OK yeah, so I’m sitting here in a hotel room hoping I’ll get tired here soon so I can get some decent sleep before tomorrow.
Got everything checked in at the estrogen-fest IronGirl registration/bike racking/et al. It’s very…strange? different? odd? Something, I just don’t know quite what. It may have something to do with the fact that they had 1800 people register for it, so it’s pretty huge. (Biggest tri I’ve been involved in topped out at 500 registrations if I recall correctly.) Supposedly 800 of the folks here are first timers - pretty cool.
Looking around at bike racking, it sure looked like a pretty hard core field to me - didn’t see any mountain bikes or hybrids like I did at Virginia Run, and everyone had that “I know what I’m doing” look about them. Ack. Got a good look at the swim course, too - my god it looks 10 miles long. It’s hard to visualize 1,000 meters of water, and this definitely doesn’t look like I imagined, LOL. But, they’re saying the water temp is 84 degrees, so that’s definitely a plus for me. Also, something I noticed is that a good chunk of the swim is relatively close to shore, so should I freak out, in theory I should be able to paddle to the shallows, put a foot down, take a breath and dive back on in. The other thing is that I am planning now to just go ahead and side/breaststroke the first leg of it (it’s an out/left turn/left turn triangle-ish route) to get past the initial HR spike that always happens in the first couple minutes when I swim, that way I can still be head-above-water & breathing and not panicking while I wait for my body to agree that yes, we are swimming today. Once I thought about those things, I felt much better about the swim, so I think I’ll be able to stay relatively calm through it given that I’ve thought it out ahead of time and have a “plan” of sorts.
I really didn’t think anything of the fact that this was going to be an all female event when I signed up - it just looked like a reasonable distance that was late in the season, so I figured I’d be able to tackle it without dying. Well, let me tell you, this being an all-female event is a Very Big Deal. This is “IronGirl“’s first season of triathlons. The first was earlier this year in Dallas, they got about 600 people I think, and this one registered 1800, so I can see how that is a big deal for an inaugural race.
Guess I’m just having troubles wrapping my head around the need for an all female event. Why couldn’t you have a kickass co-ed event and push it hard as “first timer friendly”?
Tomorrow, I may understand why an all female event *is* a big deal. Regardless, if what I have seen so far today of the setup and such is indicative of how things will be tomorrow, it should be a very good, very enjoyable race.
Looks like the common theme of BT racers tomorrow will be “this is for you Lane” - he’s still in the hospital, still no diagnosis, but his friend who visited with him today said he’s still being a smartass, so that’s definitely a good thing. I’m usually not one to race for a “reason” but tomorrow, it’s for him.
