2011 IMNOLA 69.1

Yep, that's right, 69.1. Swim got canceled. Which means that the last 2 half iron distance races I have done have had canceled swims. It seems that people who would like to do an *entire* half iron-distance triathlon may want to avoid the races that I'm signed up for...

I wasn't planning on doing the whole race anyway- I was signed up as part of a relay team. I was the swimmer/biker, and fellow GNOTri-er Jescica was the runner. She called me from transition race morning as I was on my way there to tell me there was no swim. In Myrtle Beach last year, they canceled the swim due to high e. coli counts in the water. Sunday at Lake Pontchartrain was a different story. A front had come through 2 days prior, and ever since Friday the winds had been ridiculous. I train up there all the time and I know that there's always going to be some wind at the lakefront, but this past weekend it was pretty bad. And it was a northerly wind, which is the worst for swimming conditions since we're on the south shore of a huge-ass lake.

When I got to transition, I went over to check out the lake. The chop was definitely not the highest I've seen, but it was coming FAST, and HARD. I even spotted some rip currents running parallel to the shore. It looked borderline swimmable, but it wouldn't have been pretty. The buzz around transition, though, was that the swim wasn't canceled because of the swimmers but rather because they couldn't get the support boats out there. Apparently they weren't even able to set the buoys. No support craft = no safety for swimmers = no swim. Makes sense to me. It was a bummer, but the right call.

Over at the relay rack, Jescica and I were readjusting and discussing our plan. Everyone was pretty good natured about the cancellation, probably in part because I was at the relay rack and most of the others there were only doing the bike leg anyway. I ran into my hairstylist, which is not as odd as it sounds since he is a cyclist himself and was there to support his friend, who is also the owner of the salon where he works and who was racked two bikes over from me. He asked me how my new haircut was working out - he recently cut my hair reeeally short, Halle-Berry-style - and I told him it's been great!

In Myrtle Beach, the way they started us was we all got corralled into an area right by swim out, with no shoes or bike helmets, as if we'd just gotten out of the water. They let one person go every 5 seconds in totally random order. When it was your turn, you ran to transition to put on your bike gear. So we still had T1 times. On Sunday, they had us all pack into transition, get all our gear and bikes ready and file out of transition two by two (Noah's Ark style, as one person put it). So we skipped the swim and T1 and just started off on the bike. They also had us maintain our wave order, but it was random within the waves.

Relays were the very last wave to go off, and somehow when we lined up I ended up at the back of our wave. This means I was approximately the 3rd to last person to start in the whole damn race! I thought to myself, "I sure hope I'm faster than at least SOME of the people in front of me, because I do not want to be the last bike out on the course!" It was about 8:30 AM when I finally got going.

The bike ride.... hmm what can I say. A 20-knot wind out of the east on a primarily east-west out and back single loop made for some fun times out there. It was a hammerfest the whole way out just to keep moving in a forward direction. When I could finally see the turnaround way up the road, I was literally counting pedal strokes just to make it to the cones. One, two, one, two, just make it there, one, two... Then of course the tailwind on the way back was not as satisfying as I would've liked, but isn't that always the case? As you can tell, riding flats into a headwind is not one of my strong suits. Which is frustrating, because more often than not it's what we get down here.

I've ridden that exact course once a week for about 3 years and I can honestly say this was easily in the top 5 toughest ever out there as far as windy conditions. Around mile 10-15 or so, on top of one of the highway bridges, a gust of wind was so strong that it actually blew one of my contact lenses out of my eye. So I did the rest of the bike ride with one eye. I was kind of sweating it that I might lose the other one - my prescription in the missing-lens eye is -7.0 and in the other eye is -8.0 - so there would be no way I could go on if I lost both. There were a few close calls but thankfully it didn't happen.

Rolling back into transition, I was thrilled to hand the chip over to Jescica and let her take over! The relay transition was actually pretty cool. I ran in and racked my bike like normal, then ran over to the relay pen next to run-out where all the runners were waiting. A friend standing at bike-in had waved over to Jescica when he saw me roll in, so she was ready and waiting for me. I ran up in my socks, since I had to run all the way across a huge transition and figured I could do that faster in socks than in bike shoes. She grabbed the chip strap off of my leg, slapped it on hers, and off she went.

After a quick trip home to get a new contact lens, we went to meet Jescica at the finish line, collect my Relay medal (it's the same medal but it says Relay instead of Finisher, which is pretty cool), and enjoy the post race festivities. The festivities, that is, not the food- seriously, in one of the very best food cities IN THE WORLD, the best you can do for post-race food is fruit, pizza, and Wal-Mart soda?? That is embarrassing. I was embarrassed for my city and felt like I should apologize to all the out of towners. At least the free beer was plentiful. They'd have had a riot on their hands from the locals if they'd tried to put any kind of limits on THAT.

Jescica and I stayed around for the awards ceremony, since we couldn't tell from the printouts if we'd actually won anything. The relays were all jumbled together with male, female, and mixed teams. Turns out we were either 4th or 5th out of female relays by my estimation (they never did split out the results so I have to guess based on people's names) but they only gave relay awards to the top 3. Age groups got top 5. Oh well!

I was a little disappointed in my time and wished I could've been a little faster, considering the work I've been putting in on the bike. But I did go into the race a little depleted- I got super, super sick on the previous Saturday night and couldn't really eat anything until about Wednesday. And, looking at my power numbers, I averaged a much higher wattage than I ever have on any of my training rides. So it looks like the effort was there, even though the time was affected by the weather conditions. So I'm cool with it.

I took a photo with Monte at bike check-in, but it's not uploaded yet. There are also one or two pics of me biking courtesy of Gary, Sherpa Spectathlete Extraordinaire. I'll post them later.

What a bummer for all the first-timers that they don't make a 69.1 sticker!