I'm practice riding the Rev3 Poconos course on Saturday! I have no idea what to expect and it think it may be a real wake up call. We'll see!

Posting a race report separately.... LOVED IT!!!!!!

Okay, so for starters - I did NOT hear the announcer!!! What a bummer! I am just going to try to remember it as if I did. I also didn't hear my name at the finish. I was in the ZONE.

Thank you so much for spectating. That run was brutal for me and I needed every shout out and cowbell I got! Evidently I got scalp burn myself.

I guess the big take away is that it is amazing what a difference a year and mediocre training can make. I felt 100% confident in my ability to finish, and meet a reasonable goal, by the time I toed the line on Sunday - and I was right. You might remember that as of last year when I signed up I had never done a tri with more than a 400m swim in a lake, other than an abysmal attempt at an ocean sprint tri. Longest bike ever was 35 miles.

I stayed local and left early so I didn't deal with ANY parking issues at all (which everyone is griping about). I had at least 90 minutes to set up transition and I have used just about every single one. That setup up was TIGHT though. I went from some ridiculous 8 minute T1 at Rev3 to 4:30 - still not fantastic but I was pleased. I practiced transition and took some basic tips and visualized it and got it down to a science.

I won't lie, the swim gave me a moment of grief. I liked the tiny swim out to the tread water start to warm up. I stayed in the back far corner. But then this woman was backstroking in a zig zag pattern back and forth across the whole swim space! I saw a guy in the wave behind us posting about it too. She was going fast enough to somehow keep cutting in front of me. Once I shook her it got better, but then I hit the red buoys, which in later waves have been called "death buoys." I think I got lucky - I struggled at the buoys and it made me panic a little, but I settled in once I got past them. I didn't actually *stop* like I did at Rev3 because, well, when I stopped, I started quickly sailing backwards. They shortened the course, more than the .2 they had announced they were cutting off, and it was quite clear to me that they had - I knew I did not swim a mile. That was juuuust fine with me.

Ladders out were great, no complaints. Tripped on someone being stripped. Out on the bike I felt held back on the long stretch before getting on the Expressway, there were just SO MANY cyclists trying to claim space. Tons of people passing three abreast, "drafting" was unavoidable... a little frustrating. I have no idea whether that's normal because I've never been in a race this big. Once I got out into more open space I was feeling good, so I kept my speed a bit higher than I had intended (heart rate was just a tiny bit higher though). This course was FAST especially around the first half. My splits were nuts - 18.9 mph on the way out, 16.5 on the way back - but everyone's were like that due to the wind. I averaged 17.7 on my road bike, no aero bars - pretty proud of that. That's my typical pace in the crowded, twisty sprint I do every spring. My goal had been 16mph! The course was beautiful - I really love my home state and especially the rugged piney woods where I grew up. The bike just flew by for me, loved every second of it. My nutrition was dialed in. Grabbed bottles like a champ! On the last few miles before transition a guy pulled up and asked if I could spare any water - I was able to give him the half bottle of Endurance I had left that I had decided I was done drinking anyway.

Definitely took it easy into T2 but was totally happy with it. Felt very organized. There was a 2 mile run up and down and up and down an air strip for starters, and I kept thinking "this is here to separate the wheat from the chaff." Ugh that was awful. But I kept my pace exactly where I had planned, at 9:55. At the end I popped into the porta potty and I'm glad I did. Timed it - lost 1:24. But in the end that was completely irrelevant because my time goals for the run alone went out the window by mile 4. I had been mentally adjusting my overall goal while I speeding along on the bike but that proved totally irrelevant too. Wow, I don't know if I underestimated the challenge of running off the bike for that long, or if it was just tough conditions, or what, but that run was a big eye opener. Actually, I can compare my performance to women in my tri club whom I compete against all the time, and I know that my performance on the run was spot on where I would have hoped it would be, maybe even a tiny bit better. AND it was my strongest leg in comparison to my age group. But man, it's a tough hit when your half marathon PR is at an 8:41/mi pace and you finish this at over 11:00/mi! More than half an hour slower. Well, when I say it that way it doesn't feel quite so terrible. It was painful. I felt it in my quads - I think my system would have been fine to push harder but my legs held me back. I want a tri bike. There's a woman from my club I would really have liked to have matched, but she beat me by 7 minutes. A tiny bit on the swim, a tiny bit in transition - I beat her on the bike despite her fancy carbon aero nonsense - but she got me on the run. Because she saved her legs with her bike, or so my speediest friend tells me.

I struggled on the run with whether I had pushed too hard on the bike. But seeing that I performed right in line with typical performance against my friends, and knowing how much slower everyone was, I think I did the right thing. I felt FANTASTIC on that bike and it honestly would have been an effort to go more slowly.

So... out of the 70 or 80 women, not counting relays, from our club who did the race, I came in 8th!!! I am so stoked about this. Not that I'm trying to compete against my friends but it's such a good barometer or my progress. Okay, who am I kidding - of course I'm trying to compete against them! The women who finished ahead of me are all way tinier and/or trimmer than me, so of course now I'm trying to work up the motivation to shed some pounds because I know it's working against me. I am very very bad with the food. Unlikely to really happen. But I do need to get some my upper body shape back, work on my core, and get rid of the five extra pounds I put on during this training. Ugh; nothing like triathlon photos to show you what you really look like.

My club won the Ironman Tri Club program for our division; we are Div 2 but we had way more Ironman points than any other clubs. We missed the local Delmo Cup though - it only gives extra points to those finishing in the top 10 AG, and we only had one.

So my goals increased over the course of the summer. I started this process with the goal of 7:30, expecting to make it, with a B goal to finish. By the end of the summer I was at 6:40 A goal, 7:00 B goal, finish C goal. In the past couple of weeks I mentally was thinking 6:30 was possible but still sort of looking at 6:40. So I finished at 6:17, with a much faster bike and slower run than I expected. The swim was shortened to about .7 miles, so depending on the conditions I would have finished the full 70.3 right around the 6:30 mark!! Feels pretty amazing. I was a few spots shy of the top third of my age group for my first 70.3 without fancy wheels and as a terrible swimmer. (The swim didn't really impact much though, it was such a small segment of the race.)

I saw a few athletes with disabilities out there who blew me away; the police were awesome supporters despite having to deal with outraged drivers; the volunteers were second to none, with aid stations every 1.2 miles with ice, sponges, hoses, you name it; there was great crowd support.

I loved it, and the race distance itself feels totally manageable to me. It's the training that I'm not sure I would take on again anytime soon. Next year I'm going to focus on developing my bike and training hills and speed so I can try to PR my local sprint and the Rev3 Poconos Olympic, and I think I will do Survival of the Mills in October, a 7 stage race. Depending on where I get on my MTB over the winter I may try this Xterra that I deferred entry in this summer.

What a year! I have to thank everyone here for the encouragement that I was ready to step up to this distance - you were totally right and I am thrilled that I did this. I definitely relied on all of you to get me through. Oh yes - and now I have to go run, because I signed up for the Philly Marathon in two months!!!!

Yes! I am quite familiar with treadmill buoy stories. I heard that all the beach patrol were struggling, and once I thought back it explained why I would sight and have plenty of room between them and me, and then the next time I'd look up I was about to run into one. The drama on the facebook page is so hot and heavy. DelMonte was hilarious in one his videos - "none of you are going back to the Olympic Training Center at Colorado Springs, you all went back to work, and you got there safely." Get over it, essentially. I loved that he pointed out that it's an AG race full of amateurs, because people are flipping out about OA rankings because of the mid-swim change. There are no OA rankings!

I'm so glad I didn't try to maintain my pace on the bike. Everyone is talking about how tough the second half is - I just went by feel and heartrate. It helped that I was so far ahead of my goal pace.

Thank you!