Salem Triathlon

Saturday (June 7) was the Salem triathlon.  The weather around here in Utah has been unseasonably cool (that is good) and also unseasonably wet (not so good - at least not for triathlons).  So, for the past week I have been keeping an eye on the weather report and just hoping all turned out well.  The forecast had been changing from chance of showers to partly cloudy and back again.  Friday had turned out to be a beautiful day - the wind had really been blowing in the early afternoon but by the evening it had died down and no storm had rolled in so I went to bed Friday night thinking we had good weather ahead of us.

About 5:30 am I awoke to the sound of rain pattering.  My heart just sank.  I got up and checked and sure enough - it was raining.  I figured they would probably cancel the bike ride if the rain kept up but would go ahead and let us swim and run.  I went ahead and prepped my bike anyway trying to maintain an optimistic attitude but as the morning wore on, the rain just kept coming down.  About 7:30 am my brother, nephews, and their friend came over and we just all sat there watching the rain come down.  At 8:00 am we went down to the pond and as soon as we got there we could see people leaving with their bikes and other racers were telling us that the bike portion of the race had been cancelled.  The rain continued to come down.  There were a lot of dejected people.  The race organizers were still determining if they were going to let the swim portion of the race go on or just turn it into a 5K race.  I don't know why the swim was being questioned - the rain is definitely wet - but so is the water and the water temperature, while cool, was certainly not freezing.

At about 9:00 the rain finally stopped.  The decided to shorten the swim to about 500 yards (I'm not sure why they decided to do that, either - why would it be anything other than all or nothing?) and then run the 5K race.  Jeff and I had decided that we would just skip the triathlon altogether and come down later that day and run the course ourselves.  As a matter of fact, he and my nephews left and went home.  I just wanted to stay and watch and I was still contemplating whether or not I should race when they all showed back up and decided to go forward with the race.  So, we hustled down to the beginning of the swim and lined up with the last wave of older women and made it out in time.

My swim was OK.  I got battered around during the first 30 seconds and got to swallow some delicious Salem pond water.  But, then I was able to settle into my pace and started stroking out.  But, my arms felt like lead around 150 yards into the race.  I had been practicing swimming all during the week and I felt really good going into Saturday but for some reason or another, I just lost all my steam.  I still turned in a respectable time (11:00 minutes for ~500 yards) but not as good as I had practiced during the week.

I hustled into the transition area where I saw Jeff, Cody, and Trevor.  Jeff was just leaving as I got there and Cody was shortly behind him.  I put my shoes on (sans socks) and Trevor and I left for the run at about the same time.  He quickly out distanced me, though.  I saw Julie at the beginning of the run but I was able to overtake her and get a good running pace going.

In the end, I placed 197th out of 414 racers (there were 859 racers signed up so less than half stuck around for the abbreviated race) which is not very good.  Way below what I wanted to do.  Of course, the bike is my strongest event by far and I would have gone up several spots had there been a bike portion of the race.  So, it tells me that I have to start improving my run (I averaged 8:46 min/mi - not too bad for me but bad when considering the competition) and also that my bike is really good.

Utah Summer Games is this coming up Saturday and Provo is the following Saturday.  I'm anxious to get my run times down.  That will be a combination of more running during the week and also dropping some more weight.  While I have lost a lot of weight so far (about 80 pounds), I still have about 30 pounds I need to drop to get into competitive running.

Thanks for reading.  I love doing the triathlons - they are fun.  It continues to motivate me to keep training and keep in shape.  Russ and Christi are now going to run the Provo triathlon as well and Russ seems to have gotten the bug.  He'll know after the Provo triathlon.