My First Tri

This morning I completed my first triathlon.  It was a lot of fun.  Matt Nix told me about this race, and he and Denise met us there this morning.  It was an off-road sprint triathlon, so the biking portion was mountain biking and considerably slower than riding on roads.  It was at Joe Pool Lake in Grand Prairie, which is about an hour from our house.  We decided to leave Lila with Aunt Janina and take Wyatt down the night before and stay in a hotel nearby.  The idea was that we'd get more sleep by not having to get up so early since we wanted to be at the park by 5:30.  Well that didn't really work because Wyatt basically kept us up all night.  So with about two hours of sleep, we headed out from the hotel around 5am.

I started getting my bike and transition gear ready by the headlights of the car since it was pitch dark.

There was a little bit of light when I actually went down to rack my bike and setup my transition area.

Okay, here we go.  Thirty seconds to swim start.

And I'm off.  I'm the rightmost guy, basically in the center of the picture.

Wyatt is pointing me out to Denise. "Look, there's Daddy in the water."  He really loves poining lately.

Emerging from the swim.  I lost 15 pounds training for this race, but there's still plenty of gut to make me wince at this picture.

Through the first transition and riding out on the bike.

Coming back into the transition area at the end of the bike.  The bike was the longest component at about 1 hour 16 minutes for me to do the 20km (about 12 and half miles.)  There were a lot of places with pretty deep sand and a lot of fields where the grass wasn't cut very short.  So it seemed longer than 12 miles.  Thankfully, it was pretty flat.
My fans were as tired as I was by the end of the race.  Colette took some great pictures of Wyatt at the race.  Watch for them to show up on her blog.  ameybc.blogspot.com

Crossing the finish line at a little over two hours.  The clock says 2:09, but that was the time from the start of the first wave of swimmers, and I was in the second wave.  My official time was 2:03:34.

Me with my biggest fan.

Matt and I after the race.  We were covered in dirt from the dust on the trail mixed with our sweat.

Exhibit A.

So we went for another swim.

I had a great time, so I'm looking forward to picking out my next race.