Sunday comes and I am up and ready to go at 5 am. I get over to the course around 6ish or so in the morning. Had to wait for them to get ready for the athletes before they would mark us and allow us to find our spots to get setup for the actually race starts. Get into the pool area and find out that they are starting the swimmers at a pace of one every five seconds. Okay I am # 685. So I got a LOT of time to wait until I am in the pool. Good thing is that while others are in the pool I am able to hit the john.
Finally after only one plus hour of waiting I am next in line to go into the pool. Got my snorkel and googles on and without fail I get into the water with no worries just trying to get over to the other side. But that quickly changes as I am now seeing the bottom, seeing other swimmers in front of people that could cause me to stop and zero chance of me just being able to stand up and wait as the water is deeper than the Indian Ocean. It was so deep I swore I saw an Russian Submarine down there. Now not slowly but quickly I start forgetting how to breathe under water, my fear of swimming hits me and a full fledge panic attack hits me. This caused the rest of the swim to be extremely long and very much out of my control as every time I got the courage to start swimming that fear or panic instantly hit me and I was looking for the nearest rope to hold onto. After what seemed to be days I am out of the pool. BTW I was not the last person in but I sure as hell was the very last one out. This by the way will be the first and last time that I will allow my panic attack get to me in a way that I am last out of anything. I got the pills to take. Fool me once H2O and shame on you. Fool me twice and shame on me. So I will be prepared both with better swimming techniques and the right pills.
Ok what is good about an panic attack you ask? Well lets just say that leaving the pool and exiting the pool area and walking to my bike in 20 plus winds and freezing temps I felt nothing. I was completely unaware of the wind and temps because I was still trying to get myself calmed back down to finish the other two parts of this race.
Change and hope unto my bike and rode off. The wind was so strong that it literally almost push me down on my bike twice if not three times. And for the life of me I have no clue how no matter what direction I was riding the effin wind was right there in my face. Seriously how? Second loop was a little better as I knew what to expect from the strong winds to the hills to the wet spots. Finish my bike ride only to see must people either already drinking their finishing beer, heading home or doing whatever. Yet I was just finishing only the second of three sports in this race. I still had the 5k to run.
Feeling disappointed by that fact I finally did see some runners ahead of me. Finally proof that I would not finish dead last overall. So I took off with the determination that I was not going to allow whoever was in front of me to beat me in the run. After all this is my strong point. Finally while meaningless due to how long it took me to get out of the pool I was facing people and knowing that I can make up ground and beat them. Confidence I had on this part of the race. Time I did not have.
Finish the race, got my medal, my beer and then headed home. Took something to relax me to hopefully rid myself of the anxiety that I still had from the race.
Final results were:
Swimming 20:56 for 300 meters. Which will bad was actually one minute shorter than I thought I would have done.
Bike 58:57 for 16 miles and a 12.2 mph pace. Slower than what I trained at but then again I had the effin wind hitting me face on for the whole 16 miles. So not too disappointed at it now.
Run 32:42 for 3.1 miles and a 10:33 pace. A lot slower than I would have liked but again for my second brick I was actually happy with that. And remembering how my first brick ended up I am very happy. Because my first brick attempted ended in me feeling like I could throw up from start to finish if I attempted to run any further. So first brick last a horrible 1 mile. At least this time it lasted the full 5k distance and that will only get better.
Overall it took my slow ass 2:00:20 to finish everything. And believe it or not my goal was actually 2 hours and no matter how bad certain segments may have looked for me by me it ended right where I wanted to finish for my first tri. It just didn't go as planned from start to finish for me because I was expecting more from myself than what I saw myself doing on Sunday.
Now it is back to training for the Caveman in April and hoping and praying that this time my swim will be a lot better. The good swimmer swam 300 in about 4 minutes and I did it in 21 minutes. So if I can just get myself down to 10ish minutes I know I can complete for real in the next race.
That is it. I couldn't post this yesterday because I was still in the effect of feeling extremely anxious and I had thrown out more f-bombs during my bike and run to make even a sailor blush. I will work on that. Like I always say I am not perfect no matter how much I believe I can be. But perfection doesn't just stop with me it continues to my abilities for running, swimming and biking. And because of that I will have my perfect race soon that I can guarantee anyone here.
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