This weekend was packed full of activity. Saturday I arose early to participate in Pat's Run. It is a short 4.2 mile run honoring Pat Tillman and raising funds for his foundation. I averaged just 8 minute miles, but there were so many people it was hard to run. Over 20,000 runners on the course and so many were getting trampled on. I saw children go down, adults fall over. Pretty crazy and hectic. But it was a nice day and I had a good run. I finished in the top 5% of female finishers.
I then took 4 beautiful young girls to go see the new Hannah Montana movie. Surprisingly, it wasn't as cheesy or as lame as I had expected.
Sunday I arose at 4:45am for a triathlon to raise money for breast cancer: Tri for the Cure. When I got to the parking lot and was putting my bike together in the dark, I had difficulties. The screw holding the brake pads together had come loose and now my tire was sitting on my brake pad. I was worried I wouldn't be able to do the race. I had three people try to fix it and luckily it got fixed in time. Unfortunately, it was a pool swim, which meant one swimmer after another after another. We all had to be out of transition by 6am, preferably by 5:30am, yet my number wasn't coming up till 9am. This meant a lot of sitting around and waiting and waiting and the temperatures just kept getting hotter and hotter. They started with number 1 and I was number 463. I finally got to start the swim at 8:59:30. So I had already been there since 5:15 and was just starting the race, which ended up only taking me 58 minutes to finish. I placed 18th out of 89 in my age group. I think I finished 91 overall. There were a few DNFs. I finished around the 20% mark for both my age group and overall. Not exactly where I'd like to be...I need to swim faster. I placed okay in the bike and run, but my swim was really slow. I see I have a lot of work to do. The unfortunate part of the race was all the waiting around. I think I would have done a better race had I not had to wait for hours and hours, which screwed up the nutrition and temperatures were racing past 90 degrees by the time I got to the run. I did manage to run just over a 7 minute/mile pace for my quick 2.25 mile run, despite the heat.
I don't think I'll be doing any more races by this company. Many competitors told me that this is what happens with most of their races, just wait and wait and wait. I did do a triathlon by this company back in 2005, but it was an open water swim, so different story.
Well, it's getting hot here. Temperatures are hovering near triple digits, which means no more afternoon runs...getting up very early to beat the heat.
