So much for the swim...Lawrence 5150 Triathlon

The weather over the weekend made for an interesting race on Sunday.  As per my previous post, I was nervous about the swim…but I was ready to put my game face on and suck it up.  I got up at 4:30am on Sunday morning so I could have my coffee and let it settle.  I had all my stuff gathered and I got it into the car.  It was wet outside because we had a storm roll through around 3am, but otherwise looked clear.  There was still a chance of showers but they were supposed to end by 7am (the race started at 7:30).  We decided to put the bike in the car instead of on the bike rack since it was wet outside, and since Ryan wasn't racing.  As we hopped on the highway, I could see a huge bank of clouds to the west where we were headed.  Then the lighting started.  By the time we got to Lawrence it was raining and lighting pretty bad.  We got everything unloaded from the car.  I started to put a trash bag over my handlebars to keep them from getting wet, but I looked around and realized that they were going to get wet no matter what so I gave up.  The walk to the transition area/race start took forever.  It was cold, windy, and wet.  They ended up delaying the race, and then they decided to cancel the swim and just send us on the bike and run.  I’ll admit, I wasn't disappointed at all.  Looking at Clinton Lake during the storm, there were big whitecaps and the wind was howling.  I was not looking forward to getting in that water!  The second they announced they were cancelling the swim, I was not nervous at all.  Not even a little bit.  They had us line up and do a ‘time trial' start on the bike, meaning each person went off one by one.  Our time didn't start until we crossed the mat, so there was no hurry to get to the front of the line.  Unfortunately this meant that there was congestion during the first few miles of the race, plus the wet roads made it tricky.  I'm sure the pro athletes were really annoyed too, because they had to deal with all of us 'age groupers' being in their way the whole race.  It had stopped raining by this point which was good, but there was standing water and debris everywhere.  By the time I was ¾ finished with the bike, the sun had come out!  It got really warm and super humid, and of course I hadn't put any sunscreen on.  I debated on whether to even wear my sunglasses on the bike, but decided to just to keep the water spray and junk from other bikes out of my eyes.  I'm glad I wore them.

I was hurting on the run, which was fairly hilly.  I thought I ran faster than my final time showed and I was disappointed in my time, but regardless I did okay.  The frustrating thing to me is that the gal that won (I got 2nd) beat me by 7 minutes!  7 minutes in a sprint triathlon is a lot of time.  So for the past day I have been trying to figure out what to do to make sure that doesn't happen again!  I know what I need to do; I just need to see if my body can actually do it.  My ultimate goal is to beat this lady, but she has years of triathlon experience on me… I still think I can beat her if I work my butt off.  Regardless, I need to be a faster biker and runner.  I know she will be at the next triathlon in June.  Obviously I would love to say my goal is to beat her at this race, but realistically my goal is to narrow that 7 minutes down as much as I can.  Looks like some more speed work is in my future!