I have been a bad blogger (I don’t know how many
times I can say this before I just have a BAD blog). But I am trying to
be better….
The build up to RAGE was stressful I will admit.
Work has been crazy, this time of year is always busy but add that we
are opening a new exhibit and it pure insanity. So taking two days off
to drive to Vegas and race was a challenge. So
when I saw that the weather was forecasted to be in the high nineties I
went into full stress ball panic mode. I seriously thought about
skipping the race (then I could have joined my club for a long training
weekend in Moab) or dropping to the Olympic race
to avoid meltdown. In hindsight the weekend could have been a lot more
fun if I would have relaxed a bit and rolled with the punches, but that
the story of my life. But here is how the long weekend went:
Wednesday: Get home from work at 6pm and try
to start packing, find Triathlon pack list on Google documents and
laugh when I see it hasn’t been opened since September. Who’s idea was
it to start the season with a half ironman? Mine?!?!
Oh yeah…well I am an idiot. Finish packing late in the night and assume
I have forgotten many important things, go to bed feeling very
unprepared for a out of town race.
Thursday: Pack everything into out tiny car
(it gets great gas mileage)
throw our dogs in the back and head to my
parent’s house. Drop the dogs off and hit the road on time (YAY) then
realize we forgot a bag at home and have to
back track (boo, but hey it could have been way worse). The drive was
about 13 hours if you don’t count the detour or the hundreds of bathroom
stops that we had to make.
Since we were trying to hydrate for a very
hot race we were drinking more water than we
would normally on a road trip. We listened to audio books and tried to
relax on the way, overall it was fairly enjoyable for being trapped in a
car for so long. We pulled into our hotel around 8 pm thanks to gaining
an hour from the time change. The hotel
was nice enough but it was weird rolling my bike into a hotel!
Friday: We were able to sleep in and wake up
with no alarm (bliss) before packing up and heading out to Lake Mead.
Since I hadn’t been in my wetsuit in seven months or done any open water
swimming in just as long I was ready to
get some practice in. Thanks to liberal use of tri-slide I was able to
get my wetsuit on comfortably and jump the water. It was very easy to
get in the water and very comfortable to swim. I guess that’s the one
bonus from the warmer than normal weather.
The down side of that was that RAGE was supposed to be an opportunity
to practice swimming in COLD water like CDA is likely to be. After
sighting to some “no wake” buoys I was feeling like the swim would be
the easiest part of the day. We then hoped on our
bikes and did 30 minutes of easy riding.
We figured out that transition
would be long and difficult, it was up the boat ramp and that starting
on the bike would be a challenge too. Good thing to note and make sure
your bike was already in an easy gear.
We
threw our bikes on the car and headed out for an easy 20 minute run.
The run headed out on a dirt (sand) trail and headed up the hill pretty
quickly, I realized that footing may be difficult especially on the way
back on fatigued legs. But mostly I noted that
at 10 am I was already very hot and it was just going to get hotter.
We did get a chance to walk out on the Pat Tillman Memorial bridge and get a great view of the damn that way.
Packet pick up was surprisingly small but made up for it by being quick. There was one small room where you picked up your numbers, chip and goody bag and a few tents outside trying to sell stuff. After we had our packets we stopped at Red Lobster for a carb-loaded dinner before heading back to the hotel where luckily we got a good night's sleep.
Race day info coming soon in a Race Recap.....
Pre-race Red Lobster....you are BRAVE!
ReplyDelete