Race day always starts early and since the whole family with going to come with me it started even earlier.  We were up at 4am so we could be on the road by 5am.  My wife Julie did a great job wrangling the kids and their stuff that morning.  Hard to remember that when I was doing this the kids were only three and eight.  In all fairness, she had the harder part of the coming day – keeping them occupied for the hour and a half before the race (not to mention the 4+ hours I would take to finish the damn thing), now that is tough job.  We got to Treasure Island around 6am and found the coaching staff for TNT.  As I was settling into the transition area the jitters kicked into high gear.  Add to this I discovered that besides the Olympic distance race I was doing they also had a Sprint Course.  I must admit I was sorely tempted to try and trade to the shorter race but that stubbornness thing won out yet again.

The hardest part for me when it comes to races is the wait for the start.  Once I have checked in, been body marked and setup transition I seem to have nothing left to do but crawl into my own head.  THAT can be a very scary place.  One side note about body marking is that besides writing your race number on you in sharpie they also tag the back of your leg with your age.  Each year this seems to bug me more but you must play by the rules.   Some people do have fun with it though.  I saw one woman at a race who had “35, single & looking” on the back of her leg.  Being slow, you get to see almost everyone as they pass you so you can see what is written but back to this race.  While I was busy pacing the cage, so to speak, I realized that two Canadian gentlemen were planning to do the swim without wet suits.  For those who don’t know the average water temperature for San Francisco Bay in November is 56 degrees.  That is cold with a wetsuit and is downright frosty without one.  The bonnie lads were convinced that being from up north they would be just fine – umm, sure you will.  This race was utilizing a deep-water start.  This meant you jumped off a dock, swam out to the starting buoy and waited for the horn to sound.  One guy never even reached the starting line and the other one, bless his heart (that is polite speak for poor dumb bastard) made it 100 yards before they had to fish him out.  The swim ended with a run (walk/stagger) up the boat ramp and into transition.  Oh yeah, remember that wet-suit discussion, I wasn’t kidding.

The bike course was almost completely flat with only a small section, maybe 200 yards that went up hill before you turned around and went right back down.  The course a had a couple down sides for me.  The first was that since Treasure Island is a small, manmade island so to have a 40k bike ride we had to do 6 loops.  This meant keeping track of how many times you had gone around, tougher than you might think.  One of the coaches gave a me trick though.  You take one of the sticky power bars and break it into six parts.  Then you stick the pieces onto the center tube of your bike and as you come to the end of each loop eat a piece.  When you pull the last piece, you come on into transition. This way you don’t lose track of the loop count and you also take in some much-needed nutrition while on the course.  One side note – CLEAN the area of your bike where you are going to stick the pieces before AND after, just saying.  The other down side was that with six loops I had some people who could pass me twice (did I mention I was slow on the bike?).  There was one guy who each time he passed me he yelled out “YOU GOT THIS, YOU ARE DOING GREAT!!”, I just can’t tell you what that is worth when you are starting to lose steam.

The run was every bit as terrible as I thought it would be and worse, it was a two-loop course so it felt like you were doing it twice.  My running buddy and I had ended up together by the last loop on the bike course so we headed out onto the run course together and to make things a little better we picked a third member of the team to run with.

After the first loop, I hate to say it but I had to bid teammates goodbye.  I just couldn’t hold even the modest pace we were going and I didn’t want to slow them down.  The last 2 miles was a very slow, rather painful shamble.  The number of random strangers who would yell out “GO TEAM” as I went past them if they were spectators or if they were runners passing me, was almost beyond count.  That kind of support really did help but even still by the last mile I was pretty much done in.  It was at this point I came upon the “tough love” running coach for the team.  He looked at me and said “Are you ready to quit?”.  I manage to gasp out a “Hell no” as I struggled past him.

His response was “good, then finish thing”.  Did I mention I am stubborn yet?  I don’t remember my final time exactly but I know it was close 4:15 and to my amazement I wasn’t last.  I got hugs from my family and my teammates who were all around the finish.  One of the training captains who knew me fairly well by this point quietly slipped me a can of beer and whispered that it was really good for race re-hydration (TNT does have some very wise volunteers).

The bug had bitten me and two days later I started hunting for my next race.