Well, I guess my ability to finish the Columbus triathlon wasn't a fluke, because I've just completed a second one and I'm still alive to tell the tale. This one was more of a whole-weekend event — or at least it seemed like it to me, since it was sandwiched in among other activities during two frantic days of visiting friends and family back home.
Erin said that I could borrow a road bike for the day from the Ohio City Bike Co-Op, which was excellent because I found out on Saturday morning, as I was trying to leave my apartment in Pittsburgh, that I can't fit my (mountain) bike into my car without taking it apart. I was already running late at that point, so I shoved the bike back into my building, tossed the rest of my stuff for the weekend into the car, and cleared out as quickly as I could. I got to Erin's apartment around 1:20, and once Ben got there we drove across the river to the bike co-op on the near West Side. Erin and Ben are members, so they can borrow bikes and equipment for free, and the people at the shop said they didn't care if I did the same. It's a pretty laid-back place: only one real bike repair expert surrounded by a mess of volunteer workers in a crowded shed right by the Cuyahoga River. It took us almost two hours to get what we needed, but eventually we headed back to Case with three functioning road bikes and spare tubes, tire irons, and frame pumps to go around.
I spent the night at Ben and Kathi's apartment; Ben and I woke up at 5:00 to get ready to go. I used Ben's same alarm that jolted me out of bed back in July, but this time it was set to a normal beeping instead of annoying electronic classical music. My cold, once I was awake enough to take stock of the situation, was worse than the day before, and I ended up spending about 90 percent of the time I wasn't swimming, biking, or running blowing my nose into the closest Kleenex, napkin, or paper towel.
To save time, Ben and I took my car over to Erin's place at the Waldorf and then drove it back to Ben's again once all the bikes were loaded onto Erin's car. Then the three of us drove down to Portage Lakes State Park a bit south of Akron. None of us had remembered to print out the directions, but I'd at least looked at them a few days before, so I was the de facto navigator. Which meant, of course, that I got us onto the wrong side of the rectangle of freeways in central Akron and therefore caused us to miss the proper exit onto Route 93. We were able to correct this, at least, after only a few miles, and Erin turned around at one of those breaks in the median to get us headed in the right direction.
We arrived at the park just in time to pick up our registration packets, collect our stuff for the transition area, get body marked, and get set up before everyone was herded down to the beach for the 8 a.m. sprint triathlon start. Right from the beginning things were much less stressful than in July: we knew roughly what the morning procedure would be, we were all right without a pre-race meeting and without any knowledge of the course, and I personally felt all cool in the synthetic compression shorts and sleeveless top I bought for the occasion. The only things I wasn't at ease about were my cold and the water temperature. The air, at that time of the morning, wasn't more than 60°.
It was supposed to be a mass start from the beach, but they broke it down into four waves separated by about two minutes each. First up were the men under a certain age, then the men over that age but below another one, then all the women, then all the remaining older men, so Ben and I were in the first start. The mass start was a lot nicer, I thought, because all the fast people didn't have to kick me in the face as much as they zipped by: they were already out in front almost from the first stroke. By the time the second (and third, and then fourth...) wave of starters hit me, they were already partially spread out, and I was able to move out to the right and let them pass me in a steady stream on the left. Think of the ideal traffic pattern on a freeway with two lanes in each direction, erase all the slow grandma cars but one, and you'll have the idea of how the swim went.
I pushed myself a bit more towards the end of it, based on my horrible time in July, and came out feeling like I had gone a bit faster. I also didn't feel so out of breath coming out of the water and trotting in my bare feet into transition. I got my synthetic shirt stuck around my shoulders for a minute or two because I wasn't completely dried off, but eventually forced it down and rolled my bike to the exit. The biking course was a really nice ride: kind of hilly by Northeast Ohio standards, but they put all the big uphills at the beginning and gave lots of scenic lakeside views in the middle. Once I figured out how the frame-mounted gear shifters worked on my borrowed bike, I got into a nice pedalling rhythm, passed a good number of people, and enjoyed the ride. The only annoying part was that the course, on regular country roads around the park, wasn't closed off to cars. There were policemen stationed at every intersection, so they could halt traffic when bikers came by, but this didn't always work. Near the end of the race, when I was trailing a lady on a bike by several meters, I came up to a major intersection with a stoplight. The light was red and there were six or eight cars stopped at it, but we needed to turn left in order to stay on the course. The lady in front of me started to stop for the light until the policeman at the intersection saw what was going on and told her to keep going, so then we had to edge along the line of stopped cars and turn in front of them.
The running was a T-shaped course within the park, and I started out taking small, upright steps and going very slowly. There was no way of reckoning milage except by feel, and I had no clue where I was in the race until someone passing in the opposite direction said the last turn-around was just after the next bend. The turn-around had a mile marker 2 sign, and I don't think it was until just before that point that I started feeling better and sped up a bit. I didn't push myself to do the last eight-tenths of a mile fast like I usually do, but instead settled for a small speed-up in perhaps the last quarter mile.
Ben was waiting for me at the finish, so we collected some water and snacks from the food tent and staked out a place under a tree to wait for Erin. I felt a lot better than I had in July; the persistent thirst that, on that occasion, led to me drinking six cups of water was almost nonexistent, so I ended up having two cups of water, a banana, and two Fig Newton bars before Erin finished about a half-hour later. Then we migrated to a picnic table and ate some more food.
Ben and Erin had a big med school test to study for, and I had more people to visit on campus, so we decided not to stay for any awards or raffle drawing that might have been scheduled for later in the day. The first Olympic-distance athlete crossed just before we left, so it would have been at least another hour and a half before they were all finished. We ended up stopping at Panera's in Brecksville for a light lunch — and to make ourselves look more like civilized beings — before heading back to campus.
Results have been posted for about eight hours as I'm writing this, so the rankings will probably change as the race people sort everything out in the next few days — at least, that's what happened in Columbus. I do know, however, my own times in vacuo, so I can say a few things about how this race compared to my first one. As I thought, the swimming was a bit faster — almost as low as when I swim in the pool — but I still have a long way to go to be competitive, or even average. Part of the problem may be that I have a hard time swimming in a straight line within the course, and end up drifting off to the right almost instantly. At best I probably turned the rectangular course into an octagon and thus added to the overall distance. The major problem, though, is that even with my head permanently on the side I can't figure out how to breathe without swallowing a wave or two, especially when people are nearby. I didn't even bother trying to swim the "right" way in the choppy water, since I can normally only keep that up for 150 meters tops in a calm pool.
The road bike probably saved me between eight and 10 minutes, but I should have pushed myself more. I don't consider myself to be a bad biker (unlike swimming), but I was still far far below the average time on that part of the race. If I can get myself a road bike of my own and practice keeping up a good pace on it, I'd expect to cut a few more minutes off my time.
Running, this time, I knew would be slower, but it wasn't really that much slower. I actually ran faster than Ben in the same race, which is something that I never thought I'd do in my life. Preliminary results are showing, unfortunately, that the field overall ran faster than in July because my place on the running portion is in the 90s and in Columbus it was in the 50s. In transition, I'd noticed a large contingent of 20-something guys looking like serious athletes, so it's possible they're responsible. By the time I'd gotten to the running part, everyone else my age was off the course already so I had a nice time passing all the old people who were running with their arms looking like chicken wings.
And I guess that's all for the season. I'm hoping to spend the winter actually learning how to swim, since that's probably the best single thing I can do to improve my time and feel better about myself as an athlete. (It still seems very odd to think of myself, much less refer to myself in print, as an athlete at all; I've always been ridiculously awful at all sports and have a body to match.) A secondary goal is going to be the increasing of my running pace, since running seems to be something I'm actually average at and should therefore continue to develop it into something that may approach good by the beginning of next year. Biking, ever since I started training, has always been the tertiary exercise, and I suppose it's going to have to remain in third place as a sort of strength-maintenace routine.