Trisport Canada Milton Try-A-Tri Race Recap: Part 2

Good morning!

Sorry about leaving you hanging yesterday. I was moving at such a slow pace after the race…you don’t want to know how long it took me to write Part 1. Eric goes, ‘You are STILL typing?!’ You should have seen the look on his face when I told him I only got through the swim portion! Priceless.

Thank you for all of your encouraging comments…Eric was basically glowing all day long!

Try-A-Tri Race Recap: Part 2

Missed Part 1 of our Try-a-tri recap? See this post.

After the swim, we exited the water through here…

We were quite disoriented when we got out of the water! Eric said he was wobbling all over the place like he was drunk!

Next we, headed to the transition area for T1!

We were SLOW as molasses transitioning. We didn’t want to kill ourselves trying to rush, rush, rush so we just took our time and did what we could. Plus, we were super tired from the swim!

I decided on Saturday that I would not be bringing Dwight to the race. Initially, I was planning on using my Garmin 305 for the bike + run portion, but I decided against it. I wasn’t doing the try-a-tri for time and I didn’t have any goal in mind, so I figured bringing a Garmin along would be pretty futile. I wanted to go out there with my husband and have a good time. Dwight stayed at home.

Eric is 9 months older than me, so every year we are the same age for 3 months! He turns 28 in August.

Our T1 was probably a good 4 minutes or so. Off we went on the bike for the 10km. We saw some friends in the crowd cheering us on and it really boosted our spirits!!

[That isn’t us in the picture, but you can pretend we had spiffy road bikes!]

While I was a bit worried about the bike leg, it actually turned out to be our strongest leg of the race! For some reason, I thought it was going to be much more congested than it was, but there was actually a lot of room on the course.

Also, thank you to those of you who told me some of the biking rules. I had no idea that everything would be single file unless passing (this was GREAT!) and I used the ‘On Your Left’ each time I passed someone. Very useful info. I do believe the race announcer went over these exact rules on the loud speaker, but it was very hard to hear him from the transition area and in the water!

Eric and I had a really strong bike ride. The 10k course was challenging with lots of small hills, but it was nothing we couldn’t handle. Our spirits were high on this bike ride. Throughout the entire 10k ride, we alternated taking the lead position between the two of us. Eric would get a burst of energy and blow by me on the left, and then I would get a burst of energy and pass him. It was almost like a little game and made the bike leg very enjoyable! We were also happy because the rain had stopped during our swim, so the roads weren’t slick and wet.

The only downside to the bike leg was not having a road bike. It is much more difficult + slower biking on the road with a mountain bike and we could have been a lot faster with a road bike, but we obviously weren’t going to buy a road bike just for a try-a-tri race. We were actually expecting to see a lot more mountain bikes on the course, but so many people had road bikes (and many of them were VERY high end bikes worth 4k and up!). We drooled over them.

We biked hard and gave it our all. We talked here and there and we kept saying things like, ‘This is so much better than swimming!’

[Not me]

Our time for the bike leg  was officially 32:58/32:59 minutes which is 18.2 km/hr. I was so surprised to find that my legs felt like BRICKS when I stepped off my bike. I guess I have never really pushed that hard on a bike before and my quads were stiff, stiff, stiff.

T2 is a very quick transition because all we had to do was take off our helmets and grab a sip of water.

The run leg was just 2.5 km, so I figured it would go very smoothly!

The first 1.5 km were run on the trails, up this hill and beyond:

Eric and I were in high sprits and we sang the Rocky theme song while going up the hill and laughing. I kid you not.

It was VERY muddy due to all of the rain and we had to walk through many areas so we didn’t wipe-out. Eric also stopped to go to the washroom and I waited for him to return. We were off again through the muddy trails, taking it very slow.

Around 1.5 km, Eric started to have serious doubts.

He kept getting bad stomach cramps and I encouraged him to walk and stretch them out. He said he wasn’t sure if he could finish and he was getting frustrated that people were passing us. I gave him several pep talks during the run and I told him that there is nothing wrong with walking! I kept encouraging him to stop and take a breather, but he was still having a very hard time getting over his mental doubts about his ability.

I tried to use every trick in the book. I got him to visualize how great crossing the finish line would feel, a big post-race lunch, a hot shower, etc. I also said, ‘Don’t forget we are on a secret mission here, we can’t give up now! We are so close!’ After about 10 minutes of the pep talk, we made it to the last hill and we could see the finish line approaching…

[This picture was taken at the end of the race, but there were people all around the finish line cheering!]

Eric said, ‘Ok let’s do it.’ and he got a burst of motivation to finish. I said, ‘Want to sprint?’ and he said yes and then he grabbed my hand for the last 10 metres and we sprinted our little hearts out.

It was a moment.

Unfortunately, we sprinted so fast at the end, we had to slow down suddenly right at the finish line or we would have trampled two people who were also crossing. :lol: It wasn’t exactly the photo finish we hoped it would be. However, we are still waiting on pictures so it could be quite funny.

Our finishing time for the 2.5km run was 17:07 mins which is 6:51 km/hr.

I was disappointed to find out that we didn’t get finishers medals for this race! I really wanted Eric to have a symbol for all of his hard work. I think every race should have medals!

Right after crossing the finish line, we saw Steph who was eagerly awaiting her Sprint Relay! She was doing the 30km bike leg for the relay. Her and her team did awesome, check out her recap on her blog!

Eric and I were so happy to be finished, we decided to drop all our stuff off at the car and then head back to the ‘party area’ to get some post-race food. We must have walked another 30 minutes to the car and back! It felt like it took forever.

I had an apple and a banana and Eric had a Classic Glo Bar and an apple.

Then we headed back to the water to see if we could see the Sprint going on, but we missed the action so we headed home to get out of our damp clothes and get warm again! My black jacket was soaked and this blue zip-up was very damp and I was freezing. I was also wearing my wet swimsuit and red biking tank underneath! Brrrrrr. I kept saying, ‘Hot shower, hot shower, hot shower’

One last photo memory before leaving.

Speaking of brrrr…I present to you the doggie wetsuit.

My heart went out to this dog….he did NOT look like a happy spectator!!!

Later in the day, we found out our results and we both had a finishing time EXACTLY the same which was 1:02:58. I was quite surprised that it was just over 1 hour because it felt like a lot longer than that! I finished 31/37 in my age category and Eric finished 19/21 in his category. I think Eric thought he was going to be dead last, so to see that he wasn’t made him quite excited. :biggrin: Overall, we finished 234th (Eric) and 235th (me) out of 276 try-a-tri participants!

We honestly could not have cared less about our time in the end, it was the experience that mattered to us. We both knew that we had taken ourselves far, far out of our comfort zone to do this race and that felt really good.

Later today, I will be showing you everything I ate post-race. Have a great day!