanks for making it to the end of a really long post with lots of numbers that you probably didn’t care about.
Over the last month and a half I have swam 4,375 yards, biked 73 miles, and ran 18 miles. That sounds like a rather exorbitant amount of “exercise” to me, but I have always wanted to do a triathlon, and I figured it was the sort of thing you sort of need to prepare for. The race was in Monticello, about an hour and half from Vinton, so me, Bob and Erin drove down the night before and stayed with some of the wonderful people we had met on our project in Hopkinton. The mornings before big events are always rather nerve racking, but this seemed particularly so. We dropped our bikes at the first transition area the night before, but we still had to leave around 6:15 to get all our transition things set up and catch a bus to the starting point. I laid out my towel, filled my water bottles, rolled up my socks to make them easier to slip onto wet feet, and had my helmet ready to go. Over the course of my training I had set a few goals for myself. Namely: Finish- that one was immutable. One way or another I was crossing that finish line. Once I was confident that this could happen, I decided I needed some sort of easy, attainable time goal and 2 hours seemed like plenty. Over the last couple weeks, however, when I started adding up my training times, not accounting for transitions and fatigue, it looked like it would be cutting it pretty close. At that point I decided I needed an easier secondary goal so I decided I just wanted to be in the top half of the finishers. I must be more accustomed to ranking myself academically as opposed to athletically, because when I got there and looked around at the physiques my fellow racers reality slapped me in the face that suddenly seemed absurdly ambitious. That led to my final goal: pass four people. I am happy to say that I achieved three of the four goals with flying colors. I finished, I finished in 1:54:07, and I passed 18 people in the process. I placed 141 out of 177, putting me squarely in the bottom fourth, but I have a theory on that—since this was the first ever Camp Courageous Triathlon, it seems plausible that the people who would have heard about it and/or been interested were mostly people who were already into tri’s . But that is just a theory. (Oh, and a note on the passing goal, I’m pretty certain I passed a few people in the swim portion, but I was much too busy attempting to breath to mess with counting, and I feel a little bad about counting the 12 year old I passed on the bike, but I defiantly passed him, and there were two guys that I only passed due my excellent drink while you run skills and they promptly repassed me as soon as they returned to their pace, but hey, I did technically pass them.) So here’s how the whole thing felt. The swim was scary. They let you seed yourself (so I headed straight for the back of the line) and they waited 5 seconds between each individual. That was really nice and cut down a lot on the dreaded “kicked in the face” scenario. Between the nerves and the adrenaline and the asthma and the not being able to see two inches into the water, I pretty much couldn’t breathe. I have been really proud of myself for the progress I’ve made in my side breathing, but the open water really threw me and I could only make it a few breathes before needing to stay up longer to get my bearings straight. I ended up side stroking for about half of the 500 yards (yeah, I know, real cool) but my 11:43 swim time is actually about a minute and a half faster than I think my practice swims were. I spent over three minutes in the first transition. I figured trying to get my breathing under control and my feet actually dry was worth an extra minute or so. About a quarter mile in, I tried to down shift and suddenly I couldn’t pedal. That was more than a bit disconcerting, but after clumsily swerving around for a few yards and nearly taking out a volunteer, the chain popped back into place and didn’t give me any more trouble for the rest of the race (16 miles in all). My bike time was 1:06:06, about 8 minutes faster than my last practice time, and it felt great. It was fairly flat (hmm, a flat road in Iowa, weird) and curved thru lovely fields and tiny towns. It was a beautiful day and you could see for miles and there was no place else I’d rather be. But then came the run. The bike to run transition has a pretty bad reputation as your leg muscles try to adjust to their new task. Sure enough, my feet felt like large, wobbly chunks of lead and my knees and hips like rusty hinges for the first half mile or so. Oh, but let me back up for a second. When I hopped of the bike in second transition, after a few seriously wobbly steps and some not so discrete laughing from the volunteers, my legs just couldn’t stop moving so I just tossed my bike on a rack and kept running thru the transition area. That led to a T time of 36 seconds which was, drumroll please….the overall third fastest transition time!!!! Yep, pretty much a pro. Ok, back to running. The course was an out an back run down the same road you had just biked in on. It was completely straight, with no shade, and you just ran to a sign then turned around. I’ve always been a fan of loop routes myself, but I don’t think I’d actually realized the psychological effects of the anticlimactic out and back. Almost as bad as a treadmill. Regardless, I ran the 5k in 32:29, only slightly slower than my normal running pace, and I was able to run the whole way. I assumed I would be absolutely dead by the end. I assumed I would fighting back pain and just willing myself to finish. Not so. I was still smiling and sure, I was totally exhausted, but in a healthy way not the “wow, everything in my body thinks I shouldn’t have just done that” way. That’s the response I’m used to, so this was a nice and welcome surprise. Bob and Erin also did great and we are all pretty proud of ourselves for actually going thru with it. I saved one of the best parts for last. In case you felt bad about not being there to cheer for us, don’t worry, that part was covered. Somehow we pulled some strings to get permission to take the van that far so at 6 in the morning, four of our teammates and one teammate’s roommate piled in the van with some highly encouraging posters and showed up to cheer us on. It was so great to have them standing at the finish line cheering us on and witnessing such an awesome personal achievement. It really meant a lot. It also meant that we all got to go back to Hopkinton for a lovely lunch with some of the people we had worked with. We ate pizza in the gym that had formerly been our home and caught up on all the small town happenings including the recent damn break and subsequent flood. It was so good to see them. We drove home and I spent the rest of the day working on a mural. Each team gets a chunk of wall for them to represent themselves and we chose to immortalize our beloved dashboard buddies.
It's not quite done yet, but for just a couple days of work it's coming along quite nicely. It was actually rather fun to be painting again. It’s been so long, and after working on it pretty much all afternoon yesterday and all day today I’m having some serious flashbacks to my college days. I kind of miss it. At the beginning of the year we did a physical training baseline test involving push-ups, sit-ups, and a mile run. Today we repeated it for comparison and, despite yesterday’s exertion, I still dropped almost half a minute from my run time. It was a nice close to great and challenging few days. Tomorrow we have our last one day service project (I get to do trail work), the next day is graduation rehearsal and awards banquet, and by noon on Thursday it will all be over. Surreal. Alright, well, thanks for making it to the end of a really long post with lots of numbers that you probably didn’t care about.
Yay Rebecs! So proud of you!
ReplyDeleteBec, You are amazing! I enjoyed reading the extra details that I didn't get to hear about on the phone. And the mural looks great!
ReplyDelete