It was an incredibly sunny and hot day at Annie Williams Park on August 6, 2011. I had to pick Tara up quite early (7am) to get there to register in time for the race. When I arrived at Tara's aunt's place, she was ready to go with bells on. It took us about an hour to get there and we had no traffic. Once we got into Bracebridge I wasn't exactly sure where the park and we ended up following someone who was also going to the race. Turns out he didn't know where he was going either, and we ended up making a wrong turn. It wasn't that complicated to find the park after all, and we were more than an hour early. Tara and I weren't allowed to register until Natalie arrived so we were left to wait for her in the transition zone. We started to panick around 8:45am when Natalie still hadn't arrived. The reason we panicked a bit was only because I needed to get our team's timing chip so that I could get ready for the swim. Other than that it wouldn't have been a problem. Finally at about 8:50am, 10 minutes before the start of the race, I went back to the registration desk and asked if we could our timing chip and the women reluctantly let us have our chip. In the meantime I sent Tara to get my cell phone which was in the car to see if Natalie had left a message. We found out that Natalie had left a message and she was running late. Natalie arrived just in time for the start of the race and Tara and I were once again relaxed.
I got my wetsuit on and went down to the river to warmup for the race. Interestingly, Bracebridge this year was a time trail race for sprint tri national championships, so instead of doing mass wave starts they let each person go on their own 5s apart. I was the third last to go and there were 290 people in the sprint tri in total so it took awhile to finally get to me.
It was strange starting by yourself because it was difficult to tell where you are going. In fact other than passing the odd person, most of the time I felt like I was swimming by myself. I found sighting very difficult and I actually wound up in the middle of the river halfway through the race. One of the kayakers was yelling at me as I was swimming in center of the river, and finally when she was able to get my attention, I redirected myself to swim near the shore. This wasn't good either because I ended up almost hitting a dock a few minutes later. I ducked so that I could swim under the dock which was fine but I am sure that swimming in this zig zag direction was not good for my overall time. I finally exited the swim with a time of around 15 minutes. The swim distance was 750m and it had a small transition tacked onto to the end of the swim and my official time for the swim leg was 15:31s. The switch of the timing chip to Natalie went very smoothly. Before long she was off and biking on the 20km bike trail leaving Tara and I together in the transition area.
Tara had to wait again while Natalie was on the bike course, because Tara was doing the last leg of the tri which was a 5K run. The Bracebridge tri has a really good 5K course. It is fairly flat and it is an out and back course. For this reason I decided run the run course in order to practise my pacing for 5K and 10K courses. It was a great idea because while Tara was waiting for Natalie to return from the bike course I got an opportunity to run the course twice. By this point in the day it was pretty hot and by the time I finished the second loop of the run I was ready to jump in the river to cool off. So I did.
I passed Tara on the run course and cheered her on. She looked fairly "fresh" compared to the other athletes. She ended up finishing the run loop in 24:56s.
And Natalie finished her ride in 49:31s. Overall our team did really well, we finished 4th out of 8 teams and missed the podium by about 1:35s.
This result was much better than expected since our Kushog Lake relay team came in last place last year. After the race, Tara's mom took some pictures of us.
We were just about to collect our bags when a women came over and grabbed Tara's bag and started to leave. Both Tara and I started to chase after her and the women was stunned when we tried to grab the bag away from her. She said: "this is my bag." Tara and I were both confused when we started to realize we both thought the bag in question belonged to our team and we had accidently placed all of Natalie's belongings in this mystery women's bag. Items included car keys, money, event Tshirt and a water bottle. We were horrified when we realized that it was lucky the women hadn't returned earlier and taken her bag before we had realized the mistake. What an adventure! All and all though I think we had a great time and I think Kushog Lake will be back in full force in the future! Thanks again MSC for another great triathlon event. See you next year when Kushog Lake returns for another shot at the podium.
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