As A Matter of Fact Bigun…: A Bottomless Lakes Race Report etc...

I did race this weekend and I did PR.

Now I likes me some good trash talkin’ now and again but let’s face it, it’s talk. Sure, you have to have some powerful jaws to keep them flappin’ all the time and you need a set of lungs like bag pipes but hey, don’t men in skirts operate those things?

If you will allow me a moment I’d like to present some of that paper the Bigun so despises.

My weekend began bright and early at 5:00 am for breakfast…yes, I slept in because it was Saturday…and then it was down to meet the crew for our scheduled easy ride. We did a bit of an out and back with a few intervals and a couple climbs. We rode pretty hard but since I never stop my Garmin, a habit I picked up in those early season brevets, my log shows total time including a couple flat fixes and waiting to pick up stragglers.

After the bike it was time to pack up the Fam and head for Roswell, yes…that Roswell, the home of the space alien crash site. While this year happens to be the 60th anniversary of “the crash” we were not in for those festivities but were headed for the Bottomless Lakes Triathlon. This race is a real grass roots effort but very well run never the less. The way you can tell it is grass roots is that you can never quite tell what the distances will be on the swim and the run. The races bills itself as 400 meters – 14 K – 4 K but it is really ABOUT 400 meters – the bike is a changeless loop that is NOT exactly 14 K and the run is ROUGHLY 4 K. In any case it is a fun race.

Despite enjoying this race the one thing I dislike about it is the fact that the Clydes take off in the second wave with the women and men over 55. I’m not embarrassed to swim in a pack of women and YES they can hold their own but as many will understand it just doesn’t feel right. It’s like fighting for a spot on a life raft so I just try and steer clear and don’t swim as aggressively as I would in a pack of men.

When the air horn went off I had positioned myself far to the inside and to the front away from all but the fastest swimmers. I figured that I would approach the swim allowing people to swim over me if I couldn’t keep up but I was going to try my best to make sure that did not happen. I took off and swan hard for the buoy, which was also the turn around point. I surged ahead full steam and never looked back. By the time I hit the turn around I had only one other swimmer at my side and knew that another had just rounded the buoy. I tried a different buoy rounding technique that I’ve been thinking about as a possible time saver. Normally I just sort of work my way around the buoy swimming sort of flat as if I were going straight ahead, which is awkward and jerky especially in a hair pin turn but this time I “banked” the turn meaning I kind of rolled into the turn, buoy at my back and kept swimming hard in that rolled position. It worked great! I then dug in for the home stretch and was the 4th person out of the water just a few seconds behind fellow Outlaw Miguel “Sharkbait” Sanchez.

I was probably a little slow in T-1 but I got out still on Sharkbait’s tail and there were no other Clydes in sight. I caught Sharkbait about 1.5 miles into the ride at the top of the one big hill and just kept blowing on by. The bike course is an oval that circles the lakes (sinkholes full of water), first climbing up onto the bluff and then dropping back down to the river bottom for a relatively fast and rolling return to T2. I felt like I had a good ride but the splits are pretty random as to whether they put your T1 and/or T2 into your swim, bike or run so it’s all guess work. I hit the run and ran with everything I had left; at least as much as I could give figuring on the distance I had to cover. My Garmin doesn’t tell the story well either because I didn’t hit the buttons correctly but I got a graph.

Total time 54:21 - I won first in the Clyde division and would have taken 3rd in my age group. I also beat my PR for this race by about 4 minutes. I know Bigun hates the paper but there has just been too much uncertainly in this race report…to much for him to seize upon so I’ll just state the following - go to the website and look at the race results for yourself.

Ok, ok...small race right? What can I say, the Bigun will always have me on that one because he races in an area that has like 30 people per square foot and I live in an area where you could swing a dead cat and never hit anyone but hey, what's to be done. Just for insurance I went ahead and drove home and polished off the day with an 18 mile run along the dirt trails through the Bosque. I ran well the first half of the run but the wheels fell off the second half and i was chased all the way back by biting horseflies. No, wait...um, ACTUALLY...wanting to perfect my seceret Texas weapon I went ahead and got in some good practice moseying...take that Bigun, read and despair. I bet you've never seen any graphs with such a proficient mosey. Yeah...mosey practice.

But I guess like Bigun said, it's only paper...right?

Ahem...

Next up on the race docket, the Mountain Man half in Flagstaff, AZ on June 22nd in which I attempt to throw down a 70.3 time sans the pattented mosey. The GEEKGRL and I will head out a day early to spend some time poking around the Grand Canyon.