Race Report

Woohoo! I took first in my category!

Now to the full face report.

Prerace
I arrived at 5:50am to Walnut Creek Park. Took my bike, a towel, and my race number down. Saved my rack spot with my bike and towel, then went to get body marked. After that I went to get the rest of my stuff. Got all of that done by 6:10. Transition didn't close until 7:10 which meant I had a lot of time to kill. Took a short run, did a short bike ride (which was good because I was in the wrong gear initially).

Swim
I was in the 6th swim wave since I was racing in the Athena Category. The prerace camaraderie was great. We were just joking around, supporting each other with Q/A, and cheering for each other. It was great.

Once we got in the water I placed myself in the middle of the pack figuring I wasn't a terrible swimmer but definitely not great. It seemed longer than 500m, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I actually felt better about it this year than last and I came out of the water with still quite a few women behind me so that felt good.

Bike
Coming out of the swim I was more tired than I expected which I attribute mostly from running through the shallow part of the water to get out. So by the time I got out on the bike I was already breathing hard which is just a great place to start when the first mile is 90% uphill and a rather steep one at that. Thankfully I had trained on it and new I was getting a nice downhill once I got to the top.

The first major downhill I just blew down. I was in my top gear possible and still felt like I could've pushed more. I've really learned to enjoy the speed I can get from that and how far it'll carry me up the next one. Once I got to the first turn on major roads I had to slow down more than I wanted for two reasons. First as I stated yesterday, they had just laid fresh gravel down so it was a bit more treacherous and that means the road isn't as smooth to just crank it. Second, I had managed to catch up to a whole group of people ahead of me and just didn't have the speed to pass. Since we can't draft I had to stay 3 bike lengths behind the person in front of me. I did eventually pass a whole group of them but it was still not as quick as I would've liked.

When I got to the halfway point it is the only relatively flat road and I normally crank hard on it. I pushed hard, but I felt like I could've given it a little more but my energy was starting to drag. I did make sure I pushed hard enough so that if the notorious dogs came after me that I could get out fast since at that point I was pretty much all alone (as far as seeing folks ahead of me, not sure about behind me).

The rest of the ride was fairly uneventful. I did use a powergel on the ride back so I could hope that I had enough energy for the run.

Run
I got back from the bike and had promised myself Gatoraid so I guzzled (mistake #1) more than I should have especially since I had not had positive experiences in the past while running with fluids sloshing in my stomach.

This year we did a slightly modified start to the run so that we wouldn't have to run over wet, slippery, uneven rocks and instead extend the path a bit to use a new bike path they had put in to address the issue of bikers trying to go over those same rocks.

The run time will not be good this year. The gatoraid caused my stomach to cramp and lack of enough trail running caused me to walk a large portion of it. I ran off and on passing Lance who I met on Thursday at a tri-club meeting. Eventually I was only walking and he caught up with me and said "come run with me." So I did. It was great to have someone to run with and he had the same opinions about up-hills that I did... they should be walked. Probably around mile 2.5 my stomach was just getting worse so I told him to go ahead and I would catch up. I finished probably about 20 seconds afterwards.

Overall
I crossed the mat at clock time of 2:27ish. Given that I was in wave six that put me 20 minutes behind the clock time, so I did it in 2:07-2:08ish depending on how the chip time comes out. Which means this year I was slower than last year. It could depend on many things... was the swim course actually longer this year (it felt it), did the gravel roads slow everyone down and thus my relative placement isn't as bad, just how much worse was my run since I think my bike was better. In the end, I'll look at all the pieces and see how I did and compare my relative ranking to the other women.

Placing
This year I competed in the Athena category (women over 150 pounds and opt-in to this category). In the past 3 years there have been 6-8 women who have finished each year. I figured I stood a much better chance placing in that then in my age group which had almost 30 women. As of race day there were only two of us. I raced the entire thing not being sure where the other woman was so I needed to either catch her or not let her catch me. In the end, she didn't end up racing. Thus I took first place by default! I still raced hard and given that when I signed up I did expect 6-8 other women, it's still a victory.

Epilogue: Nutrition is the 4th Sport
As mentioned in the run portion mistake #1 happened when I guzzled gatoraid before going out on the run. This was compounded with mistake #2 that I drank an ice cold gatoraid as soon as I finished. I both chugged it and was not used to drink ice cold water or gatoraid. Mistake #3 was eating about a full orange in a rather ravenous manner. Mistake #4 for drinking another ice cold gatoraid. Can you see where this is leading?

If not, let me guide you. In my cube I have a photocopy of a shoe ad that has the slogon "In triathlons, victory and defeat often taste the same" and a picture of a female triathlete on the side of the road curled up and clearly looking like she lost breakfast. Yep, that was me. Expect instead of losing breakfast I lost all that lovely gatoraid and orange pieces. I ended up doing it twice in two separate locations since I was dumb and tried to eat part of banana and water to calm my nerves. Nope, that just came up too.

This left my body in an extreme sugar low (which I already have issues with) and unable to eat. Thankfully the triathlon community is very supportive and so I had many offers of help to either take me to a hospital for IV fluids, take me home so I could rest, or just get me anything I needed. I appreciated it all.

Lesson learned: be careful about both pre-race and post-race nutrition.