Last weekend I drove to Wilmington, NC to spectate Beach to Battleship. A lot of my masters swim mates were either competing or spectating and I thought it was a great opportunity to mingle in a non pool setting as well as spectate a race… something I must admit I do not do very often.
I got in the car on Friday evening, after I fed the family some dinner and made my way to the city on a very dark and deserted road. My only company were the tunes I was playing… and yes, singing at the top of my lungs. Hey when there is no one in the car.. who cares how out of tune I am!
I arrived a little after 10 pm and met my friend Jen, her son and boyfriend. Jen's boyfriend was competing on his first half IM; and Jen had never spectated a triathlon before. I had not seen Jen for at least a month, and even though I wanted to catch up and do some talking; I knew we needed to go to sleep in order for her boyfriend ( R ) to get some rest before the race. I challenged Jen's son to a "fall asleep race"… and I think I won unintentionally… That's what happens when you wake up at 5 am, work all day, drive a boring 4 hours and stay up WAY past your normal 9 pm bedtime.
When the next day rolled in, we got ready, ate some breakfast and headed out to the race course to try to catch R on his swim to bike transition. We got to the race site, got situated in a nice spot and then we waited.. and then waited some more… Turns out that R had a much faster swim split than anticipated and we completely missed him. Ooops.
Determined to not miss his next transition we got in the car to head to T2… The joys of a point to point race.
We made it to T2 with time to spare and even had time to go get some warm coffee… it was a COLD morning. We positioned ourselves along the IN section towards transition and we could see, not only the bikes come in, but also the runners on the first out and back portion of their run.
Triathletes started rolling in soon after we found our spot (in the sun!) and the fun spectating began. I tried to give Jen as much information as possible about everything and what to expect when R rolled in. I pointed out different running forms and how to tell if a runner was evidently hurting or not based on how stiff their stride looked. And then it hit me…. I LOVE this sport; and I wanted to be racing!
R rolled in and he looked AWESOME! He had crushed his swim time, but gave us a pretty good estimate of what his bike split would be.. He nailed that one. We yelled super loud for him and he finally saw us when he first started running. He looked GOOD! Light on his feet and ready to throw down on the run. I knew right there he would come well under his run estimate. After collecting his things out of transition we made our way to the finish line about half a mile away.
At this point I was bummed I had not seen any of my masters friends. Not really knowing what splits they were expecting I had no idea where to look for them. Come to find out, one of them had actually passed right in front of me when headed out for the run… Oops again.
Luckily I was able to connect with them at the finish line and we spent a little bit of time spectating together with Jen and son. About 25 minutes after we had made it to our desired position close to the finish chute; R came along… Completely CRUSHING his expected run time by almost 20 minutes!!!! He was running the half marathon at my 5k Pace. Ha! One of these days I will be able to run that fast too for longer than 3 miles.
He finished the race with an awesome sub 5:15. His first half IM! Way to go R!
I had a pretty bad season in 2013 as evidenced by my previous post, I got burnt out and lost the sense of fun in the whole triathlon world. Spectating this race was exactly what I needed to light that fire back up and remind me how much fun this is. I am ready to tackle 2014. Let the fun begin!
