619

I woke up super early on Saturday and made it out to the Splish Splash Dash, my first dualathon. The entire event was fantastic, the two highligths for me were when they wrote my number on both of my arms in thick black marker, the other highlight would be finishing (not because I performed badly, but I always have such a high after finishing anything with a real finish line, and meeting personal challenges always brings tears).

I was amazed! The water was warm in clear. We had an open start, which means all the swimmers line up in the water between the bouys that mark the start line. Here is always where I make my most fatal mistake, I like to line up near the front (must have something to do with overestimateing my ablity), but as soon as the "GO" is shouted I get run over. Never fails, on foot or on bike being passed by crowds is nervewracking, but not life treatening. In the water, being passed by schools of swimmers is scary. I didn't warm my arms up well, so the feeling of being stampeeded brought on a slight anixty arm cramp, and I really wondered if I would finish. Once I powered through my nerves, aches, and let the speedy folks get out of my way I did fine. As I've noted in previous blogs, this was my first open water swim in several years, the swim course had us go clockwise through the lake. As a trainied lap swimmer I don't swim in circles well, and I struggled with staying on course throughout the swim portion of the race. While fun, I was happy to get out in run.

The 5 K (about 3 miles) traced through a lovely residential area, filled with small rolling hills. I ran most of the course, but walked up all the steep hills (chicago is flat, so I didn't want to risk injury going to hard over the hills). The most impressive part of the run, was watching the other athletes as they passed me. My goodness, these folks are good shape! Some men were running in only their Speedos, some women ran only in their Tankini's -- I threw some shorts and my TNT singlet on with my shoes.

Overall, for my first dualathon I didn't do so badly, out of a total of 67 entered in my event I finished 59! In my age group I finished 7 out of 9 with a time of 1:20 *(about 25 minutes faster than I anticipated).
I look forward participating in anothter dualathon, which isn't on the books yet, but I sure do feel better about the Sprint Tri coming up in 2 (gulp!) weeks.