The swim course felt more crowded then last year for some reason. I got bumped around a lot. I don't mind that so much, but I did mind when some dude from 2 waves behind me came up and punched me in the head (while he was sighting, he saw me!). Thankfully that was towards the end and I knew I was getting out soon.

I was hoping to cut my swim time down more, only 30 seconds better then last year. I seem to be stuck on auto-pilot for races. No matter what the distance or the conditions, I average 2:30 100/meters. It's bizarre.

The distance to get to transition was much further then last year's. Last year I had a 4 minute transition and I spent a good minute or two looking for my bike computer in my gear bag. This year I didn't have any blips, and yet it was a minute longer.

I'm pretty proud of my biking! I averaged 16.5 last year. So a huge improvement, and I worked hard for it! I was excited to actually be passing people left and right, not typical for me. The wet roads really didn't impact me much, we all had to go slow around the corners, but I'm cautions on turns anyways, so I can't say it affected my time that much. I did have troubles eating and drinking on the bike in the rain and wet conditions. I'm sure I didn't drink quite as much water as I would've because I had a hard time keeping a grip on my water bottle. Also, my food got soggy pretty quickly, and was hard to choke down.

I remembered to take my bike gloves off, an achievement in itself!

I can't stand running around Haines Point. It seems like every race in DC ends up there. I don't mind it on the bike for some reason, but on foot it just feels like it takes forever. I passed the time the same way I did last year: singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall in my head. I was passed a lot on the run, and only passed a small handful of people--most of them walking. I knew I was doing 10 minute miles, which isn't speedy, but I didn't think so many people would be faster. ah well.

Walking back to transition and to my car, ha!


We had a 25 minute rain delay. I can appreciate the organizers wanting to help us have time to get our transition set up, but when I was already started 90 minutes after the first wave I wasn't excited about it. The whole crowd groaned when they announced it, so I guess I wasn't alone.

There were tons of volunteers warning us on bad patches of road or turns coming up--I really appreciated that.

My only complaint is that the porta potties ran out of toilet paper by the time my husband got to the race. He counted--60 units and not a single one had toilet paper by like 9:30! There were people there till past noon!