A Girl...

First Tri

Our weekend activity bender began Saturday at 5 a.m. We slammed some breakfast, gathered all the equipment we could carry, and headed over the hills and into the rising sun. I said last week that we would be joining several hundred other insane people for the Tri for Fun, but it actually ended up being more than one thousand triathletes and several hundred spectators, including little girls holding signs reading "Go Daddy!" and a baby in a backpack clanging a cowbell for his mom (both on Flickr).

If you ask Simon how he did, he'll say, "Oh, okay for my first time, I guess. I'm pretty pleased with myself overall."* If you ask me, though, he did more than just okay. With a finishing time of 1:11, he came in just twenty minutes behind the leaders, who included a former Ironman champion, the fastest woman in the Bay Area (she won this year's Bay to Breakers 12K), and a superhuman freak who can do a marathon in under two and a half hours. Simon never stopped moving along the course, finished strong and with a smile, and looked good every minute he was within my sight. I was proud to be his cheering section, and he wasn't even that sweaty when I hugged him on the other end of the finish line.

As evidence of the fact that I'm still F-ING TIRED from Saturday, I left all my notes on Simon's specs at home, so I'll have to go from memory here. He did the 400-yard swim in an astonishing 8 minutes--about the time it took me to trudge across the sand from the starting point to the transition area--and happily, he did not get eaten by any sharks that may have been casing the small inland lake.

His transition time between the swim and bike was around two minutes--not bad considering it was his first time and he was dealing with a wetsuit--he flashed me a big smile at the bottom of the hill leading into the 11-mile ride.

I didn't know what to expect out of the bike section, and without my notes here now, I have no idea how long it took him to complete the loop. He has several century (100-mile) rides under his belt, so I think I expected him to blast through in about ten minutes. Of course it didn't occur to me that he would have to pedal 66 mph to do that, so I spent what seemed like forever worrying alternately that he had (1) blown a tire and crashed and gotten run over by a semi or (2) finished the ride in record time and I'd missed the whole thing and wouldn't be there at the finish line when he completed the run and I'm a bad girlfriend, bad! Happily, he was just fast enough, and my camera and I caught him flying down the hill, still looking fresh as a daisy, which is more than I can say for myself because it was HOT.

The run ended up being the hardest part, which I could have told him from the beginning. When we go jogging, we can do about 2.5 miles before I'm grabbing my windpipe and making the international sign for "dying of too much cardio work," but clearly Simon's been holding back on my accord, because he did the three miles without stopping or dying, and seriously, he is the sweatiest person I've ever known but when he crossed that finish line he looked no worse than Lizzie Bennet after taking a short walk about the room with Caroline Bingley.

The event was "non-competitive" and therefore unranked, but Simon did amazingly well and is in good form for two significantly longer triathlons in the fall. He did so well, and the other participants did so well--12-year-old girls, old ladies, some guy who'd had a heart attack six weeks ago--that I almost felt like this was something I could get into. Almost. Maybe I'll shoot for a 10K in, oh, 2009 or so. I said "maybe."

A fraction of the gillion photos--plus notes and commentary--are up on Flickr, so if you haven't signed up yet, now's the time. (They're not paying me to advertise, I just want you to see how cute Simon looks in his wetsuit.)

*Since writing this, Simon has checked out the online photo album from the event, which shows him finishing in 146th place. Considering that he started five minutes the first wave of 150 ("elite" athletes only), he now freely admits that he kicked some serious ass.

Posted by Leah at July 17, 2006 04:16 PM