MESA,
ARIZONA
We decided to try this race this year and I am glad we did. It was a good race. Christian announced that he was going to beat me today. I told him “Fat Chance”, but secretly I was a bit concerned. Panama left my legs a bit torched and because of my post-race tourism, travel and exhaustion, I haven’t been able to bike or run for an entire week and I wasn’t sure how my legs would respond to a sprint. I haven’t worked out for a week because all the traveling and lack of sleep left me exhausted which opened the door to me getting sick. Yesterday I cancelled a meeting so I could take a nap. I spent the entire day yesterday with a headache and had to take the nap because I felt so tired. Despite all that I felt pretty good as the run started today.
This was a reverse triathlon. We woke up and the streets were wet from rain. It cleared up and turned out to be a nice day however. Christian immediately bolted in front of me making his intentions clear. He was running so fast I just decided to pace behind him. He slowly got further and further in front of me. Damn it is pissing me off that he can consistently run faster than me now. I felt good, but even at my best I can’t stay with him anymore. By the end of the 3 mile run I think he was a more than 100 yards ahead of me. That was enough to make him gone and on the bike by time I reached transition. I hunted him on the bike for the entire first loop. I finally found him and slowly passed him a bit into the second loop. I was shocked at how long it took me to pass him once I had finally found him. He had looked back and knew that I was coming. The boy can bike now. I was torching my legs. My run felt fine, but I could feel the killer hills of panama’s toll on my biking muscles. Despite the pain I put some distance between Christian and I. I did not necessarily need it because if we hit the pool even I knew I was coming out of that pool before him. I suffered more for the future. I wanted to make an investment for the future of sprint racing for future psychological warfare. I have always been faster than Christian on the bike and I want him to continue to believe that.
During the last loop a car made a right turn into the bike course right in front of me. I screamed “noooooo! and I must have had protection from above because the car stopped with just enough room for me to squeeze between it and another car which was waiting to make a left out of the same parking lot. The adrenaline gave me a boost and I used it to rocket for the next few minutes. I hit the pool and put in one of the most difficult painful swims of my triathlon career. My toe cramped in the first lap and my entire body was just saturated with lactic acid as I tried to swim. I burned deep into the red to pass another athlete and spent the rest of the swim in lactic agony to stay ahead of that person. I actually felt like I was going to throw up as I dug deep to stay ahead. Man that was a hard swim. I felt like I was dogging it the whole way but I must not have given that I turned in the second fastest swim of the day. I ended up with second in my age group. Christian got first in his age group and was 9th over-all. The boy is getting fast. And he hasn’t trained been on a bike or swam in over a month. Christian came so close to tasting victory over me that he is already asking if we can sign up for this race next year.
