What really happened

So now that I have sufficiently basked in Kori's glowing review of my performance on Saturday, I can tell the actual version of events.

As part of my evil plan to stress her out the morning of the race, I was still running around getting ready when she picked me up so we got a late start. Then ten minutes from my house I realized... I forgot my sneakers. How does one forget sneakers? I mean, the only two really essential items were a bathing suit and sneakers! So we had to turn around. Now, Kori is always excessively prompt. And early for races. I put us a half an hour later than our expected arrival time. Thank God the roads weren't bad, or else we would have been really close to missing our wave. But all was well and we arrived with just enough time to pick up packets and get ready to go.

After clearing up the little mess of us both being number 61. I got marked and then I turned to Kori and asked "What number are you?" She said "61" and I said "But I'm 61!" and lo and behold we were both marked with number 61. There was a typo somewhere, but it got all fixed up and I continued the day as number 62.

After the pre-race meeting, we jumped in the pool, mainly to kill time. I did swim a couple of laps, but I wasn't really warming up, just tooling around. I practiced some flip turns since every pool is different. Kori was indeed lounging around. But that didn't stop her from swimming one more lap than me in the 7 minutes of swimming! I did 275 (same as last year). I suck at swimming. I have decided I am okay with this for short events, because that means I get to pass a lot of people on the bike. Because I'm best on the bike.

Unfortunately for Kori. Because really, an extra lap on the swim translates into very little total mileage. We hopped on the bikes and we were far enough away that we couldn't see each other's distances. I decided I was going to work on beating my distance from last year, 4.55 miles in 18 minutes. The volunteer got everything set up and said "I'm going to put this on level six, but most of the women lower it."

Yeah, that's not the type of thing you say to me. So I kept it there. The first mile I managed to keep my cadence above 90, but I slowly kept dropping. And that 18 minutes seemed to go on forever! And I realized I was going to have to work to beat my distance from last year. At about 9 minutes, I lowered it to level five, but I realized my faster spinning wasn't making up for the lower level, so I popped it back up after a minute. I thought I was going to throw up on the bike. The last 30 seconds I popped it up to 7 and pedaled my guts out, ending at 4.57, just barely squeaking by last year - someone needs to get on her bike more often!

Kori did 4.3 something, so she had to more or less lap me twice on the run course (12 laps to a mile). I thought I might be able to keep up with her, but she dropped me like a hot potato after half a lap. The first lap I came around at around 35 seconds, which is a 7 min/mile. Uh, I think not. I settled into a pretty steady 40-45 seconds per lap and I came through my first mile at 8:18, which prompted incredulity on my part, but my lap counter verified it!

I started to drop back a bit after that, but I was constantly petrified of having Kori on my tail, lapping me. Along one part of the track, there was a line of mirrors, and every time I passed that portion, I would be checking for her behind me (and also noticing that despite the cute skirt, that I looked like I was about to die). With a couple minutes left, I'll admit that I started imagining the nice things Kori would say about me. She didn't manage to lap me, but on the last lap in the home stretch, I heard her lap counter yell "Go, Kori!" so I knew she was behind me and I sprinted in as hard as I could with Kori coming in like 5 feet behind me. So she didn't technically lap me, but since she got one more lap than me in during the 15 minutes, so for all intents and purposes, she kicked butt (especially with her 7:10 first mile!).

So she did beat me at two of the three events. But alas, it is all about the bike.

She should have known better.

This weekend, I'm running a 5k. I figure if I can do 1.75 miles in 15 minutes, I should be able to beat my 5k PR of 27:42. It will be close, but I always PR at the Rosy Cheeks Run. It must be the running in the frigid cold. Last year I skipped out because of this same tri, but apparently it was so cold that the timing clock stopped working.