Sunday, April 7, 2013

Does Kim Tri? Yes, yes she does!


 I have triathloned! It went very well. I was in the 8am wave, so we got there around 7:30 (my mom came with me to cheer me on). I got marked up with my number and my swim cap and got ready for the swim. I decided to treat that part just like I do for swim practice, since when I do practice, I'm always laying out my stuff so I can get in and out of the locker room quickly (I go before work). So I did that, and it took all of 5 minutes because, well, I'm organized like that. So, yeah, I was way early as usual. But that was all right because there was actually time for me to warm up a little in the pool.

It turned out my wave was really full. This meant I had to share a lane in the pool, but it was okay. I gave the other girl in my lane a 10 second head start so we weren't right on top of each other. 10 seconds is usually plenty enough separation- it's what we do in practice- and it was fine this time, too. She went past me maybe twice, but it wasn't bad. I went out pretty fast on the first 25- too fast, really- but then I settled down and got into my groove. My shoulders burned a little at first, because I wasn't really warmed up as much as I usually am before I start going for distance, but they calmed down. I knew they were calling out times, like, 5 minutes left, but I couldn't really hear what they were saying until they said there was 30 seconds left. I was about 2/3rds of the way to a wall at that point, so I picked it up to hit that one (your score goes by pool lengths). I did 325 yards total, which is about what I had planned- I'd figured on 300, but when we did a trial run in practice on Thursday, I did almost 325, so I was hoping I'd get that last 25 in today.

And then it was on to transition, whereupon I discovered that putting on a sports bra and bike shorts is not easy when you've just gotten out of the pool. But I was on time (a lot of people were not getting through transition on time. The bike people were complaining about that).

The bike part was the hardest part, which I anticipated. The seats were really hard, and I knew I'd slacked off on the training for this part, so I wasn't surprised. But I knew my dupke would get with the program after about 10 minutes, and it did, more or less. I alternated between standing and sitting when it got too much to sit. It seemed to take forever, really. But I did it! I went 12.3 miles in 30 minutes. And called out the guy who asked who was doing a "real" tri this year. I said, "I'm doing a real tri. I'm doing it right now!" Hopefully he changed his vocabulary to outdoor tri as opposed to "real tri", but I wouldn't hold my breath.

And then it was on to the run. My legs were a little tired, although, honestly, I didn't start getting tired until about the last five minutes of the bike leg. If my dupke hadn't been sore, I wouldn't have even started feeling sore at all until then. But I had a couple minutes to stretch my legs back out after getting off the bike before getting on the treadmill, so that helped. I walked the first minute, just to get my legs back under me, but then I started running. I ran for about 4 minutes or so, and my legs started tightening up and the muscle right above my ankle started hurting, so I walked for awhile. Then I ran some more and walked some more. I probably wound up running just about half of things. Here, have a photo:


This is oh, maybe half way through the run. It's blurry- Mom was taking it was a cell phone, and I joked that it was a short person taking a picture of another short person on a treadmill, so yeah. But, you can see I'm still smiling. I smiled pretty much the whole time. The girl taking official photos got several of me, because I was grinning so much. I was just so excited to be doing this and doing it well.

And here's me all done:


See, still smiling!

So, all told, I swam 325, biked 12.3 miles and ran/walked .94 miles. The run part is a bit lower than it maybe could be because I had the treadmill set on 3.0 at the fastest and I think I'd backed it down to 2.8 by the end. If I go much faster than that, I start having balance issues.

But I am very pleased and very proud- I'm gonna take the swim cap they gave me and write my distances on it and put it up in my cube. And I can now cross "do a triathlon" off my life goal list. I don't know exactly if I want to do this again- the swimming part was great, the running part was fun, but the biking part was not so much fun- but I'm not going to rule it out completely yet. I did have fun, and that's the point.