BTU Triathlon
Lake Bryan, Bryan, Texas
500-yard
swim-14.5 bike-3.2-mile run
This was not the most well-organized event I had been to, but they did have carpet laid in the entire transition area – looking for a positive. The swim was uneventful, other than the usual jump starters swimming like fury only to end up dog paddling and gasping for breath two hundred yards out.
One
thing I was truly impressed with was a young man who walked up to the edge of
the lake for a swim warm-up before the race.
He reached down and took off a leg, then stood on one leg before he
entered the water. The next time I saw
him was halfway through the run. It had
taken me that long to catch him, and I probably would not have caught him at
all if he had not had to deal with that prosthesis hurting the stump of his leg
(see photo)
It
was hard to get the momentum up on the bike, but once I did, I began to roll
pretty well. I can remember coasting
down a hill tucked low in the drops, gaining speed all the way down, zipping by
another rider who was peddling like crazy.
Finally,
the course went onto the earthen lake dam and we ran on that. A man in my age group passed me. I thought of making a race of it, but I just did
not have a race left in me. In the last part of the run, we had to get off the
earthen dam by coming down a slippery clay hill, then crawl over a log. This was not my favorite part of the event. But once the log crawling was done, there was
pavement, and I finished with a clop-clop from my mud-weighted shoes.
They had the age groups messed up. Somehow, they got me in a younger age group, and I did not place. I would have been second in my correct age group.
It was still a good experience. A friend of mine got out of the swim, went to her bike, only to find she had a flat right there in transition. So, I was thankful for a good race.
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