Augusta was amazing! Denise, my bike, and I left early Friday morning in Shrek to make the trek to Georgia. We stayed with Tim Tillery, his awesome daughter Jaedyn, and his equally amazing parents on Friday night in Peachtree City. As you can see on the slide show, Jaedyn was nice enough to give up her bed which enabled me to sleep better than any princess!
On Saturday we took the three hour drive from Peachtree to Augusta. I took my bike in to get some last minute repairs and we checked in to the hotel.
I wasn't nervous about the race at all until the rules meeting. There I learned that the water was going to be a balmy 69 degrees. To me, the person who's lips turn blue when I see a cold picture, that's freezing. Another thing that brought butterflies to my stomach was being around all of these dedicated athletes. A race like this was something that most people spent a minimum of 16 weeks training for.
I was able to put aside some of the butterflies and do my carbo-loading at the Mellow Mushroom (which was amazing)!
I slept like a rock on Saturday night also, unlike most people I talked to. I now know the reason for that. Unlike most people I had talked to, I hadn't experienced the pain of a 70.3 yet.
We got to the race on Sunday morning, got my transition area prepared and got me to the starting line. Now I know what cows feel like as they're being taken to slaughter. Everybody groups up in their heat and are slowly hurded to the starting line. The only thing missing were the prods.
Getting in that cold water was a little bit brutal because we had to get in an then wait for them to tell us to start. I was shaking; a little from the cold and a little from the adrenaline... and we were off.
The first 200 meters was the hardest part of the swim because there are bodies swimming over bodies. A little pandamonium. There was a guy who freaked out right in front of me and had to get help from the kayaks, which made me a little edgy. There was also seaweed that kept getting wrapped around my arms and body. Thanks to the current, I was able to complete the swim in under 40 minutes. I wasn't exactly swimming in a straight line, however, and probably added quite a bit of distance to the swim.
As you can see in the pictures, I was one of the slowest ones in the swim which made it easier to find my bike. The bike portion of the trip was going very well. There were a couple of huge hills. On one of the hills, I started to grumble to myself and then passed a para-athlete at the top and remembered how lucky I was just to have working legs.
With 5 miles left in the bike portion, my back tire blew. I had never changed a flat before, but I had watched a Youtube video on how to. Unfortunately I didn't pay attention well enough and it took me almost 30 min. to figure it out. I ended up finishing the bike portion in around 3 hours 15.
As I started the run, I felt like I needed to make up time for the flat tire. About halfway throught the run, I didn't care about time anymore. I didn't properly hydrate during the race, so my kidneys started to ache as the run went on. At about mile nine I hit an invisible wall and it took all my effort to continue running. I made it through the last 4 miles and finished the race. It was a pretty amazing feeling to cross that finish line. My final time was 5:55:48.
An even more amazing feeling, however, was seeing everyone come together and invest over 2000 dollars into child saving research for the Children's Heart Foundation.
I had an amazing time and I hope all of you did too!
Please stay tuned. I'm not done yet!
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
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