Danskin 2008 - our fifth!

4am wake up call. Not pretty. I hadn't slept since 12:30am due to kid problems. I had big bags under my eyes and felt lethargic. I made a banana, raw cacao, stevia smoothie and a soy coffee. Grabbed my bag and was out the door. As I drove into Seattle from the north, there was an amazing array of lightening the whole way in. I wondered if we were going to have another rainy tri. Bring it on! Not much more could get worse after the night I had, I thought.

Hooked up with Tracy and Brad and then saw most of the gals from the team When we got to the transition area I found that someone had put their bike next to the end where my bike clearly was placed yesterday. I politely requested that they swap places with me as my bike was the only bike on the rack when I left it there. Then they proceeded to set up their transition area hanging off the end by about 3 feet directly where I would be needing to run with my bike. Instead of making a big deal, I changed the direction of my transition space so I would enter and exit in a different way and avoid the bucket/transition area they had created in our running space. Last call and we pammed up to put on our wetsuits and ran to the swim.

SWIM: 18:34
If you can call it that.... was a cluster. People everywhere from all 5 waves, swimming backwards, sideways, floating, staying in place. It was crazy! I turned after the first buoy and couldn't see the next one so I tried to follow the canoes. It didn't work to try to draft anyone as I couldn't see anyone swimming a straight line. I didn't see anyone from my wave and got to worrying that they were all in front of me. I'm a super slow swimmer so I knew I wasn't in front of everyone. Managed to pull myself out of the melee in a quicker time then previous Danskins and swam freestyle pretty much the whole way. Still a very slow swim. Clearly I have work to do on the off season. My 400m times are not translating to my 800m times. At all.

T1: 2:35
Long run from the swim to my transition area which was furthest from the swim. I had a choice of a really short T2 or a moderately less long T1. Chose the short T2 and long T1.

BIKE: 33:49 My best bike split ever. Yahoo!
Being a cancer survivor won me a wave #5 this year. There were lots of gals already on the road, but I passed most of them and didn't have anyone stop in front of me on the hill up to I-90 and had the hill down from I-90 to myself. I'm very happy with my bike split and can't wait to work harder to improve this!

T2: 1:23
Disaster in T2. Remember that T2 was to be my fastest transition? My space right next to the run exit was calling my name. I was running with my bike and a swimmer ran into me. First my bike landed on the ground then I landed on the bike. Hard. I couldn't believe my bad luck. She helped me up and I kept running for my spot in transition. I could tell my body was out of whack. My neck and shoulder already hurt. What should have been an amazing :30-:40 second transition ended up being much longer. Plus - I was in the flow after my bike and my flow was rudely interrupted!

RUN: a pathetic 25:34
I just couldn't get myself to run faster! I was running what felt like as hard as I could. Usually when I'm running that hard, it's way under 8's. Not today. Today it was 8:15's. Many things to attempt to attribute to this.... I'd like to blame it on my T2 crash adventure. Or maybe on the fact that my bike split was 5 minutes faster than last year hence busting up my legs more this year. Or maybe even my lack of sleep last night. You know what I think it was... This extra weight I'm carrying around. I've gained at least 10 pounds in the last several months and it's all in my belly. My eating is all messed up right now and I can't seem to reign it back in. GOT TO FIGURE THIS OUT.

TOTAL TIME: 1:21:57
AGE GROUP: 12/427
OVERALL: 83/3710

Notes to self - Stop thinking about how if you hadn't crashed in T2 you would have placed at least 10th.... Stop chastising yourself for gaining this weight as your training has become more intense. Focus instead of the tremendous improvements you've seen and focus on your limiters over the off season.

Current limiters: the swim and my nutrition. I think my run mojo will come back as my nutrition improves.

After the race I ran to back to the swim to try to catch up with my friend Ingrid who was doing her first Danskin. I couldn't find her but found out later that she rocked it and went even faster than she anticipated. I'm hoping I have a new tri convert to play with!

Then we hung out with the JFT2 crew. Nine teammates did this race and three came in first in their age groups. PRETTY AMAZING!

JFT2 rocked the house today! Congratulations to everyone!