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Do as I Say, Not as I Do

Everyone is calling me crazy for racing an olympic-distance triathlon exactly two weeks after doing an Ironman. And, yeah, well... they're right. It was completely ill-advised. I'm supposed to be recovering. I signed up for the Santa Cruz Sentinel Triathlon in the spring knowing full well that it was probably a bad idea. But like I've said, I'm an addict, and I needed the quick fix. And this is a fun, beautiful race.

Also, there was wine tasting. And you know I couldn't turn that down.

OK, the wine tasting was not officially part of the race. But on Saturday afternoon, after checking into my seedy but conveniently located hotel by the Boardwalk, I drove up the winding mountain road to Bonny Doon to meet some friends and taste some wine. It turned out there was a special anniversary event going on, so the "quiet creekside setting" was more like a "raucous party with very difficult parking." It wasn't quite the experience I expected, but that didn't stop me from buying three bottles of wine.

I love the fact that my friend Christina stuck a big IM Canada bumper sticker on her dad's old Jamboree.

Sunday morning dawned beautiful and clear (and surprisingly fog-free). There was some pretty big surf, but being in the last wave, I got to watch the first four waves of racers attempt to get through the big breakers (dive under! dive under!). The swim was one of the worst of my life. The cold cold water (50-something degrees) gave me a serious case of gasping reflex, which was not fun. I thought I'd never catch my breath. I swallowed a lot of seawater. Ugh. It was actually the first time in six years that I've panicked in an open-water race. But I got over it and finished the 1-mile swim in 30:39.

"Learn to swim. It's fun!"

My bike time was 1:23, a minute slower than last year, but this year I dropped my chain and had to stop to fix it. (Doh.) But I've gotta say, a 25-mile ride sure goes by quickly when you've spent the summer doing all-day rides every single Saturday.

Today I learned that the run course was two-thirds of a mile too long. So if you adjust the run distance to 6.86 miles, my run pace was 9:04, about 20 seconds per mile slower than last year. Not bad at all considering that my poor legs are hardly recovered from the IM.

My finish time was 3:04 and change. The finisher medals, always unique at this race, were plastic whistles. The spectators at the finish line probably got pretty sick of hearing the non-stop tweeeeeee sound of the finisher chorus.

I was about 8 minutes slower than last year, including the bonus running courtesy of the mismeasured course. But the only real disappointment of the day was that there were no bagpipers at the start like there were last year. Because you know how much I love bagpipes.

September 25, 2006 11:02 PM