Let there be bling!

What a wonderful weekend for so many reasons - great weather (at least on Saturday!), great racing, great company & bling!

After taking a half day off work on Friday, we arrived at Vincentia just before 5pm to pick up the keys for our gorgeous apartment. Friday night also saw R come into my sprint team as a last minute substitution for his brother due to illness. Saturday morning the alarm went off at 5am & I was up & out of bed straight away. Nothing like adrenaline & nerves to get you moving. We arrived at transitions ridiculously early but after some stuff-ups with registration & marking, not to mention the usual toilet queues, the time passed very quickly. I am always amazed by the nerves I experience before a triathlon. I wasn't nervous before I ran Six Foot but a lil bitty triathlon sends me into spasms. While I try to focus only on the things I can control, I think it is the extent of the uncontrollable variables that make me nervous.

We were racing in the mixed teams category and, unlike every teams event I have done so far, this time the teams had their own separate wave starts - yippee! Thanks in part to the salt water & wetsuit, I had (by my standards) a great swim. It was controlled, relaxed & I quickly got into a good rhythm. I also managed to swim in a relatively straight line which is something I struggle with. Got out of the water, looked at my watch & did a double take when I saw 13.51 - about 3 mins faster than I had anticipated. At this point I learnt my first lesson of the day - don't apply too much bodyglide to the back of your neck because it's very hard to grab hold of the wetsuit to take it off!

After a quick transition I was onto the bike & out of town. I was really pleased with my ride too; I felt strong & managed to 'play tag' with several guys who I would pass going up some of the inclines but then be overtaken by on the flats & downhills. I don't often pass blokes on the bike so that gave me a lift. I discovered too at this point that I had a faint headache; the dead road surface was rattling the brain a bit too much. At the turnaround, I decided to set myself of goal of getting back to T2, and effectively finishing my race, in sub-60min which I did - just! - after just about red-lining it all the way back to town. Got off the bike and ran back to rack my bike where I met R who gave me a kiss and took off on his run. He flew, running a 19.xx, the fastest run split of the mixed teams category.

I must have been in a great mood after the race; I hardly blinked when R managed to drop my bike off the top of the car! After the race we headed back to our apartment & R mentioned that he thought we may have got 3rd place in our category. So we decided to head back into Huski in time for the presentations. Once we got back to Huski, we checked the results to discover that we had finished 4th out of 15 teams – happy days!. No need to attend the presentation ceremony we thought so we decided to skip presentation & get some lunch. Once we had sat down & ordered lunch, we looked at the results again & discovered that an all mens team had been included in our division so in fact we had finished 3rd :-D :-D So we scoffed our (delicious) lunch to get to the presentation ceremony. And lucky for us, they had picked up on the mistake & we were awarded our bling - my first in my adult sporting career! We spent the rest of Saturday morning at the race HQ buying stuff in the expo & watching the rest of the racing.

I'm sure R is sick of me saying this but this is my blog so I'm going to say it again - I'm still stunned by my swim split. Looking at the results, had I done the sprint as an individual that split would have had me 10th out of the water in my AG out of 65 women! I'm still shaking my head at that...

Another 5am start on Sunday morning this time for R's race. It was so much harder to get out of bed without the adrenaline ;-) I had a lovely morning cheering, eating, drinking coffee, finding shade & melting in the sun (& did I mention eating!) with Gnome while we cheered on R, TigerAngel & others who all had great races. It was nice of R & TigerAngel to coordinate their lap timing so well ;-) In all, a really enjoyable weekend; so much so that we are already looking at booking our accommodation for next year.

So that race brought my season to an end. 3 races. 3 very different experiences. Saturday's race was THE perfect way to end the season. It has left my body in one piece (well, no worse than it was when I started the race) and my mind in a very good place. I'm itching to build (lots of) bike strength over the off-season, looking forward to my first race of next season* & to get the body strong enough to run again so I can cross a finish line myself! Woohoo!

MTD:
Swim - 16.5km
Bike - 174.4km

* Yep, it's going to be a big one ;-)