After seeing my brother and my sister-in-law compete in Burley, Idaho's Spudman Triathlon in 2009, I was inspired to participate myself. I already had my bike and I was riding to work every day, so I thought the 40 km ride would be fine and it wouldn't be to big a stretch to tack on a 1.6 km swim and a 10 km run. I was right about the biking part.
BIKE TRAINING
As part of my training, I continued to ride to work every day, which is 15.3 km each way and takes about 30 minutes. Two weeks before the race I tried riding 40 km and found it wasn't too bad.
RUN TRAINING
I bought a pair of real running shoes and ran a few times, but nothing more than 3-4 km at a time. I was supposed to do a 10 km race organized by the church in our area, but I pulled a muscle in my leg earlier that day and thought it wouldn't be good to make it worse and miss my triathlon.
SWIM TRAINING
I did exactly two sessions of swim training. Once was in the hotel pool in Kalispell and once was at the YMCA in Calgary. The first time I tried to just see if I could swim for 30 minutes without dying. I spent most of the time doing the back stroke, but I managed it. The next time (at the YMCA) I tried to actually work in some front crawl and go for some more speed. I found that I could only two a length or two of that before I started hyperventilating -- I'm not used to the idea of breathing only part of the time while exercising.
RACE PREP
My sister-in-law's grandparents were kind enough to host me at their house in Burley the night before the race and I was nervously excited as I went with my brother to take our bikes to the transition area by the river. As we were walking away we heard a loud pop of an exploding tire tube coming from direction other than our bikes. Somebody would be in for an unpleasant surprise in the morning.
RACE DAY
Despite the early hour, the morning was perfect and reasonably warm. Our age group was going to be the last heat of the day, so we actually didn't have to get up half as early as the others. However, because we elected to start in the back of the pack for the swim (and because we were painfully slow swimmers), we were some of the very last racers out of the water that day. I think I was 4th-last out of the river and my brother T was 2nd-last. He said that the safety crew in the boats followed him so closely that they even asked him his name and cheered him on as he swam.
WETSUIT
I had arranged to borrow a wetsuit from my older brother but we missed the hand-off at the lake the previous day so I ended up borrowing one from my sister-in-law's family, who are all about 7 inches shorter than me. I managed to get the thing on, but getting it off was tough. I didn't know if it was proper etiquette or against the rules to ask a bystander to help me pull the suit off my shoulders. I was going to wait for T to come out of the water, but I finally got it off just before he arrived on the scene.
BIKE
There's not much to say about riding the bike except that I enjoyed starting at the very back of the pack so that I could pass lots of people and feel like I was making up ground. I lost a lot of that ground when I got to the transition zone and couldn't find where I'd left my shoes. The scenery changes significantly when you add a few thousand bikes.
RUN
I had heard that there is a temptation to push it too hard on the bike and then have nothing left for the run. I think that must be what I did. I think my heart was up to the challenge, but my legs weren't -- especially my feet. I chewed up the first few km pretty well, but once I got into the unknown territory of 4-5 km, my legs got lost and apparently gave up. I did my best to keep a slow & steady pace but it was really tough and I dropped to walking several times. I still managed to sprint across the finish line, but my feet were so sore for the next few days that I felt like I could barely walk.
Swim - 00:30:49
T1 --- 00:03:48
Bike - 01:11:51
T2 --- 00:05:15
Run -- 01:04:08
Total- 02:55:53
You won this time, Spudman, but I think we will meet again.
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