My First Triathlon!!!

Well... the big day is over, and I'm officially a Triathlete!

In an effort to keep this as short as possible, I've decided to mainly post pictures here and if you want the longer story about our triathlon you can check out my sister's site: jodyverhagen.blogspot.com Obviously since we did the tri together we'd pretty much say the same thing, and she's already said it!

The day started bright (well, ok not so bright as it was overcast all morning) and EARLY at 4:15am. We mangaged to get our butts moving and over to Naperville by a little after 5am. That gave us plenty of time to set up our transition area, wait in the port-o-potty line for 45 minutes and see the first 2 hours of the race! It kind of stunk that we were in the 31st heat out of 32, but it did give us plenty of time to calm our nerves. And it was helpful seeing everyone do it before us.



Guess we're going to have to work on our "game faces"

huddling for warmth. did I mention it was freezing?

feeling optimistic

showing off our bulging muscles!

i mentioned it was cold, right? as you can see here my true feelings are coming out as I am glaring at the lake! if looks could kill...!

The time actually flew by and before we knew it it was 9am and we found ourselves knee deep in a frigid lake in chilly weather along with 50 or so other certifiables wearing a serious amount of spandex (and goosebumps). Never the less, we were ready!! Here we are charging into the lake!!! (i'm the one with the gray criss-crossy straps and jody is in all black to my right)

ok... we didn't exactly charge. actually, I think we were one of the last ones to actually dive in and start swimming! we walked until we could no longer touch!

my arm =)

18 minutes later we were done with our "contact sport" i mean, swim! Then it was a 1/4 mile run up a hill to the transition area (cruel, i know!)

the first transition went smoothly. it was pretty easy to find our bikes since by that point the first 30 heats had already left!

it took a minute to get clicked into the pedals, but then i was off! (btw, I didn't fall once the whole day! though i did almost fall while i was trying to run in my cycling shoes!) =p

the bike was definitely my favorite part of the day

it took us 58 min to do 14.5 miles (I'm sure we could've done it faster if we hadn't chit-chatted most of the time!)

after a little refueling, a quick change of the shoes and a stop at the port-a-potty we started our run

before we knew it we were on the home stretch!

Whoops! I got a little confused and started running off the course. I'm not sure how I did it, because I actually had to go past the orange cones, and I never even noticed! There were no runners in front of us at that point and I saw a guy running with his kid off to the side and started following him, never realizing that he obviously wasn't in the race! Luckily Jody was there to get me back on track! i did make several on-lookers laugh though!

Triathletes!!

I thought the end was a bit disappointing. I had really hoped to be exhausted to the point of collapse when I crossed the finish line. But there was no drama. I crossed the finish line and felt great! Darn! It was awesome though! It was such a great feeling to have finished. I'm proud of our accomplishment and can't wait to work on our time now! 3 weeks until the next one!