Not last is almost as good as first

Woo! I know I've said this in my last five posts, but I'm back blogland. I'm really back. Life is finally settling down a smidge. I've almost got the house unpacked. The Modern Roomie and I held a yard sale to get rid of some of our extra crap no-longer-needed treasures. I got through the first bad push of busy season at work. I've knocked out all the necessary doctor's appointments for the next few months.

Oh, and I did a triathlon.

Custom-made someecard from Noodles.

I mentioned a few weeks back that I'd begun training for a sprint (read: shortest possible) triathlon. And when I say I'm going to do something, I will nearly kill myself making sure it gets done. That wasn't completely the case with this, I'm proud to say.

My training slacked off big time in the last couple of weeks before the 200-yd swim/9-mi bike/5k run, so I was a little worried. But everyone who told me I was already in decent enough shape to survive and that adrenaline would carry me through part of it was right.

Y'all, it sucked at a few points along the way, but it was still mega-awesome.

The swim was in a pool which I found encouraging until I actually got in the pool with 300 of my closest friends. Ok, that's a lie. The start times were staggered, and the swim was snaked which means you swam a lap, ducked under the ropes and swam the next lap, repeat for a total of eight times. Great and all, but I put myself with a way too slow group for my speed and at that point people were stacking on top of each other in the pool. (And the fast swimmers were pretty much through their biking and starting their run by the time I got into the pool.) Still, got the swim done in about 5 minutes.

Some really awesome triathletes can get out of the pool and onto their bikes in a mere 50 seconds. It took me two and a half minutes, but after that I was on my way for the biking portion which was through a sort of rural area but still with some traffic. There were some sucky hills at first before it eventually leveled off. Biking is still my weakest discipline (though I love riding) and I'm super-slow, so it took me 40 minutes to finish.

Getting off my bike my legs felt like rubber, and not the strong kind of rubber. As I passed the Modern Mom and Modern Fella who came to cheer me on, I sorta barked 'I can't believe I have to run 3 miles now!' Well, I didn't exactly run the 3 miles. I walked the first half mile or so and up every hill I encountered. But I ran the rest, and I did the whole 3 miles in 32 minutes, which shocked the bejeesus out of me because that's not much longer than my 5K finish times when I HAVEN'T swam and biked 9 miles beforehand.

So I finished not last, which was my goal (technically 333 out of 372). Overall time (with transitions) 1:23:08, which again shocked the crap out of me. I had budgeted about 20 more minutes than that.

It felt so dang good to sprint across that finish line (I had to use every last bit of energy I had, after all), knowing I'd done it. I didn't fall apart after I was done -- it hurt to go up or down stairs, but really I was just tired.

And I'm already plotting my next one. Sept. 20. It will be even awesomer. Goal: to finish in less than one hour, 23 minutes and eight seconds. Who's with me?