Well, we finished!! :) Here are the three of us after the race. Sarah and Kristen look genuinely happy; I look like I’m trying too hard not to look exhausted.

The swim was shorter than half-mile, and I had people slithering around me the whole way because the course was too short to separate people out completely. The end of the swim was still a good quarter/third mile to the transition area where our bikes were, so we all had to run on sand/gravel barefoot to our bikes after the run. Surprisingly, running with bike cleats wasn’t all that bad, especially after the whole barefoot gravel ordeal, and also because I no longer cared about clunking and wearing down my cleats.

There was a long stretch of NASTY hills (a mile or two?) in the middle of the bike. I pushed myself enough to make it up all of them, mainly by repeating “I didn’t come all this way to walk my damn bike up a hill.” Too bad I couldn’t similarly motivate myself on the run. I definitely walked for bits and pieces of the run, not really because I was completely exhausted, but really because I just didn’t feel like pushing myself that hard.

I did have a crash on my bike, right before the dismount during bike/run transition. The girl in front of me dismounted early, and I swerved, lost my balance, and couldn’t clip out of my pedals before I hit the pavement. There were many gasps in the audience because I’m sure the crash looked pretty bad; I slid a couple of feet after I hit the pavement, and I have the road rash to show for it. Lucky me, I picked the most spectator-populated stretch to crash. Nothing major was hurt besides my pride perhaps. My bike was fine, so I hopped up from the ground immediately and started running my bike back to the racks. The audience clapped for me; that was cool :)

So the end result:
Overall rank - 675 of 1981
Age group rank - 34 of 81
Final time - 1:36:12

I’m happy. Not competitive fast, but I finished! Yay!

More pictures are coming, and there were official race pictures that the Danskin people took too that we are all waiting on.