2007 Dilloman Triathlon (Relay)

At the Dilloman Triathlon Roger and I participated in a relay. I did the swim and Roger biked and ran. Being in the midst of crazy half-Ironman training, I didn't really want to push it and do another race. Plus, I'm always up for a swim and this gave Roger the opportunity to do another race without having to swim. 

We arrived in good time at the site, parked, got body marked and set up transition. Which for me consisted of standing around and applying sunblock while Roger set his biking and running stuff up. We then milled around, waited in the port-a-potty line, then milled around a bit more before I sang the national anthem.

Saturday was my first time ever singing the national anthem at an event. (I sang it at the offroad Dilloman the day before). On Sunday I felt more confident about it and sang it even better than I had Saturday (which is good because there were a lot more people). 

After singing, I waited around for my wave. The relays were going with a wave of men. So there were two or three other girls and a bunch of guys in my wave. Still, I positioned myself pretty close to the front. We began the 800 meter swim and I found a guy going about my speed to draft off of. This was good because the buoys were really hard to see as we headed strait into the sun. 

As we continued, I noticed that we were far far to the right of the buoys and the kayakers were herding us further to the right. I felt like we should have been swimming right next to the buoys. I figured the kayakers were just getting in our way because they were drifting or something. A little while after passing the last buoy I realized I didn't see the next buoy, but I kept drafting. Then the feet in front of me stopped and I ran into him. I popped my head up and he said "We're off course!!" We made a hard right turn to head for the turn buoy. 

Had they drifted? Were they misplaced? I don't know, but things were weird and we did some backtracking. We headed back to the turn buoy, made a hard turn around it, then I ditched the feet and sped up, passing the guy I drafted off of for the majority of the race. 

Heading for shore was much easier to sight because we were finally out of the sun and the shore is always easy to see. I came out of the water and up onto the very very muddy shore. Yuck. They told us to have shoes (because there were stickers and brambles in the grass) there so I put on my flip flops and headed up to transition where Roger was waiting.

I went down the wrong side of the rack so he reached under and took the timing strap from me. After he departed with his bike, I toweled off a bit, grabbed some snacks and headed down to the Advanced Rehab tent where I had a lengthy massage. In fact, it was so lengthy, I missed seeing Roger on the bike completely and didn't see him until the run. I cheered various runners until he came in to the finish. 

We ended up coming in first place (out of three) in the mixed relay division. Yay! For the awards, however, they weren't so granular and we came in 4th overall (out of 9 relay teams) behind the top 3 all male teams. We had a good time.