t h e m a y f i l e s is foremost a family blog, chronicling everyday life. Life including natural, healthy eating (with recipes thrown in at random), home educating (with ideas popping up sporadically), an attempt to homestead on .2 acres (with very meager yields), raising 3 of 4 children with a rare genetic disorder, and lots of highly personal family triumphs and failures. You may also find an eclectic array of musings on politics, exercise, sewing, emergency preparedness, backyard chickens, and religion. This blog isn't a campaign to glorify anyone or anything. Just simply a record.

5.31.2009

Salem Sprint Triathlon

Saturday proved to be chock-full of adventures. It began bright and early with my first ever Sprint Distance Triathlon. I have a tendency to take on the huge challenges and ignore the little ones...so I have only done Olympic Distance triathlons in the past. I LOVED this event!

Here I am inching my way into my new wetsuit. This was an adventure for me. I purchased a DeSoto T1 wet suit about 10 days ago. I had never swam in one before. It is a 2 piece wetsuit. At the tri store I a bunch on and swam in a endless pool. The DeSoto was my favorite.
On Memorial day, my neighbors and I went down to Utah Lake for an early morning swim. It was perfect. I loved my wetsuit, practiced sighting (something I never did as a swimmer in high school) and just felt great all over. I went into this swim ready to master the panic.

I am somewhere out there in the lake swimming. If you will remember I had a disturbing panic attack at the Spudman last summer. The first 2 minutes of the swim I felt the panic coming on. My wetsuit was suffocating me. The girls were just joyfully frolicking in the water...

Get Control.

Mentally I went back to my early morning swim in Utah Lake. I knew my wetsuit wasn't too tight. My body was playing tricks on me. I worked through it, keeping my head above the water in a slow controled breaststroke, and after just a couple minutes I got into a rhythm and had my best open water swim ever.

The bike felt great. My legs were a bit fatigued, from lack of training. But it felt great.

Finally the run. My body is not used to a 5k race, especially after a bike. I really wanted to be going under 7 min pace, around 6:30's but I ended up doing a 7:17 pace. I finished with a bit too much left in me. The run was over before it started for me.

Lots of room for improvement. My transitions were horrible! My wetsuit got stuck. I was just plain slow. But despite all this I ended up third in my age group and 16th overall. And actually my splits were faster or within 30 seconds of the first 2 girls, I just had slow, slow transitions. My official time was 1:22.08. I finished within 8 minutes of the first place Elite. And I had over 4 more minutes in transition time than her.

I feel confident I can shave a minute or 2 off my swim, bike and run. This was so fun I ended up signing up for another one in 3 weeks! We raced home to prepare for sixteen 4-8 year olds who would be converging on our house in hours for Ellery's birthday party. You can read about that soon!

1 comment:

Brittney said...

Congratulations! That's awesome!