My first Tri experience

WOW, here it goes: This is the Fremont, WI Mini Sprint

Weather, well, it wasn’t exactly nice out. We got there bright and early, thank god, cause it turned out that they weren’t providing any bike stands. After finding out that we could set up early, we jumped to one of the few trees available to lean my bike against. Plus, this turned out to be an easy way to find our transition set up. After setting up we got through the registration fairly quick due to us being some of the first ones there. We walked down to the swim area and were baffled (not just us) how far we had to run from there to the T1. You had to run on grass through parts of the camping area, then on carpet that was put over some real big gravel (this did not make it any easier to run), and then finally over concrete to the entrance of T1.

Some people ended up bringing a towel and sneakers to put along the grass path so they didn’t have to run barefoot. At first I hit myself on the head for not thinking of that, and then I realized how much time these ppl were going to loose by putting on their shoes and then changing into bike shoes in T1. Although, a lot of them didn’t seem to have bike shoes!

My friend and me ran once around in a circle, than I tested my bike, and surely enough it was already time to go to the water. We waded in a little bit to see how cold it was, and it seemed pretty decent – at the shallow part of it at least. The wind and the temperatures outside were chilly and I was in the last wave, so I decided not to swim. I got the chance to watch everybody and realized that everyone wanted to be on the inside of the swim lane. Of course, that made it a huge cluster once they hit the water. They had each wave start at the same time (manually timed) every 2 minutes. Since I didn’t want to get beat up on my first Tri, I decided to start front left, were barely anybody seemed to wait, that way I didn’t have to deal with other swimmers too much and could just swim around them; turned out that I was right. Not one kick!

I’m not sure what happened next, either I just went all out without noticing, or I was shell shocked by the water temp. It was a lot colder than we thought and I felt my legs getting cold fast. Half way through the course I could barely breathe, my strokes, although concentrating on fewer kicks and long strokes, would just not fall into tune. I did a few breast strokes, about 10 seconds on my back and tried again. When I saw that I was only the 3^rd or 4^th swimmer behind in my wave, I decided to suck it up. It helped that somebody was trying to pass me and I didn’t want anything of that sort to happen. Somehow I got some more strokes in and finally finished on my side. I was brutally exhausted and dumbfounded that I had such a hard time!! Oh my, did I not count on the run out of the water being all wobbly. This was only supposed to happen from bike to run, so I thought ha ha ha.

My first transition was okay but I feel I could have done better if I would have felt my feet.

I didn’t want to waste time drying my feet all the way, and that ended up getting me through my run. More to that later!

I’m not sure if you consider my bike time good/okay, but it sure felt like I was finally accomplishing something. I zoomed past a bunch of riders, left a guy in the dust that was trying to stay on me, and just felt good. I even slowed down because an older guy seemed to be at total exhaustion after only 3 miles, I told him to shift down and spin more to get blood flowing and recover. I lost a few seconds there but it made me feel good to help somebody. I just kept passing and passing, it was great. Then this lady comes up; problem was that she didn’t let me know that she was in the process of passing me, so when I was going slightly to the left to pass some ppl myself, I all of the sudden saw her there and just about crashed into her. Now I know now why they remind everybody of bike safety and etiquette! I survived and tried to make it a point to catch her – but I didn’t. Boooh.

Neither my clothes nor my feet dried off on the bike ride. 

The T2 came up so fast that I forgot everything about getting out of my shoes before hand, but I think I had a decent time anyways. Besides my feet being numb, the transition to run was effortless; it took me no time at all to adjust.

The run was okay. For some reason I felt that I was running really slow, but looking at my time I was surprised that I did pretty decent. I have this tugging nerve problem in my toe and I could feel something pulling but due to the numbness I couldn’t feel the pain LOL it was great.

When they finally put up some race results, I was totally psyched to find my name on the 14. spot in overall female. Wow, I sure didn't feel like I was doing that good during the race. I hope that I will do good at the Oshkosh Tri; it will be my first sprint and I'm very nervous about the swim.

That was it. It was a lot a fun and I'm looking forward to what lies ahead.