Race Report

Event: US Women's Triathlon Series / Subaru Sprint Triathlon
Swim: 750m
Bike: 22K (13.8 mile)
Run: 5K
Date: 6/24/07
Location: Naperville, IL

I already had a rollover registration for this race because of the running injury last summer that took me out 10 days from the event. The rollover was only good for one year, so I was relieved when, after I discovered I was pregnant, my midwife allowed me to keep this shorter, slow-poke friendly event on my schedule.

I was especially looking forward to this race because I was finally going to meet Tri Blogger extraordinaire and all-around cool chick Wylee, which I was understandably over the moon about. To make it even more fun, her good friend Teri threw her hat into the first-timer ring, and we also managed to hook up with the very sweet natured Tri Blogger Meepa. The icing on the cake was a last minute call from Swim Coach "I'm never doing another triathlon" Marcy to let me know she was coming back for more.

So, the stage was set for an epic Girl Power weekend. I was looking forward to the weekend with the girls, but for several days before the race I was strangely numb - not at all my usual psycho happy OMGIGETTORACE self. I'd been plenty psyched in the preceding week, so I chalked it up to hormones and made myself go through the motions.

Saturday
Saturday morning Wylee had me laughing my ass off with check-in calls that, no matter what the call was about, boiled down to two things: 1) I am freaking out about my precious baby, my fourth child being strapped to the back of a truck going down the interstate, and 2) Just to prove exactly how FREAKED OUT I am about my beloved bike being strapped to the back of a truck I have grown a giant zit. We're calling her Fiona.

So I pretty much knew I was going to love her from the start.

We managed to arrive in Naperville from our respective places of origin (hats off, btw, to Wylee and Teri for driving 300+ miles for this) with just a little bit of "our exit was closed for construction and we're lost in the suburbs" and "what do you MEAN they don't have our reservation?!" thrown in for flavor. We got settled into the hotel, popped over to the Expo, drove the course to show the first-timers it wouldn't bite, and then headed out for some traditional pre-race face stuffing.

After dinner group shot (from Left: Tri Blogger MommyMeepa, Tri Blogger Wylee, Wylee's friend Teri, Tri Blogger Siren, Swim Coach Marcy)

Sunday
The 4:30 wake up call went off like a bomb (seriously, this was the loudest phone I've ever heard), instantly making my head pound and forcing me wonder what the hell I was thinking. Hello... pregnant, tired, just yesterday morning you were puking... why EXACTLY did you think this was a good idea?!

Marcy and I moaned for a few minutes about how tired we were and how much we just wanted to be done, then we got on with it. Me, Marcy, Wylee and Teri were all ready to go by about 5:30 (effortless for those three perky morning nazis; a new record in race morning punctuality for me) and we headed to the race. We made it to transition by about 6:15 - not bad for my I-hate-mornings self.

Oh, and the weather was absolute perfection - overcast with a projected high of about 80. We even got a little bit chilly waiting for our starts.

I started to shake the odd depressed numbness I'd been lugging around for days when I set up my fantastically OCD transition space. Then I got cheered up even more as I watched Wylee and Teri getting their stuff ready, because I was just so happy for them to be embarking on their first race.

The last of my hormonal bad moodiness disappeared when we decided the baby needed a race number too. Aside from being ten different kind of silly, it really helped remind me just how incredibly lucky I am to have this wonderful life and amazing friends.

(And how can you not love all my shiny I-got-up-at-4:30-and-bathed-in-SPF50 glory. Now that's SEXY!)

We posed for one more group shot before transition closed, then we were off to, ya know, wait around for 2 hours for our wave starts.


Around 7:00 - standing in line for the bathroom
Around 7:15 - bumped into Meepa, hugs and well-wishes all around.
Around 8:00 - standing in line for the bathroom
Around 8:30 - high-fived Meepa coming out of the water
Around 8:45 - cheered for Marcy coming out of the water
8:54 - Wave 29, game on.

Swim
The water was a wonderful 78 degrees and in spite of the gloomy sky remained the most inviting "open water" venue I've ever seen. New this year: I WAS NOT ONE BIT SCARED. Unwanted replay of previous year: The humiliation of the swim buddy guy thinking I was such a pathetic swimmer he followed me through the whole course, telling me over and over how great I was doing. I wanted to DIE. But I can't blame him - shoulder injury-induced lack o' swimming for, oh, the last 11 months or so really put a dent in my performance. I was really frustrated, because even though I did not feel one iota of fear I couldn't stop hyperventilating, so I couldn't put my face in the damn water and swim properly. I finally started to get control about halfway through the course and started swimming like I'm supposed to, which of course felt lovely and I was kicking myself for not getting myself together sooner.

Wylee was a freakin angel. She obviously could have gone much faster on the swim and I was alternately feeling horribly guilty for holding her back and humiliated for my pathetic performance. I know I can do much better. But I also should know better than to beat myself up over it after being out with an injury for so long. And that whole hosting an alien energy sucking pod person thing probably didn't help either.

One mildly scary point on the swim - near the end I got one of those sharp shooting lower abdominal cramps that pregnant women sometimes get. My doctor calls them growing pains - they're perfectly normal and they always pass fairly quickly. The only problem is that they generally make me double over in pain and I was in 15 feet of water. Thankfully curling my legs up in a ball for a few seconds helped it pass with no real trouble.

The real irony was that even though I was beyond humiliated by the swim my time ended up being a PR for this course. So even coming back from an injury, being pregnant and having zero stamina, my swim coaches have obviously done wonders for me.

T1
I had to pee. Big shocker - I'd promised my midwife I'd hydrate up the wazoo to keep the baby safe, and I had been. I felt fantastic, so I jogged from the porta potty to my bike hoping to make up the time. I strapped on the HR monitor (another promise I made to the midwife) and got a nasty surprise. Jogging maybe 50 yards had made it go as high as if I'd been running several(pre-pregnancy) miles. Holy crap. It went down a bit when I sat down to get my shoes on and such, but it was unfortunately a sign of things to come.

Bike
Once again, Wylee was a freakin angel. She kept an eye and me and Teri, obviously coasting dramatically slower than she was capable of going on the Sexy Biatch. She's got legs as long as I am tall and I suspect she could smoke just about anybody on that bike course with her speed machine. Instead, she chatted with us, made sure I was eating and drinking and tried to keep me honest about the not-so-perfect HR monitor readings I was getting.

If I had to sum up the bike in one word it would be frustration. It's a flat course, there was no wind to speak of and physically I felt fabulous. In fact, more than once I thought to myself 'gawd you're going slow, let's crank it up' only to check my HR and see it was 15 BPM over my limit! I spent the whole ride gearing down and coasting and gearing down some more and coasting some more. Had Wylee and Teri not been there, laughing and chatting and making me have a good time, I have might pulled over and thrown a Normann Stadler style tantrum. I was just so frustrated. And no matter how many times Wylee assured me we had all agreed to stick together, I still felt terribly guilty for holding her back because I knew exactly how it felt to want to go faster.

Oh, and 20 minutes into the bike I totally had to pee again. By the end of the ride I was clenching every time I hit a bump because I'm not a pee-in-the-saddle kinda girl. Especially not on a sprint - that's just weak. But I was a good little pregnant girl and still forced myself to drink every drop of my bottle of Nuun, much to the surprise and confusion of my poor bladder. I was never so happy to see a porta-potty as I was at the end of that ride!

T2
Not sure where the crazy T2 time came from - I had to pee again but it didn't seem like it too that long. Regardless of the glacial time it was uneventful and I was happy we were heading into the last leg.

Run, err... Walk
Wylee and Teri are much better walkers than I, and I worked pretty hard to keep up with them but I felt great. Once again, the overwhelming feeling was frustration, because I felt physically good enough I desperately wanted to break out into a run. My HR was at the upper limits of acceptable for the entire walk, which was a welcome break from the soaring numbers I'd been seeing on the bike.

We started to feel the effects of being in the Family wave (which goes off nearly last) when we noticed much more traffic around the course than usual. One woman even swerved at us and ran over a cone not 6 feet away. I've always felt perfectly safe when racing; being nervous about cars was a first, particularly for this course.

Somewhere around mile 1 we were wondering if there was anyone left behind us when a cop came up and started following us on his motorcycle. I told them that means we're DFL and we laughed about it. The cop told us we had to finish the race on the sidewalk when we turned the corner about 2 blocks up. My racing ego reared up at the implication that we were being pulled off the course, but I bit my tongue because he didn't say we had to stop. Just get off the street.

Then he zoomed ahead and we could sort of hear him talking to the volunteers at the corner; I thought I heard him say there were a few walkers behind us (yay!) and I heard him tell them we had to go on the sidewalk.

We went on the walk until they couldn't see us anymore, then Teri announced that there was still a race course and she was still in the race, so she was going to walk on it. Wylee and I joined her back up on the road for a while, until the dreaded Big White Race Van came up. I was SURE they were pulling the course, but they weren't. The lady said we really had to get on the sidewalk and stay there, because the police had started to unblock the roads and cars were ignoring the cones blocking off the course. The race officials were quite concerned someone was going to get hit.

We also managed to get out of her that we were definitely not the last walkers, so while we were disappointed at being pulled onto the sidewalk I was content not to be DFL.

As we neared the finish Wylee and Teri had a burst of energy and I encouraged them to go on ahead - my hip flexors were cramping up and every step had become painful. Plus, this was their first race and they'd come a long way for it, I felt like they deserved to go out ahead and finish together. I came in maybe a minute behind them.

The Finish
There was barely a soul at the finish line, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Meepa had stuck around to wait for us. She'd gone as an age grouper and started well before we did, so I'm sure she must have waited quite a while, although she was too nice to say so. Thanks to her we got a nice group shot of us at the end. Sans medals, you might notice, because they ran out. Although they did promise to mail them, I was NOT amused. I didn't realize until I didn't get one how much getting this particular finish medal meant to me. It wasn't particularly a physical challenge to finish, but it had definitely been an emotional one, and one I don't think I could have managed without Wylee's support. I guess I'm more competitive than I thought.

Results
Swim: 22:13
T1: 10:19
Bike: 1:04:54
T2: 10:06
Run: 56:42
Total: 2:44:11
Place: 1880/1885 finishers

Final Thoughts
However frustrating it was to go slow, I'm still very glad I went through with the race. It was great to spend time with new friends even if we didn't have the perfect race experience. I'm certain I would never have forgiven myself if I'd decided not to try. And even though I was not happy with the finish time from the standpoint of my pre-pregnancy goal for this race (sub 2), there is something to be very happy about. Because you see, two years ago at my first race, on this course, this was almost exactly my finish time. I even finished in the exact same place as that first race - 5th from last. And two years ago I sure as hell wasn't pregnant and hadn't had injuries - I was just heavier and slower and less fit. And I was thrilled to have finished at all, regardless of my time. So I have to be pleased that I've come so far I can take a time that I used to be happy with, beat it by 3 minutes pregnant and recovering from a painful and debilitating injury, and know with certainty it's a temporary situation and that I'm capable of so much more.