Yes, I am absolutely crazy. Thanks to my wife's uncle, Walt Jominy or Mr. Jominy--fellow teacher at WA. We decided we would enter into a Sprint Triathlon this past Sunday morning at Tradewinds Park. The crazy part was that we didn't plan this until the day before and spent the rest of our Saturday making sure we would have the right gear to survive the race. The triathlon consisted of a 1/4 mile swim, a 10 mile bike and a 2.5 mile run. I thought why not do it. It sounded fun and the variety intrigued me. Doing well was not hinged on one event. Before the race we received a few sets of numbers and our yellow swim cap to distinguish our group. One number was to stick on the front of our bike helmet, one to put on our shirt or race belt for the run and one to put on our bike frame. They also wrote our numbers in permanent marker on each arm and right quad and then put our age on the back of our left calf. I think the age part was just to motivate everyone when they saw someone older in front of them to go faster, but who know the reason why? We were set to go off in the last group called "first timers". While the first 3 groups went off on their swim we anxiously waited to begin while trying not to get bitten by ants. When we were finally given the start I felt I would do pretty well being that I swam competitively since I was 7 and up and through high school. But within 10 strokes into the race I had a problem. The timing chip that was on a velcro strap affixed around my right calf slid down to my ankle and was beginning to come off. I immediately stopped and tried to first stop it from falling to the depths of the murky water then undo it and put it back on so it wouldn't come off. In the process Uncle Wally noticed what he thought was just some random guy drowning and and immediately alerted lifeguards. But after about 15-20 seconds and before the lifeguard to get there I had the strap back on my leg. That's when I noticed that my group was pretty far in front of me. I gave it my all and pretty quickly caught up to and passed my entire group. But I then proceded to catch up to the group that started 2-3 minutes before us and pass up a good bit of those people. I have to say that was one of my proudest comebacks as an athlete in my entire life. I got out of the water, pretty delirious and headed into the transition area to get my bike. My time for the swim was 7:12, but if you take off my sinking time I without a doubt finished in less than 7 minutes. Good enough for 1st in my group of 1st time males under age 40.After an embarassing transition time of 4:19 it was off to my $185 Diamondback Outlook bike that got me to and from class on the campuses of UF and Malone College. The biking part turned out to be pretty stupid due to the fact that I was on one of the toughest gears to try and keep up with women in their 40s on $1500 bikes. But hey I was the only one with my type of bike, a camelback and offroading gloves! During the beginning of the ride I noticed that I was not sweating and needed to force myself to drink my water. Even thought I didn't want too it made a big difference and after a few minutes I felt better. Towards the last mile I went to an easier gear to try and help my legs recover and flush out some of the lactic acid before the run. That didn't help. I ended with a time of 37:31, officially 38:28 depending where they got the split and two seconds behind Uncle Wally. I was a little faster this time in transition going 2:59 while enjoying a chocolate electrolyte gel.
By the time I got to the run I felt like I replaced my legs with mahogany tree trunks. They were super heavy, but I just started passing people up and shocked myself with the times I was running. They had markers at each half mile. My splits were 3:17 and 3:38 for the first mile (6:55 total), 3:39 and 3:37 for the second mile (7:16). The last half mile doesn't make any sense. I ran 4:15 to bring my total to 18:26. The good thing is that I passed up at least 30 people and had the 3rd fastest time for my group. Overall the biking part and my slow transition time killed me and contributed to my 8th place finish out of 19 in my group. My official total time was 1:10:32.025. That's 1 hour, ten minutes and 32 seconds. On my watch I had 7:18 of transition time. Most people had between 2 and 4 minutes.
All in all I have to say I was really happy with my performance. Without a doubt this makes running 5k's similar to watching paint dry. I can't wait until I can do another one, but maybe I will do some training first.
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