Laura's Triathlon

I'm a little behind on posting so I'm going to attempt to catch up over the next few days. A couple of months ago, I competed in my first triathlon. It has been on my bucket list since we lived in Missouri and I saw some of my friends there compete in one. I chose a sprint distance just to get a feel for it. It went about as I suspected. My strongest leg was the swim which was, unfortunately, the shortest portion of the race. We were in a pool, so it was a bit tricky placing myself in a place where I wouldn't catch up to anyone or be caught from behind.

As you will see in this video, I failed. Even with being slowed down a bit, I was still second place on the swim portion for my age group.

As I predicted, my slowest leg of the race was the bike portion. It was quite frustrating to have 100's of bikers pass me during the 60 minutes I was riding. I was told a week before my race that having a road bike makes a huge difference when competing in a triathlon. I tried to borrow a road bike from one of my neighbors, but everyone that I asked, owned mountain bikes. I gave up and decided to stick with the bike I trained on, knowing that it would make my times worse. It was still frustrating during the race. Someday, I'm going to ride the same distance on a road bike and see if it really makes a difference. I'm the purple spot in the middle of this picture. I was transitioning to my bike in this picture.

Here I am riding past the fam after my first lap.

Here I am finishing the race off.

I finished the race in about 1 hour and 40 minutes. When we went back and looked at the times, we realized that I finished my 5K in 29 minutes which is the best 5K time I've ever had. I told Danny that it is probably because I was chasing this 69 year old man the whole run and I couldn't believe that I wasn't able to catch him.  I may not have been the fastest competitor, but I did have the best cheering section out of anyone in that race.

I was glad to have finally been able to cross this item off of my bucket list, but part of my hopes to one day be able to do a longer length triathlon(after I find a good road bike to borrow.)