I am an Oly-Woman!

The Deuce-person Olympic was quite a tough race. I don't think they call it DeuceMan unless you were doing the half (or "long course" as they called it). Officially, I think the race I did was called the Deuces Wild Olympic Triathlon Course.

Everyone I talked to about DeuceMan said it was hard. I only did half of it, and my half was hard. I've been trying not to call it DoucheMan.

Trying hard.

Anyway, I finished - this was my first olympic!

My beloved finished the Long Course.

Clydeologist finished the long course.

Geekgirl finished the long course.

I think they both felt like it was more DoucheMan than DeuceMan. I count myself lucky that I was only signing up for half their experience, my half was plenty challenging.

The logistics of the race were a bit of a nuisance. Because the facility isn't really set up for a field of triathletes, we were asked to either drop people off, or ride our bikes to the transition area from a parking area 2 miles away. I opted to drop beloved off, and then drive away to park the car and bike myself in.

Let me tell you. It's one thing to race-handle Suzy Q, who is a twitchy beast at the best of times, and something else to handle her with a full transition pack on my back when I have race nerves. I am lucky I did not fall down on my way to the course.

The Swim is something I haven't talked about much lately. Perhaps it is because I didn't want to give the monster a name, or the air for it to breathe its own life. In a practice open-water exactly a week ago I had a full-on freak out panic attack in the water. I was wearing a wetsuit, it was cold, it was windy, there was chop. I could not catch my breath, and I fully panicked. I think I swam maybe 400m. I thought I was going to die.

I had that experience living in my psyche all week on my way to Show Low.

To get past this, I started talking about it - very tentatively. I got awesome advice from the Clydeologist, which helped immensely. I forced myself into a cold shower in the morning to get my body acclimatized to cold shocks. It's just cold, I told myself, and then you get warm. I meditated hard on my best swims, and how good that water felt when a swim went well.

Part of the problem is, I'm such a Newb I don't have a lot of open water experience to draw on. With 2 open water race swims behind me, one bad experience in a lake counts significantly.

On Wednesday I started to have what may have been physical effects from that swim. My stomach was in knots. I wasn't eating well. My appetite was off. I had "runner's trots". I wasn't sleeping great. This continued through Friday night, when I was reduced to eating whatever made me feel the least ill. I started to worry that I wouldn't have enough calories in me to do an Olympic. I wasn't sure if it was a stomach bug, or anxiety - but after the race it all went away.

It was after my roller coaster ride from the car park that I found my panic-stricken self in the transition area fighting the urge to vomit and struggling to get last-minute calories in. I shoved myself into a brand new never tried on rented wetsuit and went to sit in the lake for as long as I could before the race.

I talked to myself. Get used to it honey, you're gonna swim. Lake is familiar territory. You grew up in a lake. This is a beautiful day. Look at all these people. They're all nervous too. I'm EXCITED about the swim!

Ok, I said. I'm just gonna go for a little swim, and then we'll see what happens.

Off I went.

For the first 1/3 of the course, I breathed for every stroke. A combination of panic and altitude made my brain function for survival. Just keep going. Slow down, you don't have to go fast. Just keep going. Let all those people go ahead, you don't have to be in a rush.

You can see from the picture that the swim course was a nice triangular affair - and it really was a beautiful day, a glass-like lake. Herons and pine trees. Perfect conditions. Except we weren't going clockwise, we were going counter clockwise. I'm not quite a bi-lateral breather yet, and I breathe on my right.

Most people swam a triangle, I'm pretty sure I swam more of an oval, as I kept swinging out to the right.

I rounded the first buoy and said, BOOYAH! I have now finished 1/3 of the swim! That was OK, so let's try this next bit.

I almost got cocky and tried two or more strokes at once, but I decided to just get through it. My shoulder kept hurting. I think it was the wetsuit.

After the second buoy (boy did that take awhile) I said to myself, well, self, you made it this far. The boat ramp is over there. Now get busy. And FINALLY I could start swimming a bit more like I've trained to swim - all those 6,000m swim weeks started to kick in. I could do sometimes 4 strokes before I had to breathe.

I was out of the water in 37 minutes and change...

I knew that being slow out of the water would set me back all day, but I decided to just make a deal with myself. I said, let's just go for a little bike ride now and see what happens. I spent a whopping 4+ minutes in transition - a little dizzy from swimming - and finally trotted out of the transition area onto the bike course.

The Bike was le suck. I'll just say it: I am terrified of traffic. The bike course was not closed to traffic.

The first turn out of the park was onto a busy road - and I wasn't even sure I was going the right way (yeah, that course could have been a little better marked).

On the plus side, having just come away from Iron Horse last weekend, I did not have a problem with hills on the course. Hills? You call those hills? I laugh at your hills (though Suzy Q does not really have the hill climbing gears that Irene does). The traffic, however, was a real problem. A speed killer for me. Traffic makes me nervous at the best of times. That long straight part on the bike course? Mostly uphill, and on a 4 lane highway. We were fighting for real estate with the rumble strip.

On the plus side, I was still passing a few people. Going uphill.

On the down side, I did get passed by a few.

The thought flashing through my mind the entire way: "Triathlete Killed During Bike Race."

Bike time was a not-so-great 1:31. It bothers me that energetically, I knew I had some power left to do more on the bike, but was afraid to use it.

Very fast transition - 1:56 and straight to the toilet. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to pee on Suzy Q. You just don't do that to a friend...

OK, I said to myself, let's just go for a little run and see what happens.

Does it look like someone dropped their spaghetti onto a map? Alas, no, that is The Run course.

I remember seeing the run course on the map, but I don't remember reading that it was a trail run. I have no problem with trail runs, some of my favourite runs are trail runs. This one was a bit of a surprise, however. And it was hot. And exposed.

Yeah, the heat was really picking up. I was fighting a stitch in my side for the first oh, 4 miles. I stopped at every aid station and got gel, water, drinks, whatever they had. I was hoping that eventually something would kick in and the stitch would go away. And it did.

See that long straight line? The course description says this is "where you get to see exactly where you stand."

Frankly by this time, I didn't care where I stood. It was hot. It was exposed. I was kinda tired. And the run course had more hills. And cows. And strange noises. And funny smells. And heat.

The run was more of a death march.

With cookies.

Except there were no cookies, just gels. Note to Race Director: bananas, oranges, pretzels - these are all great. How about some cookies?

This is where all that training just kicked in, and my feet just kept moving. My knee started to bother me, and I stopped a couple times to stretch my hip. It went away. I kept moving.

There is one last hill in mile 6. I walked the hill.

In the last quarter mile someone said, the finish line is downhill, there's popsicles there.

Thank God.

Run time: a not too perky 1:09. Ugh.

Total time 3:24.

Yay me!

Now, everyone I talked to universally said this was a hard Olympic. Some said it was the hardest Olympic they'd ever done. I talked to one person with a Wildflower cap who said didn't say it outright but intimated that Wildflower is still harder. I'll take my brownie points nonetheless and say it's no picnic at Show Low either.

...of course, this is just the warm up. At the end of the month, I'm doing Buffalo Springs 70.3. Some told me this is a harder race than BSLT, and I hope so.

I don't want to talk about it.