Welp, it's official - I'm a triathlete!
An overly tired, under-trained, breaststroking, Huffy-riding triathlete who finished fourth-from-last. (Whoops!)
As you can probably tell from that last sentence, my first ever sprint tri did not quite go as planned, but I had an absolutely amazing time and I cannot wait to do it again. Unfortunately for me, I live in the northeast and don't own a wetsuit, so I think it's too late in the season to get another sprint tri in (and also, there's that little issue of the marathon I'm signed up to run on October 30 that I really need to focus on right now), but I'm already heavily researching bikes and eying a duathlon for October to try to assuage the triathlon bug until next season.
So, without further ado, what went wrong:
- My plan to set everything up the night before and be in bed by 9 so I could sleep as late as possible (a whopping 4:15am) was completely foiled by ::insert boring personal drama here::. Instead of going on a bike ride and then racking my bike on the car and then showering and packing all of my stuff up to go by 8:30 so I could take my time winding down before an early bedtime, I was scrambling around the house to pack my transition bag at 10:30, and ended up setting the alarm for 3:15am to give myself time to do all the things I hadn't done the night before, which came back to bite me in the ass because...
- I had never practiced racking the bike on my car, and I discovered, at 4:25am, that while the rack fits my car just fine, the bike (an old men's Huffy mountain bike with a weirdly shaped top bar) did not fit the rack. 20 minutes and 17ish bungee cords later, the bike was attached to the rack, although probably not as the rack-makers had envisioned, and...
- Then I could NOT get my tri tats to stick - I followed the instructions precisely, and yet nothing would stick to my skin. Not a darned thing. Hot. Mess. And also I lost 30 minutes on a task that should've taken five, so...
- I left almost 30 minutes late. THIRTY. FLIPPING. MINUTES. I was so late, I wasn't even panicking - I basically just assumed transition was going to be closed when I got there and I was going to DNS my first tri. Like, I was so sure that was going to happen that I was already resigned to it. Because, according to my GPS, I was going to arrive at the race site at 5:53am, and according to my info packet, transition closed at 6am, and remember, I had 17ish bungee cords to untie. (I did actually make it with time to spare, more on that below.)
- I hadn't practiced open-water swimming. I'm a strong swimmer, I swam competitively in HS and have done open-water swimming in the past, and I just never made it out to the bay to practice, mostly because I figured "how bad can 500m be?" And then I got in the water, and realized that every time I put my head down, it was pitch-freaking-black, and every time I picked my head up the rising sun kind of blinded me, and the current was pushing me in the wrong direction, and I kind of freaked and had to breaststroke the entire 500m.
- Also, I hadn't spent enough (read, any) time on the actual bike I was planning to race on (a 15ish year old men's Huffy mountain bike - yes, really). So I discovered my handlebars were crooked at the mount line. And then I discovered that the only gear that worked was third gear on the course's only hill. And then I discovered that I had a slow leak in the front tire at around mile 3 of 10. So, yeah, my bike was literally falling apart beneath me, and it took me 55 minutes to finish what should've been the fastest bike course ever, and I got to watch pretty much every person in the race pass me during the bike, even though I was pedaling twice as hard as just about everyone.
- "Transition closes at 6am," is, apparently, code for "please try to get here by 6am, please, we know it's early but seriously, please," because I rolled in at 5:51 and more than half the competitors were still arriving/had not yet arrived (which I guess makes sense since the race didn't start until 6:50, but I definitely felt better knowing I was far from the only one who was "late").
- I got to watch the sun rise over the beach - gorgeous.
- The volunteers and spectators were amazing - encouraging, excited, helpful, attentive, and understanding. The course was incredibly well-supported for a sprint, and all of the support stations were just as well-staffed and well-cheered for me (as one of the last four people on the course) as I would've expected if I'd been in the front of the pack.
- My swim was actually reasonably good - only 20 minutes, swimming breaststroke the entire way. (Breaststroke was my event back when I competed, so I guess my muscle memory kicked in or something!)
- My run was spot-on - even though I didn't have my music (headphones prohibited on the course), and even though I was coming off a tough swim and the world's worst bike, I held my usual training pace for the whole run, which was my only goal for the run portion.
- My transitions were solid - I only lost about five minutes in T1, and two minutes in T2 (and T2 could've been shorter, but I already knew I was pretty much last so I just didn't see the point in rushing through it).
- I had so. much. fun! Even when my bike was falling apart underneath me, even when everyone and their grandmother was passing me (literally, at one point I got passed by a teenager and her actual grandmother), the other competitors were awesome and kind and I just felt this weird, uplifting, bone-deep joy at being part of the race. I almost can't describe it - I just felt happy and at peace, even though it felt like everything was going wrong.
- I finished in (just barely under) two hours - since this was my first tri and I knew I was undertrained, "under two hours" was my only real goal, and given all of the unexpected stuff that happened in the lead-up and during the first two legs of the race, I'm proud I still achieved it.
