Pre-Race
My Dad dropped me off near the race site around 5:30am. They had us leave our bikes there overnight, which made packing up the car and walking to the transition area a lot easier. After I got my body-marked, I made my way into the transition area to find my bike. The race takes place in and around downtown. When I walked into the transition area and I was struck by how cool it was to see the Austin skyline emerging from the sea of bikes in the night sky. I didn't have a camera with me, so I took a mental picture. *CLICK*
The race started at 7am, but my wave was not until 8:05. I grabbed my wetsuit, goggles, and some cliff shot blocks, and wandered down to the lake to watch the start of the race. Since it was Memorial Day, the race honored active military and veterans. There were a bunch of Texas A&M students at the race. My first thought was "boo," until I realized that many of them were volunteers assisting athletes in the "wounded warrior" category and decided that the Aggies deserved a free pass for the day. At around 7:30, I put on my wetsuit (for the first time this year), ate my shot blocks, and drank some water. Shortly after that, I ran into my family and got to give them all hugs before the race.
Swim
The swim was in Town Lake (which has since been re-named Lady Bird Lake, but I just can't get used to that) and the 1500 meter course was shaped like one of those cork puller wine openers. It was a treading water start and my wave was wearing blue caps. I have no idea what the water temperature was, but I was really glad I wore my wetsuit! The gun fired and I began my first open water swim of the year.
I felt good during the swim. I didn't want to start too fast, so I settled into a pace that felt sustainable. I focused on swimming with long, strong strokes. I didn't feel like I was going very fast, but it wasn't long before I started seeing yellow caps from the wave ahead of me. The buoys marking the turns were also yellow, which made things a little confusing. I just thought to myself that it was a good sign every time I saw yellow - I was either passing someone or approaching a milestone in the course. When I swam under the Congress Avenue bridge, I rolled over briefly to look for the famous Mexican free-tailed bats, but didn't see any. I saw my Dad cheering as I headed out of the water and into T1.
Bike
The bike course for the Olympic Distance was 4 loops, which went around downtown and the Capitol. I felt pretty discombobulated during the first loop. When I grabbed my water bottle for my first drink, the cap fell off. The rules are that you can't discard anything on the bike course. Luckily I caught the bottle cap and was able to screw it back on pretty easily. Next, the auto-multisport function of my Garmin got confused and after about three miles on the bike, it instructed me to start running. I wanted to see my cadence and average mph so I quickly re-set my watch to the bike function as I pedaled. Then, the number on my bike came undone, but fortunately it hung on by a thread for the remainder of the course.
The course had rolling hills and lots of sharp turns. This was my first race with aerobars and I think I used them for most of the course, except during the turns. I stayed in the big ring for the first two loops, but by the third and fourth loops, I figured out the spots where it made sense to drop into the small ring. I saw my Dad at the end of the first and second loop and by the time I finished the third loop, my Mom and brother were there, too. It was hot out and there were no aid-stations, so I knew I had to make a real effort to stay hydrated and electrolyted. When I finished I had drunk my entire bottle of water and half of my bottle of Gatorade. I was pleased about this - sometimes I'll come back from a ride with two almost completely full bottles. I averaged 18.4 mph (total time 1:21), which is really good for me!
Run
When I got into the transition area, racked my bike, and took off my helmet, I realized I was drenched in sweat. I'm not used to humidity anymore, so I decided to take my time and downed a little bit more Gatorade before heading out onto the run. The run is usually the most challenging part for me and the challenge is often as mental as it is physical. I tried to get myself really excited to run while I was still on the bike, but I'm not sure it worked. I started out easy and told myself not to look at my watch to see my pace until after the first mile. I cheated twice and caught myself at 9:41 and 10:02. I was happy about this as I was aiming for a 10:30/mi pace. I had given myself full permission to walk through each and every water station, but I ended up not really wanting to. Austin knows how to plan for the heat, so there were water stations about every half mile and one of the stations had a tent with sprinklers to run through. I ended up only walking through the two stations that had Gatorade so I could fully imbibe those electrolytes and I also walked through a station at Mile 5 so I could recharge and finish strong.
I had a hard time with the first three miles. It's not that I wanted to stop and walk, but I didn't really want to run either. For some reason, the image that popped into my head was a scene from one of the worst movies ever made. (I watched Bride Wars on HBO this winter.) There is a part where Anne Hathaway (whose character's name happens to be Emma) is running in Central Park. She is hooked into her blue iPod shuffle and we astute viewers are supposed to remember that she said at the beginning of the movie, "iPods are for people who can't be alone with their thoughts." Now she is distraught about fighting with her best friend and not getting along with her fiance and she can't hear Kate Hudson calling after her through her headphones. Something about watching her feet hit the pavement in that scene made me really want to go for a run. So for the rest of the run, I pretended that I was Anne Hathaway. I also repeated over and over in my head, "This isn't supposed to be easy, dig deep." I start to feel a lot better by Mile 4. Just as I was thinking that I hadn't seen my family on the run yet and that I could really use their support, there they were at the halfway point of the second loop.
I kept an eye on my pace and saw that I was hovering around 10:30/mi, which was my goal. As I ran across the Congress Bridge for the second time, my Garmin beeped to signify the 6 mile mark. I was excited for the final 0.2 until I realized that either my watch was off or the course was long, because I was definitely more than 352 yards away from the finish. (When I crossed the line, my watch read between 6.5 and 6.6.) I felt good about the run and my overall time when I finished the race, but I confess that I was really disappointed when I got my results and saw that my run pace was actually only a 11:04/mi (a 1:08:44 10k). The man who won the overall race PR-ed in the 10k, so I concluded that the discrepancy was with my watch, not the course. It was hard not to think that I could have pushed myself a little more, but in the end I think I just need to trust that I did the best I could on that day, in the heat of the Texas sun.
Finish
When I picked up my race packet the day before, I noticed that they had be down as being from Cypress, Texas instead of Denver, Colorado. It wasn't a big deal, but they usually announce your name and town when you cross the finish line and I really wanted everyone to know that I had descended from on (mile-)high for this race. I heard other people talking at the expo that their cities were wrong, too, so I thought they would correct it for race day. Well, they must have re-run the excel spreadsheet (or whatever) because when they called my name I was not from Cypress, but I wasn't from Denver either. Instead they said I was from Crawford! Ew! I definitely did not want to be confused with any other residents of Crawford, Texas!
They finally got my city right when they published the results. The most exciting part of seeing the official results was how I placed in my age group! When I race in Boulder, I'm lucky if I finish 71st out of 78. This time, I was 26th out of 83! That's like top-third! Woo-hoo!
My overall results were:
Swim - 36:17
T1 - 5:54
Bike - 1:21:00 (18.4 mph)
T2 - 3:39
Run - 1:08:44 (11:04/mi)
Total: 3:15:35
T3
Now my season is over, and I head into what some on the blogosphere refer to as "T3." I am planning to keep biking on the weekends, do the occasional open water swim for fun, and run at least a little, enough to satisfy my inner-Anne Hathaway. I am looking forward to enjoying each discipline again without the pressure to put in a certain number of hours or miles. I am also looking forward to having the freedom and flexibility to spend the weekends doing something else entirely or nothing at all!
Yee-haw!!!
