Wearing the Big Girl Pants

It's all because of this race.


If it weren't for a couple of margaritas, some over confidance, some girlfriends egging me on and this race, I would never have started down the triathlon path.


A year ago I signed up for Race the River Triathlon at Riverstone CDA thinking...hey, its a year away.  I can totally do this....no problems.  See - OVERCONFIDENCE.  At that stage it didn't occur to me that I should be intimidated or the least bit perturbed about the half mile swim, 11 mile bike and 5 km run.  Well fast forward to this morning when I am standing on the beach about to enter the river to swim half a mile and I was silently vowing to myself NEVER to drink a margarita with these friends again. It was definitely the margaritas that were responsible for me being in this predicament.

 


And so I did what all women are forced to do from time to time.  I reached for my big girl panties...in this case my blue seventy wetsuit...and took the plunge.  And it was a BLAST.


I knew going into it that last years winner in my Age Group had a time of 1:21:38.  So if I could come in somewhere close to that I would be happy.  Coach Tristan had told me that her approach to a sprint tri was simple...just go out as fast and hard as you can.  OK then.....a simple strategy.  I like it!

 

   It was so much fun seeing heaps of people I knew out on the course, including my friends Michelle who was doing her first tri, her husband Ken and Spokane Al who placed 1st in his AG..(Way to go, Al). My friend Amy told me to watch out for a friend of hers, Karen who was also doing the race and what do you know, Karen ended up racking her bike right next to mine and we hit it off straight away. 

 So back to the swim...well from my last blog post about the Valley Girl Tri you'll already know that the swim is my least favorite part of the race...but equipped with my big girl pants I managed to NEARLY enjoy it. It was a deepwater start which was new for me and the swim itself was longer and straighter than VG.  There was a bit of a run from the swim exit to T1 and then we were out and onto the bike.

The bike portion was a 3 lap course which was fairly flat but very congested with 700 racers.   So I tried to keep pushing and my legs still felt OK by the time I came back into T2. The only downside was that the straw in my aero bottle got stuck and was about 15 feet long and so trying to take a sip from it was a bit of a challenge but besides that it was all good.





Matt caught a video on me heading out on the run...I was still smiling at that point so that's something!


The run was a little ugly...a couple of hills but mostly the problem was the heat.  I started in one of the last waves...in fact the elites were done by the time I got to start so by the time I hit the run it was getting hot.  Luckily I managed to get dragged along by a very chatty Cathy who was happy to run with me.  She dragged me along for about a mile and a half and soon I could see the finish line and was visualizing my lovely post race massage in the Team Blaze tent. Ahhhhh...heaven. Thanks to Coach Scott and Tristin for supplying the Team Blaze tent and their support and for AJ for her magic fingers.






Here is a video of me crossing the finish line.  The kids handed me a gatorade and helped get the timing chip off my leg....it cracks me up...I was SO out of gas by then. I look like a 95 year old lady all bent over.





So here are the stats:


Swim:      0.5 mile    16:25
T1:                           1:39
Bike:        11 miles   34:05
T2:                           1:02
Run:        3.1 miles  27:44


Official Time:   1:20:57


Age Group - 6/52
Females - 48/365
Overall - 145/616