1.5-athon

So I participated in a triathlon on satuday. Mary and I drove down at 6:50 to Martindale and got prepped for the race. She started out doing the running. It was a 7 mile run, and I think she finished in 1:15 or something like that. While she was doing that, I was getting the boat ready and making sure Gertie was ready to go. When she came in from her run, I she tagged me, and I grabbed Gertie and we headed out on the road.

I have a speedometer on Gertie which tells me A) how fast I'm going, b) how far I've gone, and C) how many RPMs I'm averaging. I did my best to keep a pace of ~ 90 rpm, and for the first 8-10 miles, I was doing alright. Then, the hills started to take their tolls. It's not that they were extermely steep, but rather that they were extrememly long. I was kinda scared that I had started out at too quick a pace, and that halfway through, I'd hit the wall and all the people that I'd passed in the beginning would overtake me. Luckily, I didn't exactly hit "the wall"... it was more of a minor speed bump. I wasn't exactly able to keep my rpms up to 90 after about 12 miles. I settled for 80-85. All in all, I passed about 6-7 people, and finished 17 miles in ~56 minutes. I can't imagine doing this after running 7 miles though.

Anyway, I ran down to the boat after parking Gertie and Mary and I put in. All-in-all, we did pretty well. We navigated 95% of the river obstacles sucessfully. My driving has improved, as well as Mary's instinct as to when to use a post/draw stroke. However, we did get stuck sideways in the current about halfway through the race, and tumped over the canoe. We swam the swamped canoe to the nearest bank and tried to dump out all the water. In case you don't already know this, water is heavy. We had to empty Mary's water jug and use it to bail out enough water so we could turn it over.

At this point, we'd passed about 3-4 people. They all overtook us in the 15 minutes we lost while we were bailing. I'll have you know that once we got back on the river, we passed up all the people who we'd passed once before.

After it was all said and done, we finished 8th in our division. Had we not tumped the canoe, we probably could have finished as high as 6th. My bike time was good enough for 16th out of 40 men. I was happy with that.

When we signed in, we both got a commemerative jersey, which was pretty cool. It's made out of some pretty nice mesh, and drys off really quickly. We actually both ended up changing out of our normal clothes and raced in the jersey. After it was all over, to boot, both Mary and I won something out of the raffle. I got another jersey, and Mary got a paddle cover. She says she's either going to buy her own paddle or give it to Terry for letting us use his boat.