Last year, a broken crank sidelined me from the race. I tried everything I could to make it work,
but had to eventually throw in the towel.
So I was really looking forward to this year’s race.
Upon getting to the race site, I was surprised in the dark. I thought that I knew where my ‘stalker’ was
at that weekend. But they surprised me
by being there. Their note pre-race was
‘finish faster’.
In past years, we’ve been immediately behind the elites. While it’s been a privilege to be that far
up-font, it’s come at a price. Simply
because we’d have those able to do 5-6 minute swims swimming over us. To counteract this, we seeded ourselves
towards the back of the pack. This
helped some, but didn’t solve all of the issues. Especially since it seemed like they went
from a lane-line barrier to a more solid one.
Even with a couple of hiccups, it was still a decent swim.
After doing a reasonably quick T1 for the distance, we headed out on the
bike. As in Lake Zurich, we passed a
tremendous amount of people on the double loop.
I was hoping to see the Para Relay team while we were on the bike, but
we didin’t. It also got a little hairy
towards the turnaround on the 2nd loop.
At this point, the participants of the Kids Tri were on the bike
course. While some weren’t as familiar
with the rules, Lee was able to keep us safe and [eventually] get them to ride
properly so we could pass.
Arriving back in T2, I drained about half the bottle of Skratch before we
headed out on the run. While I
remembered most of the course from 2017, I had forgotten about an important
hill on River. Even still, the portion
through the woods and over the bridge was solid. So were spurts along River. However, when we hit Aurora in the heat and
humidity, things broke down a bit.
While it wasn’t a perfect race, I did end up shaving 14 minutes off my 2017
time.
