Tiger Tri 2011

A month or so ago two friends and I decided to to a triathlon relay-no one wanted to do the whole thing (or felt capable of that, I actually don't even own a bike) but thought a relay would be fun.  So we entered, and we even trained a little!

Triathlons are apparently a whole different ballgame than your run of the mill road race. We had to follow a lot of guidelines as far as when to be where, getting signed it, etc.  We had to pick up our race packet the night before and we all had to go (not together thank goodness don't know how we could have done that) and show photo ID just to get our numbers.  Everyone had to have a 1 day USAT membership since we were not members just to enter. 

Then we had to get up 4:30 to get to the designated parking area, get our timing chip, put our gear in the transition area and get "body-marked" by 6:45.  This means that in addition to wearing a number (runners) and having one on the bike we got our number written on us 4 times in black sharpie.  Also they wrote our ages on the back of our legs-also in black sharpie.  I'm not sure what the point of that was. 

Then they line all the swimmers up in order their estimated 300 yard swim time and let them go in the pool one at a time.   Our swimmer waited in line 40 minutes.  After the swim our biker took over for the 12 mile ride.  There still people coming out of the pool when when she got back and then I took off on the 3.1 mile run. 

Our overall time was 1 hour, 32 minutes.  Against the other teams we didn't fare too well but could definitely improve since we didn't do much training.  But against the individual competitors we were far from last so that was good!  There was do dividing the teams by age or sex so we really have no idea who we were competing against.

But we did have fun and may even try it again next year.  My 5K time was about a minute faster than the last race I did so I am hopeful to continue to improve with some actual training!



No hiding anything today!



Sharpie everywhere!