CHESAPEAKEMAN AQUAVELO Part 1

Whooo!

Short stats:
Swim: 1:56:47
Transition : 8:33 (sheesh) (Oh, yeah, forgot, part of that was peeing about a gallon)
Bike: 6:30:26
Total: 8:35:45

NOTE: 4 hours after firsts posting this, I just corrected it -- in my original post I reported my bike time as my total time!! Nope! Bike was 6:30, TOTAL was 8:35. Now that that's straightened out....

I felt GREAT, except for a slump of about 10 miles between about miles 65 and 75. Had just come out of Special Needs stop, so maybe it was the shock of getting going again, plus finding that while I was in SN, whoever is manning the wind fans up there must have given a signal: "OK, wind-fan personnel (angels? Deceased meterologists?) on the count of three: One, two, THREE!!" Because the second loop of the bike course was distinctly about twice as windy as the first. Like riding into the friggin' Santa Ana or something. I hunkered down low in my aeros, pulled my knees into the bike, and tried to make myself as small a package as possible. I saw people ahead of me looking like they were having trouble steering their bikes straight. It was a gale.

Swim -- well, my stroke has gotten bad the last couple months, I haven't diagnosed the problem yet; I expected about a 2-hr IM swim and that's what I got. However, I got it against incoming tide in the second half, plus an inadequately-marked course in the first half that kept me veerin out into the wild blue yonder and being redirected by course patrol ("It's over there..."), then with the tide, not only swimming a little upstream but continuously veering toward shore and having to re-orient to get back in line with the buoys (which were more visible and more frequent in the second half. Gotta talk to the RD about that.) Actually, given the currents and the way I've been disconsolate about my inefficiency and slowness, I was very happy with the 1:56.

In the transition tent, Nancy, our friend Melissa who is training for Kona, and I were all there together! Nancy had finished about 5 minutes ahead of me, and Melissa came in just a few minutes after me. We might all have had shorter transitions otherwise... we talked a little about the currents etc. as we got ready for the bike. But it was fun and heartwarming.

I am going out to run some now and will finish this later, when I get back "home" to VA. Nancy and I had planned 18 miles but Nancy is feeling sick with a sore throat and cold and is going back to bed. I don't know if I'll do 18 but I'm going out to do some. It's raining. I feel like I'd biked a hundred miles or something :-) Not sure how far I'll get. Think I'll do loops so I can bail. That's making provision for the flesh.... in other words, making tentative plans to be a weenie. But I've got a 4-hour drive home, too.

Off and running. Catch you later.