South Bay Triathlon VI
Uvas Reservoir, Morgan Hill, CA
3/4 mile swim - 16 mile bike - 5 mile run
Sunday, May 17, 1998
Part II
The Swim (3/4 mile)
Last year at this time we were experiencing a heat wave and I did this swim without a wetsuit. This year it's fullsuit time, in a great big way. Thanks to El Nino, the ordinarily balmy water of Uvas Reservoir feels more like San Francisco Bay, damned bloody cold! Now that I'm an old lady, I'm stuck in the very last wave before the relays (Women 30+). Bleah. I hate going so late; I'll get clobbered by the relay swimmers, and when you start so far back you always feel so out of the race. Bummer, bummer, bummer. Bad bad bad. plththth.At last it's time for our wave to start. The horn sounds and we're off! Stroke, stroke, stroke, no terrible crowding, this is good. I started near the front of the group and am neither crawling over nor being crawled over by other swimmers. Good good good! My hands are so cold, though, that it feels like my fingers are shrinking and I fear for the safety of one of my rings. Bad bad bad. That's distracting.
The swim at South Bay is rather unique; we swim counterclockwise around an "island" that is actually a promontory jutting out into the reservoir. I reach the first buoy and turn left, feeling reasonably good, finally beginning to warm up a little. I figured I'd just swim as I did at Wildflower, putting no pressure on myself and simply thinking "stroke clinic". Don't swim "hard", swim well. Glide, don't thrash. Rotate. Press your chest down. Don't worry about stroke rate, don't push.
I'm doing all of the above and feeling reasonably effective. But something's not quite right; my mind keeps wandering. I'm distracted. Something has been weighing heavily upon my mind recently, and conversations with various friends just before the start of the race have put this issue squarely in the forefront of my consciousness. I'm not focussing on what I'm doing, I keep thinking about this other thing, it keeps worrying me. I try to shake it off and pay attention to the task at hand, but to no avail.
I appear to be staying right on course, and it feels like I'm swimming well, although the water on the far side of the island is disconcertingly choppy and rough. I nail the lines from buoy to buoy, wheeling around the island confident that I'm making good time. At any rate, I'm sure to beat my time from last year, since I did this swim without a wetsuit then.
Finally nearing the boat ramp, I stop stroking once I can make out the contours of the lake bottom and stretch my feet downward--- oops, damn, a slight miscalculation. Hate it when I do that. Resume stroking until I'm *certain* it's shallow enough. Oops, now it's too shallow, I need a little more depth to be able to pull my wetsuit off in the water, arrgh.
Hit the button on my watch and am appalled as I begin stripping the neoprene, the numbers my eyes just saw suddenly sinking into my consciousness. 24 minutes! Did I really see that? That *can't* be right.
I'm fumbling with my wetsuit in the cold water, my mind still distracted by those numbers. As I get it off the chill of the lake upon my bare body causes my breath to skip and I guzzle a mouthful of Uvas. Ptooh, choke, bleah. The chop has also managed to knock me sideways, away from the boat ramp, and my wetsuit is still stuck around one ankle. I awkwardly resume a horizontal orientation and kick and stroke back toward the ramp, my wetsuit dragging along behind me. I can only imagine how comical this must have appeared to the spectators!
OK, OK, so I finally rip my foot out of the suit and throw the waterlogged hunk of neoprene over my shoulder as I wobble up the boat ramp. Tear my tag from my singlet and hand it to the volunteer. Sheesh! Well, that was embarrassing. Oh, yeah, and look at my watch again; yep, it sure did say 24 minutes. Talk about embarrassing! 24 minutes for 3/4 of a mile. Last year, sans wetsuit, I finished in 21. The year before was 19:56. Ugh.
Charge awkwardly up the ramp and over the gravel and rough pavement of the transition area. Ouch! Even on feet numb with cold this hurts. Make it to my spot, throw the wetsuit down and contemplate my disorganized transition spot and the current state of the weather. Hmm. Hell, I don't know, grab a towel and dry off a little bit, wipe your feet off. Shoot, should have used the ol' basin trick today, my feet are just covered with grit and gravel. Assuming I get a chance to run, I'd better make some effort to get most of that crap off before putting on socks.
My transition takes forever, I'm just so scattered, unfocussed, indecisive; it's awful. I drip so much in my sunglasses that I'm forced to towel them dry, not once but twice. I put my helmet on before finally deciding that I do indeed want to wear my vest, so I have to unzip that a little more to be able to pull it on over the helmet. I had put the gel that I wanted for the bike in my jersey pocket, so have to dig that out since I'm not going to wear the jersey. What a circus.
At last I'm ready to mount the bike. My feet and lower legs are still pretty numb. I jam my left foot into the left pedal, give the bike a little push, and swing my right leg over the saddle. Ooops, this parking lot has a little uphill tilt to it... try to generate enough forward progress with just the one foot in the pedal to remain upright. Uh oh, I'm in a very, very low gear. Ummm......
Thud.
Ouch.
The Laugh-In guy has nothing on me.
Feeling like a complete ass now, I resign myself to my fate. "Well, it's just not my day, I guess," I tell the volunteers and spectators in the near vicinity with something approaching equanimity. What can I do? It's just one in a series of "those days", and the sooner I accept this fact, the better off I'll be. I sheepishly pick myself up, click carefully in, and start to pedal, only to find that I've also dropped my chain. *sigh* I carefully, deliberately remount the chain and spin the cranks. Good, OK, now let's get out of here. Pedalling gingerly away from the racks, I experience the distasteful sensation of grit in my tri briefs. Oh, man, this is gonna be a long day....