Woooofreakinhoooooo

When you do triathlons, there's usually a nice little grace period in between races that lets you more or less forget about the pain you were in during the race, and remember the nice afterglowy feeling of having completed it successfully. This is more or less the same mechanism that allows humans to have more than one child, because if we didn't forget a lot of childbirth it probably just wouldn't happen.

So all of that is different when you step out of the triathlon world and into a race series like the cycling time trials I've been doing. There's one of them a week, and that's just not enough time to forget how bad it hurt last time. It's also a little strange doing the same course over and over, although I guess the upside is that you get to know it a bit better over the course of time.

This Tuesday was the last race of the time trial series, and to tell the truth I wasn't really looking forward to it. By the time my busy Monday and Tuesday is almost done, it just seemed like one more thing I had to do. Get all the gear together, slog out to the countryside and ride fifteen miles as fast as I could, then check it off the Palm pilot for another day. Fortunately, my hubby and the kids came along this time and that always makes it more fun. Also fortunately I had taken a peek at the rankings going into the last race and knew how close it was, so that was a bit more encouragement to get out there and go hard. The weather cooperated this time and it was balmy and lovely as the sun faded toward the horizon. I got a slot close to the start along with a couple of teammates, so I could look forward to chasing them and being done early.

Although it was a bit windy and I didn't post my fastest time on the course (and in fact, missed 1st place in Cat4 for that race by a measly 4 seconds), I held on enough to get the overall series win in the Cat4 Women's division. Woooofreakinhoooooo! There was only a minute between myself and the next gal over four races, so that was very close. I'm pretty excited, and my hubby has been nodding knowingly because he's been saying for a long time I should try my hand at just cycle racing. It does make me wonder what I could do if I actually got on my bike more than twice a week (I'm sure I will once the weather gets warmer, I don't usually ride this much so early in the year!) I don't know though, it was a cool experience and all but I really discovered something about why I love triathlons so much. It's that you're always doing something different. Every race is different, each course, each transition, even the water in the same lake is never the same twice. This was fun, but my true love remains triathlon.