I did one swim leg, at about noon,and did not enjoy swimming in the chop of the reservoir. It was Labor Day weekend and some a-hole power boaters felt the need to rip right by our swim course. By the middle of the afternoon, the chop was getting to be a pain for the swimmers. Feeling that my swim was slow I decided that I would focus more on biking and running.



To my huge surprise, after the race, when the times were published I realized that I had one of the better times in our group. In fact, I had the sixth best time of 21 swims by our team.

Rudy D. 20:41 21:11 21:21 21:24
Erik J. 17:30 17:35 18:42 19:02
Tane A. 19:21 20:05 19:40
Sarah B. 21:33 22:53 22:25
Amy W. 23:59 23:21 23:28
Nealene O. 21:56 22:05
Joe S. 20:34
Zev B. 19:33


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The interesting part about the bike was that I ended up racing each leg like a time trial as I had so much time between legs. I was able to maintain relatively good times throughout the twenty hours I was riding the five legs. On my very first leg of the race, I went out on the bike and had an incredible time going until I flatted about two miles from transition. I killed about ten minutes walking the bike, then called out to two women racers who asked if they could help. I told them to yell for my team when they got to the finish. Amazingly,none of the guys going by offered any help at all! About fifteen minutes after i broke down, my team manager Jamie showed up with two others and quickly offloaded a magnesium Paketa bike with Zipp 909 setup. I use Shimano pedals and cleats and the Paketa had Time pedals but there was no time to kill....I took off my shoes, did a rolling jump onto the bike and rode the last two miles barefoot! I got over 30 mph on the last section, and thankfully did not cost us first place eighteen hours later!!

My first legs were in daylight and from there it got more interesting. I rode at 7:30 and was the first one on our team to have to wear a light. I wish I had a picture of the headlamp strapped to my Giro Advantage aero helmet. I must have looked alien at the minimum! Riding at night was not as bad as I expected, although the park had no street lamps whatsoever, so we relied on our excellent Nite Rider lights. Late at night, I switched to my road bike, as I was getting fatigued, and felt I would have more control, and less chance of dumping the bike. I put up my slowest time on the road bike, but the late night legs were more about getting it done, then going for personal bests. I had two spooky things happen late at night; I almost ran dead on into a cone in the street marking a turn, and I nearly crashed into two deer. The deer were at east as startled as me, and dashed off into the woods after giving me a moment of panic! As the morning arrived, I was fighting the effects of the different legs, and the feeling that I realy didn't want to ride anymore. The last ride energized me a bit, as it happened at about 6:30 am, and I was able to turn off my headlamp as the sun rose fully while I was on the course. I knew that we only had ninety minutes left to race, that we were in the hunt, and I needed to hammer as hard as I could.

Overall, the bike course was a lot of fun. I liked the challenge, and mos of my legs went of without a hitch. I am looking forward to a time trial series in the same park in the Spring.

The run was a singularly weird event for me! I managed to get some light sleep from 10:00pm-1:00 am and was called for run duty at about 1:45. I shrugged off my sleep, got dressed, put on my miner's light and took some Gu2O and water to hydrate. I had snacked all day and night, so my energy level was good up until the end.

When I went out on the run, I was immediately in the darkness of the woods, and it was quite peaceful, yet surreal. I could see Hwy 225 in the distance and there was a soft yellow glow from the highway lighting. I was running solo for the first half mile or so, until I came upon some slower moving folks. As I ran further, I started to see small islands of light bobbing through the darkness. The course wound through meadows and woods and it was beautiful to be out in the fresh air, listening to the crickets as I ran. As I went further out on the loop, I realized I was passing everyone I saw, and not slowly. I believe that most of the runners were solo racers, or from the smaller 24 hour teams that did not have fresh people to keep sending out. I blew right past the turnaround and politely declined water from the awesome volunteers. I knew I was not racing a leg again for an hour or more, so I put everything I had into the run. I was feeling cool and comfortable,in a dreamlike state and ran my fastest race time to date.

Nothing..I am stoked at my time for my one run leg.

At 8:00 a.m.,when the clock rolled over to 24:00, I congratulated our last swimmer, grabbed my teammate Eric, and headed straight for the Breckenridge Brewery kegs that were in transition. We drank a couple amber beers, then posed for some team pictures and walked through the finish line where the race officials placed finisher's medals upon us.




Creeping tiredness in the last three hours of the race.


The 24 Hours of Triathlon is a race that I highly recommend other people experience. Too much happened in 24 hours to accurately re-tell here. I thought our team interaction was great, considering most of the ten people had never seen each other before! We got along great, and with the exception of not recording our legs properly we did not have any major complications or failures. At the start of the race we used a laptop with a spreadsheet to record each individual run, swim or bike. A few hours into the race we somehow stopped recording each performance. Subsequently, we had to rely on the race timing company's printouts to assess our standings. At about 5:00 a.m. several of us who were more or less managing the race strategy, met in transition to study our options. At that point we were looking like we could complete 24 legs of each sport, and we were fairly confident of a win. We had 23 swims, 22 bikes and thought we had 24 runs. Due to an error, our runner Tane was credited with six runs rather than the three he ran. Tane had run three times around 11:00 pm and then went home, so we did not have him handy to notice the error. We pushed out some more bike legs, with me and a guy named Joe pushing as hard as we could. We also threw out a couple more swims with the idea we would match up 24 legs of all three sports. We ended up short on the runs, which were quicker and easier to pull off than the bike legs. Our final tally looked like this:

24 swims
23 bike
21 run

Plus one additional swim and one additional bike.

We squeaked out the win, by one extra bike leg!!!

This race was hard, and FUN, but we WON !! I'll do it again.

Btw, the schwag was good too, a free pair of $150.00 Newton running shoes, a cool Newton tech T shirt, a Newton bag, and a great winner's plate.