Saturday, June 23, 2012

High Cliff Triathlon

This past weekend I competed in the High Cliff Half Ironman triathlon.  I was on a relay team with 2 other ladies; I swam 1.2 mi, Mary biked 58mi and Lori ran 13.1mi.  This was my 2nd triathlon event with these ladies, but my first at such a distance.  It was a lot of fun and look forward to doing more.  We have a small race we are in in August.  At this event there were 46 relays competing, we got 13 place.  They didn't have the women's teams seperated, but from looking at the results and picking the womens teams out, we took 3 out of 16.  That's not too bad :)

The kids were troopers, it was an early morning and it was a hot morning too.

Here is the swim.  I am out there somewhere.  I was in wave 4, near the front. The course was calm at first, it made a triangle, about halfway through the race I could feel some swell rolling under me and on to the final turn, there we a lot of chop as we headed to the shore.  It was rough.  But I thought, if I'm struggling, so is everyone else. 
Open water is intimidating.  I think of it like being the opposite of claustraphobic.  The openness is a weird sensation.  And if you think about it too much and over analyze it, you end up with a panic attack, so you just don't and you swim. 

After exiting the lake, I had to run to the transition area to pass the timing chip to the biker.  It was a huge hill that we had to run up, and I was having a hard time breathing at this point, the wetsuit was cutting into my neck, so here I'm walking fast past the family, i just couldn't run anymore.

waiting in the transition area.

Mary just finished her bike and Lori is getting the timing chip to take off running.

Lori hitting the finish line.  Way to go!  It was a weird weather day, it was so hot, and then the sky opened up for about 20mins but soaked everything, with lightening and thunder, but the race must still go on.

The champions! 

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