Pretty solid swim from me, right there with what I've been doing here for the past few years. Turned out to be the only fun part of the day unfortunately.

Nothing

Made a huge mistake by planning to swim in my tri shorts, and put on an underarm long sleeve under my jacket. Even with a dry towel to get the water off my torso, there was just NO way I was getting that shirt on. After saying my long standing motto to Leigh "nothing new on race day", I had to scrap the idea and just wear my cycling jacket over nothing, and hope for the best.

Not try to do something new on race day, especially something that had 0% chance of working.

This was absolutely horrific. It never stopped raining, and actually got harder about 1/3 of the way into the bike. These conditions were just absurd. IMLP 2014 wasn't this bad in terms of cold. I wanted to give up 100 times, and even decided that I would finish the bike and drop out of the race at one point. I spent the last hour of the bike urging myself to get out of that mind set, and prepare to try to run. It couldn't be colder than this, right? And if I could maybe get some dry clothes from Leigh, I could even warm up a little bit on the run? And if I could do that, I could maybe compete for an overall podium spot and one of those damn turtles.

Well, after somehow managing to finish the bike, I pull in to transition to find that the race had been called for safety reasons. I was upset for about 2 seconds before my new focus was to get warm.

I can't even begin to critique anything in these conditions.

You mean "warm-up"? The EMT and Leigh escorted my purple, vibrating body to the annexed beer tent where they had an open flame set up for us hypothermic athletes. Leigh had dry clothes and my Boston Marathon mylar for me. They gave me hot cocoa, and I began the process of thawing.


The conditions.


I love this race. I'll be back next year. But you can't control the weather, and this just just absolutely sucked.