After my coach and I met last week, I was fully ready for my race yesterday. The day before the race was great: I went for a swim and discovered the lake was not as cold as I thought it would be and that I felt great. I went for a short bike ride with my partner in crime and did some running fartleks with my puppy right after. My pre-race routine felt great. I also had a nap, read my book, and hung out with my family. It was a great day.

Sunday morning started early at 5am with my alarm clock and wishes of a happy 29th birthday from my partner and my family. I accepted their wishes, but was very focused on the job ahead: my 6th Frank Dunn triathlon. I ate some toast and headed off to the race with my partner and my puppy. That’s when the weather turned kind of yucky. It rained for about 15 minutes as people set up their transition stations and got body-marked, but it stopped for what turned out to be the only bad part, weather-wise, of the day. I set up my transition in my rain-proof Rubbermaid box (a little trick I learned last year during the wettest triathlon I have ever been in, when afterwards I discovered my transition station had went on a swim all by itself in the parking lot). I had a great warm-up and even did some butterfly to get my heart-rate up, which I really enjoyed.

The blow horn started and we were off. I tried to draft off of some big guy in front of me, but he was too fast. Plus, it was a really crowded start with everyone trying to get through the first buoys about 10m in front of us. However, after that everyone really spread out, which was also tough. I decided that I was on my own and that I would just push as hard as I could to try to catch up to someone. A guy with a yellow swim cap was my “white whale” and I tried very hard to catch up to him. I didn’t really do it, but I also didn’t fall behind. I came out of the water out of breath and curious about my time. I heard someone say in transition that it was around 26 minutes. The swim was probably a bit short, but since it generally is, I was pretty happy with that time.

I got out onto the bike without much incident in the transition area, except for having a really hard time getting my wetsuit off. Once on the bike, I pushed hard. It is probably the hardest I’ve pushed at the beginning of a bike ride ever. I did get passed a few times, but I also did some passing myself. My heart-rate was up and the first half of my first lap was at an average of 29km/hr. Considering the hilly ride and the wind, I was pretty pumped about it. That’s when things turned ugly.

I had seen a ridiculous number of people fixing flats through the first lap of the ride and thought it was curious. So when I was biking up a hill and thought that my bike was unnecessarily bumpy and it was really really hard to get up the hill I figured that it must have been a flat. I looked down to see if it was true and it was. I wasn’t upset in the least. A flat? No problem! I have fixed a ton of flats through my 7  years as a cyclist and thousands of kilometres on the road. So I went to work to fix it. I got the tube off and got out my spare. I took the CO2 pump out of my bag and heard a really big “hiss” come out of it. Uh oh. That can’t be good. I unscrewed the pump and sure enough the CO2 cartridge had been punctured. It was at this point that I knew I was done. But I looked around frantically and asked if someone from a nearby car had a pump. A guy threw a pump at me and said that he had just gotten someone disqualified for helping them. I told him that it was all right, I was done anyway, but I just wanted to get back to town. So he threw his pump at me and said, “I didn’t give you anything. Just leave it there when you’re done.” So I happily got back to fixing my flat. So I put my new tube in the tire and started to pump it up using the hand pump. I thought that something was wrong with the valve or the pump because I just couldn’t seem to get any air into the tube. This is what I knew that I was REALLY done. I discovered later that the tube had a hole in it as well. I was pretty discouraged, but decided to try to flag someone down to get a ride into town rather than walk the 6km in bike shoes.

I walked down the main street of Waskesiu with tears streaming down my face as I heard people say “Oh, that looks like another flat.” I came to my family looking the other way down the street, waiting for me to whiz by on my bike and wave at them. My mom gave me a big hug as I cried and said that I had a flat tire that I couldn’t fix. They felt really bad for me, but I really tried to hold it together. I think I did a pretty good job of holding it together until today, the day after. The day of reality setting in. I DNFed my first race. My heart feels broken, like I have been betrayed by a trusted friend. It felt like it was a fitting end to my worst racing season ever – and post-Ironman, too. My season was wrought with lots of injuries, personal ups and downs resulting in inconsistent training.

So I emailed my coach about the race and he sent me the best email that I could have received to keep my chin up and not feel like it was all for nothing:

“You may not agree right now, but I think that this has been a great season for you. You started experimenting with racing fast and using strategy, you got through an injury and toughed out a gutsy performance, and you learned to never trust your equipment. This is the kind of season that most athletes look on as a failure when it is over. In time, I think that this may be a breakthough season for you in terms of physically and mentally learning how to push yourself, developing a pre-race routine (that involves equipment checks , and learning that breaks are OK and important for mental and physical health. Remember high performance sport is not about being healthy (even though you may look good and have flat abs and the like), it’s about being designed to do what you have to in order to go fast.

Have some great time off and remember 3x/week is plenty. We start training again on September 29th.”

This is why I have a coach and why I chose the coach that I did. I am glad to have some time off now.

 This weekend is my final race of the season: Waskesiu’s Frank Dunn Triathlon. This is my longest-running triathlon with this being my sixth year in a row to complete this race. I was a little uncertain after my half IM experience as to whether I was going to do this race or if I would pull out or if I would just stop after the bike. However, I have been running a bit lately and with my knee feeling as close to 100% as it has in months, I’m going to go for it.

This morning I was looking at my previous race results and am a little shocked at the variation of times. It is partially because of the swim – it’s a rough lake and there have been times when the swim was made shorter so as not to torture us triathletes for too long. However, this year I expect to have a great swim due to my new wetsuit and working on my stroke.

This triathlon is unique in that it is not a standard distance for anything. It is a 1.5km swim, 62km bike, and 13km run. These seemingly awkward distances make the triathlon that much more difficult. This year, I look forward to seeing where I am in the grand scheme of my time results. I think that considering what my season has been like, I would be happy with a 4:15 total time result. Only race-day will really tell.

Over the years many friends and family have come to watch this race. In fact, this is the only race that my family comes to. Waskesiu is such a picturesque place and it is close to where I grew up. Also, the race is always around my birthday. This year it is ON my birthday! We always have a BBQ after with cake and lots of chatting. It is partially my family that brings me back to this race… it definitely isn’t the cold,  unpredictable lake swim. One year (I think it was 2005) the lake was so cold that I thought I was going to get hypothermia. I have since learned some tricks: two swim caps and my long-sleeved wetsuit.

Thinking back to my first Frank Dunn race, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was my 25th birthday and I was scared. SCARED. My first triathlon, my first open-water swim… and my whole family was there to watch me. When it started I almost stopped. I was hyperventilating and I had images of my mother on the shore sick with worry about the waves and the other swimmers. I eventually made it out of the swim… and it felt like forever. I did head-up breast stroke the whole way and it was fine because I was at the back taking my sweet-ass time. The bike ride was fine, but it hurt my butt and my back. The run felt like a marathon. I was so glad to be done. The finish-line remains to be my favorite part of a triathlon (with the exception for the Great White North Triathlon this year) and sprinting across the line is the best feeling ever. I look forward to crossing it with my family on the sideline for the 6th year.

Previous years’ results: