We Did it!

Well thes photos are a little backwards, but none the less it is from October 2nd when I did my first Sprint-Triathlon. Man was it hard. I knew it was going to be hard but I did not expect it to be that hard. The triathlon was up at Bartlett Lake. It is known as the toughest triathlon in Arizona because the bike and running is al up hill. The open water swim was in the lake which also makes it more difficult. The sprint Triathlon was a 400 Meter Swim, 12.6 Mile Bike, and 2.2 mile run. During the 10 weeks of training Swimming has always been the hardest for me. I knew it would be harder once I got in the lake too. Everyone is kicking you, you can't see, and it is choppy, it is much different then swimming laps in a pool. My goal was to swim freestyle for as long as I could and then flip over on my back when I got tired. Well I think I floated on my back and kicked my way through the 400 meters for about 80% of the time. Once you were done with the swim, you had to run up a hill to get to the bike station. My legs were already dead from the swim because floating on your back uses all legs, and swimming freestyle uses all arms. By the time I got to the bike station I was still trying to catch my breath from the swim and the uphill run. It took us about 5 minutes for the transition. I was eating gummy chews for energy, changing to bike shoes, putting my helmet and music on. The first part of the bike zone you have to walk your bikes out of so once we were out of that area it was straight up for about a half a mile to get onto the bike path. Then we proceeded to go 6 1/2 miles in my lowest gears 1 and 1 on both sides. The incline was horrible. Remind you I practiced on hills for my training but it was nothing like this. After about mile 2 I wanted to give up, literally. Luckily my friend was right next to me still going so it pushed me to keep pulling through. By mile 4 I could feel like my legs again and was had caught my breath back. I knew at that point I could do this. The good thing about the path was what goes up must come down so the majority of the bike path on the way back was down hill. That helped us tremendously to get ready for our uphill run. The whole bike path was a small gradual incline, but the path for the running was this steep hill that you literally ran straight up for 1.1 miles. You could barely run because it was so steep, it felt like you were climbing the mountain instead of running. Then when you got to the top to your check point to turn around you could not run down the mountain because it was just as steep going down. So you kind of had to jog your way up and jog your way down. As we were starting to head back I started feeling this rush of excitement. I had done it! I put my mind to it and I made it through even though I thought I couldn't. My friend and I finished the race hand in hand which was our goal and it was awesome. We had so many people come watch and we were so thankful for our visitors. (I'm sure I scared most of them, I had a black eye from my soccer game, no make up, hot, dripping wet, needless to say not cute) But it was so nice for them to come see me and cheer me on. I have yet to decide if I will do it again or not. Still thinking no, but who knows.