Ramblin Rose

The day after the Mud Run, Trish, Shannon and I did the Ramblin Rose Sprint Triathlon.  It was an amazing event!  The course was a great short length (250 yard swim, 9 mile bike and a 2 mile run) and the volunteers were AMAZING.  These old lady bones came in 110th out of almost 1,000 participants.  I was so excited (and I'm been really slacking at the gym lately, so next year I'll likely come in 999th).   

One of these days I'll put together a little video of the event (Mike was there with the boys taking video snipets).  Until then, here are some of Trish's (Jon's) pictures.

Here we are, doing our prerace stretching, calming our nerves.  We were a bit shaky, as normally you can be in the transition area (where you store your bike, sneakers, etc...) during the entire race.  During this race they closed the transition area 30 minutes before the race started.  We literally had 2 minutes to find our spots and set everything up.  It was all a blur once we left....we were just hoping we'd be able to find our helmets, socks, shoes, etc... once we needed them.  :) 



Here I am in the pool, getting ready to start.  Everyone starts 10 seconds apart from each other -- and the girl in front of me had a 1 minute break before the person before her.  Somehow every time I got to the end of a lane it seemed there were 3-4 people hanging around not swimming (drinking coffee, telling jokes??).  On top of that, the pool that I was swimming in was 17 feet deep (1/2 of the participants were in one 'regular' pool, the other 1/2 of us were in a diving pool)!  I had no idea it would be that deep -- and I seriously felt like I was in a horror movie -- like all those women drinking coffee and telling jokes at the end of each lane were going to shove me down 17 feet and I was going to die.  Good grief.  I was panicking during the entire thing. I ended up with such a slow swim time...and it was the longest 6 minute of my life.  :)


So often during a race you are on the bike course by yourself.  Every now and again you'll see another biker for a few seconds, then one of you passes the other and you're solo again.  During this race Shannon and I were on the bike course together the entire time.  It was crazy/awesome!  She and I started around the same time in different pools - so it was much fun to see each other in the transition area.  Check out how refreshed/smiley Shannon looks....and look how whipped/pained I look.  HA!


Here we all are at the end....so happy to be done!  :)   It was so awesome to do the race with Shannon and Trish.  No pictures of it, but Trish and I passed each other on the run too.  It was such a friend event! :)  It was Trish's first triathlon and when she finished I literally burst into tears.  I was so proud of her.  She did amazing!!  And, it was fun to train together too.  Can't wait for next year to do it again!   (Check out Trish's awesome post about the race on her blog, too.)