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In August of 2019, I raced the Chicago Triathalon. It was the end of my 2019 outdoor season, and I expected to be back outdoors about 7 months later in Carmel. But COVID changed all of that\u2026 So it was almost 20 month before I had a chance to race outside again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first race back was the Sylvan Beach Triathalon. I went down a day early so that I could work with Danny B, who would be guiding me for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Saturday, we had an opportunity to make sure that we were in sync for the swim and bike. At that point, the waves were at about a 5 (scale of 1-10) and made it a little challenging for the out. But we knew that we’d get a nice ‘ride’ on the back portion of the course. After figuring out the starts\/stops and dealing with chain\/gear issues, everything seemed set with the bike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Race morning did not start off well, and I almost did not get to race. All I can say is that I owe Mother Nature a nice gift basket. I spent more than 45 minutes just trying to get an Uber. When I did, I ended up with a driver that said ‘I am not from here’ and didn’t know how to navigate around the closures. So I arrived at about 13 minutes prior to when transition would have originally closed, and about 1\/2 mile from it. Thankfully, the weather had pushed back both transition close and race start, so we had a chance to hurridly set up transition and get ready to race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While I had benefited from Mother Nature on the front end, I paid for it on the back end. The waves had gone from a 5 on Saturday to an 8+ on Sunday. And there were a couple of points that I could feel them lifting me as I was trying to swim. Because of this, it was decided to tap out of the water for safety reasons. Unfortunately, the tether was lost during that process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
** Note — I know that getting pulled out of the water would normally end the race. I expected to be told our race was done. However, I was specifically told that because this was a Development race, we could continue. **<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we got out onto the bike, the challenges of the day unfortunately continued. It started with an asshat (who I believe may have been part of the race crew, as I saw the truck at a couple other points during the bike\/run) pulled right out in front of us as we were on the bike. Thankfully, we were able to avoid a crash, and continued on. At some point into the bike, we lost gears — the bike just wouldn’t shift into them. This meant having to do hills in 5 or 6 instead of 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of that, I put out a lot of extra energy on the hills. And I paid for it when we made it out onto the run. My legs were shot, and I believe that the most I was able to consistently run was 1\/5 mile. That was at the start, and the overwhelming majority was walk\/run. I did manage a nice burst into the chute\/finish though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While it wasn’t the race that I wanted or expected, it was still good to be back outside racing after that long. I learned a lot, and knocked the rust off of several things as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thanks to USA Triathalon for doing the clinic \/ Development Series, Catapult for getting the tandem in place, Danny B for guiding and everyone else that helped make the weekend possible!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In August of 2019, I raced the Chicago Triathalon. It was the end of my 2019 outdoor season, and I expected to be back outdoors about 7 months later in Carmel. But COVID changed all of that\u2026 So it was almost 20 month before I had a chance to race outside again. My first race … Continue reading Sylvan Beach Triathlon – 5\/16\/21<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":993,"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions\/993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nocrappyexcuses.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}