I can officially say the Loveland Lake to Lake Tri is done and DONE! I am so happy to have accomplished it, but even more excited to be able to take a breather from the training. Of course, I’ll still exercise…but it’ll be nice to be able to do whatever I want and not be so focused on those three sports 🙂
I set my alarm for the sickeningly early time of 4am on Saturday morning, but since I am a morning person anyway, I bounded out of bed relatively pain free (It definitely helped that I was able to fall asleep at 9pm the night before) My heat started at 6:42 and I still had the 45 minute drive up to Loveland. I arrived at LHS around 5:45-6am and had plenty of time to setup my transition area and take a look around. Body marking was easy to find and I even had a few minutes to do a warmup jog before I jumped into my wetsuit and headed down to the beach to check out the water.
This is always my LEAST fave part of any tri–those few minutes before the race starts when you are standing in the lake, waist-deep in the cool water, and looking out at the marking buoys that seem to be miles and MILES away from shore. In this case, they literally were a mile from shore 🙂 I started to feel the butterflies creep into my stomach cause the swim always makes me so nervous! If you start to suck in the water, you sink! Scary! 🙂
At any rate, I made it through the water just fine, and even 2 minutes under the time I had set for myself (although it was a sloooooow time!) I didn’t take into account the 1/4 mile jog from the lake to the transition area though, so it ended up a little long. I wasn’t concerned though cause I MADE IT OUT OF THE WATER ALIVE!
The bike course was awesome. Yes, it was tough just like people had told me, but it was beautiful and I do well on the climbs. I guess these big legs are good for something 🙂 I had to be careful coming down the hills though, cause I was hitting top speeds of 38 mph. Fast! Any faster and I got nervous so I had to back off just a bit. I did get frustrated at one point though. I was climbing the largest hill of the race, a 6-700 foot climb, and I accidentally downshifted too fast and my chain fell off. Definitely not a problem, but it was really annoying. I had to stop, unclip from my pedals and move way to the side so I wasn’t in the way of the other races. I put the chain back on and got moving, but it definitely added a few minutes to my overall time. Grrr!
The run brutalized me and I can quite easily say that it was the slowest and most ridiculous 10k that I have ever run. Ever! It was around 10am by that point, so the sun was up and the temps were definitely rising. Locals hung out in their front yards with their hoses, spraying runners that came by. I got so excited every time I saw a garden hose 🙂 The last 1/2 mile of the race was definitely an internal struggle and I just had to keep telling myself to move….even though spectators were probably walking faster than I was running!
In the end, the tri was awesome and I totally loved it. I think I prefer this distance and I definitely plan on doing the Lake to Lake next year. I was so impressed by the elites that showed up to–I think the overall winner did the entire thing in 2 hr. 10 min. Can you imagine?! My bike alone was 1 hour and 45 min!
Thanks to my AWESOME friends and family who came to cheer me on–the signs were great! 🙂
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