LaGrande Sprint Tri 8.22.09

My third triathlon was in LaGrande, OR. It is a two and a half hour drive from Boise, which wasn't all that bad. Shauna and I drove over Friday night and we talked the entire time, so it went by really fast! We got to town in time to find the pool and drive the bike course. We were excited about the course it looked pretty flat and it was neat riding out an old farm road with a couple of really cool barns. We went back to the hotel which was across the street from Dairy Queen so we had to get a blizzard of course. We slept pretty well, better than before the other races for sure. We got up at 5:45 am to eat breakfast and get our bike loaded back on the car. We got to the pool around 7:15 and picked up our packets and got our body marking and numbers. We were 67 and 76. We set up our transition and then we waited around for race instructions. Shauna was in the first swim heat so she started at 0830. Someone had put their time in as 40 minutes so the second heat didn't start until 0915..to try to allow enough time for the slowest swimmers....it only took her 18 minutes, so we had to sit around for 25 minutes before Kathy and I started. This was my first tri with a pool swim. I don't think it was much better than open water.....our lane had four people in it, us 3 girls were fine, but the guy in our lane started out last and in full force he passed us all kicking like crazy and about half way through he ran out of gas and slowed way down forcing all of us to have to pass him, which was not an easy task as his arms and legs were going wild. Oh well, I guess I just need to speed up so I am in a lane with normal, fast swimmers. I had thought it would take me 11:15, but I was done in 10:05. So next time I will put 10:00. The bike was great it was an out and back, I saw Shuana coming in as we were going out and then I saw Kathy just before I got to the turn around. It was a fun course, a gradual uphill on the way back, but not too bad. The run started out rough with a really big hill right off the bat. That was a little hard, but after that it was pretty easy downhill. I passed Kathy about half way through the run. I tried to run with her for a little bit, but I ended up passing her on the downhill part. I was really happy with my time of 1:26:08! I think that will be my last tri for the year....next race will be Hidden Springs Duathlon and then just some running for the winter until the Spring Sprint in April!