For the start, we walked to the end of a dock, and jumped into the water one minute before the start. It was a "first" for me, my other two were wade starts. I liked this type of start, I got into a good position for getting a good start without any bumping with others.

I have to focus on the swim. In race events, I breathe so fast and I do not exhale relaxed under water. I end up with air in the tummy and big burps. In my lake practice swims, I do better with the breathing.

Next year I am going to join a clinic that meets regularly for eight weeks for lake swims and I WILL overcome the breathing pace issue I have in races.

The Transition area was 200 yards from the lake...I walked quickly to get my silly breathing rhythm back.

RUN!

The ride was through residential streets then through a beautiful, forested business park. Lots of hills, I am proud of being able to do fairly decent on them on my heavy 16 year old MTN bike.

I am glad that I had done a fair amount of hill work in preparation for this course.

Keep up the hill work, add strength training during the upcoming winter months.

Get rich and buy a beautiful tri bike!

I have worked on jumping off bike and it was fun to do it smoothly in the race!

I felt tired lifting my heavy bike (I am whining, sorry. I've been feeling a bit tired the last three days and it showed when I reached this point)

Be rich, have a light racing bike, and lift it to the rack with ease!

More hills! I just chanted, "I love hills, I love hills". I did have to walk about three times. Gave myself 10-20 seconds of walking as a gift for getting to the top of the hills.

Since the course was a loop, we got to face and beat those awesome hills twice!

The race was on residential streets, lots of people came out to cheer us on. It was amazing to have a town support the event like this town did. One house had a little boy on roller blades playing a trumpet accompanied by his brother on a little guitar. It was adorable!

Took two pit stops - one at the start and one in the middle. I had not done that in my previous two tris. Maybe I drank too much during the run or maybe just seeing the restrooms attracted me like a magnet.

I will build endurance and speed and run more hills.

Walked around. I had such an adrenaline high at the end of this race that I talked a mile a minute "at" my husband. I cannot call it talking "with" him, because I did not breathe between words, he had no chance to say anything if he wanted. When I started to slow down, I thought "Wow, what was that?".


I did not focus my training as well as I had the rest of the year. But overall, I feel great. This was an accomplishment to complete this course.

Yesterday, Michellie Jones, said it was challenging. If she calls it challenging, then pokey old me can call it an Accomplishment!


This was the first time that the Reebok Tri was held in Federal Way. The organizers, volunteers, and City get A+++++ from me.