I knew it was going to be a great day when I heard the birds singing so sweetly out of my bedroom window at 5:00AM Sunday morning.
Yes, 5:00AM. Lauri and I wanted to get out to Pleasant Creek Park early enough to park in the main lot. With 800 participants, we knew the lot would fill quickly. We met at Starbucks at 5:30AM and followed a long stream of cars with bikes out toward Palo.
We couldn't have asked for better weather. The sun was shining, there was barely a breeze and it warmed up nicely.
The Pigman uses "waves" to start the race. The 'elite' group went first. These are the athletes that are in it to win it and it's impressive to watch them. The elite women were given a nine minute lead on the elite men, and they were all finished with the swim by the time the men started. I was in wave seven which included all women age 25-50. After the elites, waves started four minutes apart. The swim went well, I was pleasantly surprised that the water didn't seem so cold and I was excited when I passed several blue caps (from the women age 18-24 wave before me).
My goal for biking was to get it under one hour. Two years ago (the last time I did this tri) my bike time was 1:05. I'm a slow, casual biker, but I've been trying to speed up! I also tried to keep my transition time quick; get out of the wet suit, into shorts/shirt and bike sandals and helmet and go. I got out onto the road and felt like at least 100 bikes passed me in the first few miles. I don't spend a lot of energy tracking my splits, in fact, I didn't even wear a watch this time. But I did glance at my bike computer occasionally and tried to keep my speed over 16mph. I got up to 30mph going down the first big hill. That's flying for me.
I did meet my goal for biking; I ended up doing the route in 58 minutes. Then it was on to the run. I had never tried the "energy goo" prior to this event, but it's recommended, and we got a free package in our race pack, so I popped it open after the bike and sucked up about half of it while putting on my running shoes. I found it to be rather gross feeling in my mouth and I really don't know if it gave me any energy or not.
It takes awhile to get into a running rhythm after biking, but there's a nice downhill right after the first turn on the running route and that helps. The cool thing about the Pigman route is that the bikers and runners share the same route. So, while I was running, there were bikers still coming in, there were runners going out, and there were runners coming in for the finish. It's fun to see people you know and give a shout out as they go past. I caught a stitch in my side before I got to the turn around point, but it wasn't bad enough to stop me from running. For the most part I was able to ignore it and keep on going.
My run time was 30 minutes. That's a little longer that I'd hoped, but I'm happy with my overall time: 1:45:26. That's five+ minutes faster than I did this course in 2006. I also felt a lot better afterwards than I did two years ago. I spent Sunday afternoon at the pool with Willa and even feel up to a nice long run today.
Now...it's on to the Quad Cities Tri!
