Humbled

Well, I raced today.  I have been having all manner of bodily problems in the past six weeks or so: a spinal joint injury, a reappearance of my ITB issues, and something non-sports related and yet-undiagnosed.  I haven’t wanted to blog about these things because I don’t want to have a blog filled with “this hurts and that hurts and I don’t feel well”.  But things hurt and I haven’t felt well for quite some time.  Consequently I have ridden my bike once (well twice after today) in the past month and run about five times in that period of time.  Thankfully I have still been able to swim and am making progress in the pool.

Yesterday I decided I should do the sprint triathlon that was happening today.  I love to race and have been terrified to race back on the island since I’ve been here.  The last time I raced here was almost a decade ago and I have been feeling lots of pressure (internal) to perform well when I make my big debut.  For this reason, I have been putting off said debut for quite some time.  However, I woke up yesterday with minimal pain in my painful places and decided to register for the race.  I knew it wouldn’t be an all-out day and I knew I would not be impressing the people I was hoping to impress which is another reason I decided to do the race.  Sometimes if you just face up to your worst fear it turns out not to be so terrible.

The swim went well except that I was wearing a tri top with big side pockets (I had forgotten that I usually wear a wetsuit to race so this drag is not normally an issue).  Lesson learned.  Get a tighter top for non-wetsuit racing.

I was the third woman out of the water and the first female swimmer not in a team event, which is right where I should be after 11 km weeks in the pool.  I had a great transition and hauled ass on the bike.  However, my hauling ass was no match for the women who actually HAD been training and I got beat-down out there and lost a lot of places.  I was not originally planning to do the run (although part of me must have been planning to do it because I had put my race number and running shoes in transition!).  If there is one thing I do not like, it is not finishing a race.  So I decided to try my back and IT band out and start with a gentle jog.  S

Some time during the first kilometer of this gentle jog I guess it got a little too gentle and I stopped picking my feet up.  I tripped on a root and hit the ground hard and fast.  I don’t think I even stopped because the woman running beside me was still beside me when I started running again and she didn’t stop.  It was sort of a trip, dive, jump up, and run.  I was a little scraped up and focusing on my bleeding parts as I was running while trying to make sure my tri shorts hadn’t ripped.  Fortunately the damage to both me and my tri shorts was minimal and I think the extra adrenaline was exactly what I needed to override any other injury pains!  I stayed smart though, and continued to run slowly until the very end of the race when I knew my body was holding up.

Over a sprint distance, my time was about 20 minutes slower than it should have been on a healthy, fit day.  It’s hard to reconcile that in my head and to walk away saying “hey, I achieved my goal of not exacerbating any injuries and finishing the race”.  During everyone’s race post-mortem I wanted to say “Yah i have injuries and sickness and I fell and I forgot to pump up my tires and I had to stop on the bike because something was in my tire and I was riding a steel-frame kids bike with junior gearing and…”.  But really (although I just said all that here) what I tried to say was “Under the circumstances, it was an awesome day”.  Because it was.