2011 Tri-Community Triathlon Race Report

TRI COMMUNITY TRIATHLON 2011
Swim
Distance: 625 yards. Time: 11:51. My swim time was 14th place out of 29 male swimmers. At the beginning of the swim, everyone formed a line for their turn for a lane. The first 12 triathletes had already started and the group from my town was in the second 12. As each person finished, the next person in line would go and take that lane and start their swim. Everyone had a timing chip with a Velcro (registered trademark) band on their ankle. Your time started when you crossed a rubber mat. The first person out of the pool was a female and everyone cheered for her. I asked the people around me if they knew who that was. They said that she was a former U of A female athlete of the year and an NCAA all-american or something like that. It was not until afterward that I put two and two together and realized it was Lacey Nymeyer John. She was on the 4x100 freestyle swim team that won the silver medal in the Beijing Olympic Summer Games. HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_Nymeyer" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_Nymeyer So that was pretty cool.
The swim went relatively smooth. I started out deliberately at medium effort in order to have better pacing throughout the whole swim. We were supposed to do 25 laps. I was counting my laps and when I got to ten the race staff girl counting my laps told me I was half way, so I must have miscounted somewhere in there. I only stopped to adjust my goggles once. That was good because during training I stopped on every lap to adjust my goggles in order to get a chance to catch a breath. I was expecting to take about 15 minutes to do the swim so I was happy with my swim time. As I hopped out of the pool I was happy because I felt good after the swim. I wasn’t completely dead. I didn’t even have to do back stroke or the freestyle with my head above water to breathe, like I did in the 2009 mini triathlon that had a 225 yard swim.
Bike
Distance 15.5 miles. Time: 1:49:30. Last place male or female. Pregnant women finished in front of me. A few days before the race I noticed that the back tire on the bike was a little low on air. So the morning of the race I used a pump that my friends had in the back of their truck to pump up my tire. The valve stems on these high-end road bikes are a different kind than I have dealt with before. You have to untwist the top portion of it to allow the air to go in and then you tighten back down. When I got on the bike after the swim, the tire was flat. I circled back to my friends truck and pumped it up and was on my way. I didn’t think much about it at the moment. However, after getting into the rhythm I started to think about it and how it would ruin my day if my tire went flat so I was hopping that it would hold. In about two miles the tire was going flat again and I did not have a pump. There was nothing I could do except stand there and watch valuable seconds tic away and turn into valuable minutes. The next racer to come along did not have a pump. I waited for a friend to come along who I knew had a pump. As she came by she gave me her pump and went on. I thought that maybe I hadn’t tightened the valve stem down tight enough the last time I filled it up with air so I tried to tighten it down nice and tight this time. I thought that I could catch up to her and give her pump back to her. I pumped it up and sped off on my way only to have the tire go flat again, faster than the last time. Again I dismounted and tried to pump up the tire again. It held air for a few seconds and went flat. So I tried again, and again and again. All the time listening as riders went by once every couple of minutes on the bicycles. I kept trying to pump it up, what else could I do? All to no avail. It would just not hold air pressure. At this point a well meaning citizen came along and asked if he could help. He told me that he had a cell phone if I needed to make a call. I informed him that I didn’t even know my wife’s cell phone number. I knew by this point that my day was done. I considered having him take me to the finish line as there was no hope for the bike at this point. But, with absolutely no hope on which to lean, I told him that I would figure it out and he went on his way. I couldn’t run the rest of the way because I was on biking clip on shoes, and they weren’t mine anyway, and that would completely ruin them. I considered taking my clip on shoes off and running with the bike but I knew that my bare feet wouldn’t hold up to the wear and tear, nor to the heat of the pavement. So running or walking with the bike the remaining ten miles was not a viable option. So, I figured that eventually someone would realize that I was out on the course somewhere and they would come looking for me. If I was lucky, I could borrow a bike and finish the race. I started to think, and I couldn’t remember a race that I had started that I did not finish, so I didn’t want to have a “DNF” up on the internet next to my name on the results page. So somehow, someway, I was going to finish, even if it was after everyone else had left. Even if somone had to go and bring me my running shoes and I could jog the rest of the way, with bike in hand. At about that time a fellow in a truck with two kids in the back seat came along and asked if he could help. I told him the same thing. Then this gentleman in the truck told me that he lived about a mile down the road and that he might have an extra tube. Well it was worth a try. It was something within my circle of influence. So off he went. I took off the clip-on shoes and jogged barefoot with the bike about 100 meters down the road to some nice shade trees. I took the back tire off and still futilely tried to pump it up with air, even though I knew it wouldn’t do any good. The good Samaritan was back in a few minutes, and low and behold it was the right kind of tube. Just then one of the race staff pulled up in a truck with a bicycle in the bed. He enquired about the situation. He could see that I was trying to get the tire off with a little stick I had found on the ground and he asked me if I needed a spoon. I was not sure if he was referring to a common table spoon or a specialized piece of equipment, but whatever it was a spoon sounded better than a stick. He brought back a specialized piece of equipment. It looked like a flat wrench with a hook on one end. It helped get the tire off. It was here that we saw that the hole in the tube was caused by the valve stem being pulled away and off of the tube. So in my inexperience of dealing with bicycle tubes the morning of the triathlon, before the swim, I had caused a tear in the tube by pulling on it to hard one way or the other when trying to pump it up. The race staff man then helped me put the tube in the tire and the tire back on the rim. He used his air pump that he had and pumped it up to 100 pounds per square inch. I thanked race staff man and the good Samaritan for their help. I sped off, grateful for nice firm tires. For the rest of the bike I let out my frustrations of the last hour by pedaling as fast and as hard as I could. While that relieved quite a bit of stress, it totally wasted my chances of having a respectable run time.
Run
Distance: 3.1 miles. Time: 28:54. 14th place out of 29, in the men’s division.
The first two hundred meters of the run I was still on adrenaline from the bike. I was trying to ingest some “gu” energy get stuff. So, that kept my mind distracted from the fact that I was completely out of energy. Not only did I hit the proverbial “wall” but I knew that I was already red-lining it as far as heat exhaustion was concerned. At this point it was over 90 degrees, and humid to boot, not a “dry heat”. So, at the two aid stations during the run, pouring cold water over my head felt fantastic for the twenty seconds that it lasted.
Being so far behind in the bike had broken my will power to push the pace on the run. I just wanted to finish. I wanted to push the pace a couple of times but as we ran past the cemetery I knew that if I did, I would be right there with them so I focused on keeping the meager pace that I had. I didn’t sprint at the finish, or even pick to the pace at all for that matter. I was happy just to finish. At the finish area, I drank a bottle of cold water, poured one over my head, layed down on a bed of ice, stood in front of an evaporative cooler and then did it all again. At least I wasn’t completely immobilized for two hours and I didn’t throw up multiple times like I did at the end of the St. George 2010 marathon. So that was a good thing. We won a football in the raffle afterward. That was a small consolation. I was able to collect my prize for winning the 2009 mini-triathlon. The race director had it sitting in a corner in her office this whole time, and she was happy to get rid of it.
My family was such a good sport throughout the whole thing. From waking up at 4:30 in the morning, to going to the second transition stage to set up my shoes, coming back to help me in the bike, to standing around for an hour or two afterward in the 95 degree heat, they were troopers. Race staff man told me that every year one person gets a flat tire. This year it was me. Next year I will be prepared for a flat, with a tube, an air pump and a spoon all on my bike. My first sprint triathlon, quite a memorable one indeed.