Columbus International Triathlon 2005

My description of the event

Expanded from my journal post of July 25, 2005.

I'm extremely pleased to report that our intrepid triathloners have returned from the 2005 Columbus International Triathlon in excellent shape. We didn't actually win our age brackets or anything, but we all finished and none of us were last, and that's about the best you can expect from your first time out.

Erin picked me and my bike up Saturday afternoon, and we arrived at Ben's just before 4:00. We had a meeting to go to at the race site at 5, so we ended up getting there a bit early. They told all the people running in the junior triathlon not to register before the meeting, so we joined a knot of extremely fit-looking people standing in the shade until the guy in charge came to collect us. He talked about the swim course, then handed us off to some high-up official lady to explain the rest. During that part of the meeting, it came out that the junior race had some pretty anal rules, including one that said if you got lapped on the biking portion you were immediately thrown out. Erin's friend Beth and I went up to her at the end of the meeting to clarify the obscure (to us) bike rules she was quoting, and it turned out that bikes with straight handlebars, like the ones we had, weren't even allowed!

We'd actually inadvertently signed up for a crazy-person super-league race; I guess we should have known something was up when they started mentioning the Olympic tryouts and got to the part saying managers weren't allowed in the transition area. The fact that 15-year-olds were coming to Columbus from as far away as Texas to run a race with maybe 80 other people also should have tipped us off that this wasn't exactly a thing for amateurs. So Erin, Beth, and I switched from the junior to the sprint race, which should have cost us an extra $40 each, but the race director told us not to worry about it. And so back to Ben's for dinner and some last-minute bike tune-ups.

It is my considered opinion that the time of 4:45 should only come once in a day, a bit before dinner and right about when you're thinking about making tea and scones. If there has to be some other 4:45 in the day, it should be at the end of a really long night of having fun with friends. What I'm saying here is that 4:45 a.m. is a completely inappropriate time to start a day, and especially not your birthday at that. But start it then we did, and my 22nd birthday it was. Ben's alarm clock started playing a high-pitched electronic version of the "William Tell" Overture three feet from my ear at 4:37, and we were all out of bed and getting ready to go by the time previously indicated. It was still dark when we got to the race site.

Once we'd applied all of our numbered stickers and tags (bike helmet, bike, and shirt front), we pushed our bikes over to the transition area, where I was immediately relieved to see other mountain bikes in line in front of us. Right inside we went through the curious process of "body marking," in which every one of the nearly 600 participants was tatooed in permanent marker with his or her tag number down the side of both arms, age on the back of the right leg, and race designation (olympic, sprint, relay, duathlon, etc.) on the back of the left leg.

Beth and I had been given numbers way at the end of the line, right next to a fairly large group of people who'd also switched out of the junior race, so by the time the race started we felt a lot better about not being the only novices. Everyone I talked to, though, seemed to be a swimmer and seemed to count on finishing that part of the proceedings in 15 minutes. (My fastest in the Twinsburg pool is 24 minutes.) I noticed a number of quite athletic-looking people wearing T-shirts with things like "Purdue Swimming" or "Grand Valley Aquatics" printed on them.

The start of the race was gushingly described as a "time trial" start, in which people would enter the water one at a time. Since timing was done individually through little chips we had on ankle straps, no one's time would be affected but you'd have no idea if the person ahead of or behind you was actually ahead of or behind you in time. A bit after 7:15, when the scary-scary juniors were out of the water, they started sending us in. I was still feeling all right up until about a minute before we were about to start, and then the weird stomach feeling set in. It didn't have the option to last very long, though, because 60 seconds later our part of the line reached the start and I was thrashing about in waist-deep water with around five million other people trying to run me over. (The spacing between the people entering the water one at a time was about a half a second.) I eventually made it to the far right side of the course and hung out there while I got incessantly passed.

The water torture ended at some indefinite point in the future — because of the other people around me I started out way too quickly, and then had trouble dealing with waves and swallowing an amount of lake water before I figured out just how to position my head. That took up the first 250 meters, and after that the exercise seemed to go on forever: long enough for the juniors, with a 20-minute head start, to be finishing their entire triathlons. For me it was off to the biking, which turned out excellent. The course was partially on a freeway, so it was smooth and flat and all sorts of good fun. I was keeping up an average speed of more than 15.5 m.p.h. (my training rides had always been down around 14) and not losing much speed in the later part of the race, but I was still being constantly zipped by by people in Speedos on road bikes. The body marking added an extra dimension of fun, or humilation, to that part, since I was able to read off people's ages as they left me in the dust. One of the three or four people I actually passed had a 60-something on his leg, and he was still doing a race that was twice as long as mine.

Running, afterwards, was pretty hot, because by then it was almost 9:00. Deprived of the landmarks on my usual course, I had no real idea how far I had gone, how long I was taking, or when I should try to speed up for the end. I started dying with about half a mile left and had to trash-talk myself to keep going, although I still managed a nice little sprint that passed the guy in front of me in the last several meters to the finish line. The officials wanted the timing chip back right away, so I pulled up short, got it off my ankle, waved away the kids passing out the freaky frozen energy gel, and wandered vaguely towards the food and water area.

I have never felt the need to drink so much in my life. Not so much a "burning thirst" like you read about, but more like a steady background feeling that I felt like having a glass of water. I consumed five cups of water and Gatorade in a row, and then had two more once I'd cooled off a bit. Luckily I had lots of time before having to think about doing anything else. Beth crossed just ahead of me, Erin some time behind, and then Ben finished his Olympic-distance race around an hour and a half later.

By then it was close to 11:00, so the four of us decided to stick around for the awards and raffle prizes at noon. We had to sit through a long list of the top three finishers in every age and gender group, but by the time that was over the bulk of the participants had gone home and just about everyone who was left got a raffle prize. I won a pretty nice little running visor with the name of the sponsoring club on it.

Final race results kept changing over the next week or so, but I was eventually sure that I didn't come in last place either in the overall standings or within my age group, and that was enough for me. I was really surprised that I apparently no longer suck at running, which is a great feeling because that's where 75 percent of my training efforts were. Swimming I already know I need to get much faster at, and I guess I can only explain the biking (which was nice and fast by my standards) by saying that everyone else had nifty-cool road bikes and other equipment that made their job somewhat easier.