TRI-ed our best

So, I'm back.

Yesterday, my parents dropped me off at Worker Jay's house, increasing my nervousness along the way.

Mum	Did you bring your pyjamas?
Marshmallow	Yes
Mum	Okay.
* Silence for 5 minutes
Mum	Did you bring your toothbrush?
Marshmallow	Yes
Mum	Okay.
* Silence for 5 minutes
Mum	Did you bring your running shoes?
Marshmallow	OH MY GOD WILL YOU STOP IT, you're FREAKING me out
Mum	:-S

Now, before I go any further, I have to apologise since... wait for it...

There are no photos.

I went with the best intentions to do so, charged up the batteries for all of Saturday, and took some snap of Worker Jay's dog the night before to make sure all was good. But come Sunday morning, the batteries had died. Sweet jesus. Something tells me that those batteries have come to the end of their life; it's not the first time I've had rechargeable batteries die quickly on me - and I think the fact that I have absolutely nothing to photographically capture one of the most challenging days of my life has given me motivation to buy some lithium monsters. I'm going to have to go uber-descriptive on you to describe the event, due to the lack of photos. I know that there are official photos, but I have no idea when they'll be released, and I just couldn't wait that long to tell you all about it.

So settle in folks, it'll be a long'un.

The night before, at Worker Jay's house, was spent relaxing with some gorgeous vegetarian lasagne watching The Devil Wears Prada. Despite everyone else at Worker Jay's place protesting about the crappiness of my DVD choice (I felt some brainless comedy was in order), none of them left the room so eh. In fact, it was quite funny in one of the scenes, when one of the characters was eating something, Worker Jay's brother asked "Do we have any chocolate mousse?", to which all of us cracked up laughing.

My sleep, or lackof, was awful. I had triathlon related dreams. One dream, we were turned away from the registration desk and told that we couldn't participate. When we asked why, big bouncer fellas physically dragged us away from the venue. In another dream, Worker Jay was involved in a crash and had to be airlifted to hospital. In another, a jellyfish stung me during the swim and my right foot turned purple and started spasming. The ambulance guys had to amputate my foot right there(!). Those were the gruesome ones. There were other ones, more realistic ones, which were even more frightening. I dreamt that I left behind my swimsuit, that I ran in the opposite direction to everyone else, and also that we had gotten the date wrong - where the event was not on the 10th of February, but on the 10th of JANUARY. I must've had about 15+ short, awful dreams throughout the night. I was almost afraid of going to sleep because of the dreams I was having. I'm sure that part of it was general nervousness, which would've been compounded by the fact that I wasn't in my own bed that night. Worker Jay and I had agreed to wake up at 7:30am, but by the time 6:45am rocked around, I thought, "The hell with this", and got out of bed.

When Worker Jay and I started gathering our belongings, she started asking me questions that I hadn't even considered before, being a triathlon virgin.

Worker Jay	So... are you going to change between the swim and the run?
Marshmallow	Yeah
* Worker Jay makes a face
Marshmallow	...why...?
Worker Jay	Where are you going to get changed?
Marshmallow	Err... the toilet?
* Worker Jay raises an eyebrow
Worker Jay	Ooooo...kaaaaaaay...
Marshmallow	What? I'm sure I'll have enough time to change while you're doing the cycle
Worker Jay	It's just last time, there was a queue outside the toilets the ENTIRE time
Marshmallow	O_O So what would you suggest?
Worker Jay	I just ran in my swimsuit last time
Marshmallow	WHAT?! Okay there's no WAY in hell I'm doing that with these monsters
Worker Jay	It says in the race notes to wear your bra underneath your swimsuit
Marshmallow	WHAT?! EWW!
Worker Jay	Well, good luck if you want to try and change out there

I tell you, I felt like an absolute plonker putting my bra on underneath my swimsuit, and whinged like anything about it due to its weirdness. Worker Jay assured me that there would be other women at the triathlon there doing the same. Yeah, I needed to be reminded that this was a triathlon, and I wasn't the only one out there - it's not like I was going down High Street for a cosmopolitan in a posh bar or anything like that - and I'm so grateful that Worker Jay was with me, constantly bringing me back from The Land Of Absurd Freakout. Goodness knows what I would've been like if I had decided to do this by myself.

We packed up our gear, and began making our way out to the race venue. Worker Jay knew that there would be hills involved, but as we drove towards the site, Worker Jay began whimpering. It's something different when you see them big massive hills looming up above you. And by god, they were massive. For the first time ever, I was grateful that I didn't know how to ride a bike.

Oh, one thing I haven't mentioned all this time - the weather is SHIT. It's windy, raining, choppy in the water, and Worker Jay and I are both swearing at the heavens. I've been grumbling for ages about how the heat is going to drive me bonkers, but instead, we got delivered rain and wind en mass. Worker Jay and I literally got soaked to the bone just standing around listening to the race briefing. Before the race started, we stood around, scanning the crowd, and Worker Jay nervously said to me, "These people look very fit!" My thoughts exactly. Everyone there looked super focused, and listening to their conversations made me even more nervous, one of them talking about how they'd done one event last weekend and this was just another chance to 'stretch her legs' before doing an Olympic length triathlon in may. And that it's "all good fun".

You what now?

Sitting with a tub of cookies and cream ice cream, a cheesecake, and a packet of Tim Tams? Now THAT sounds like fun. Not this, running around and stuff.

As I stood in my soaking wet clothes, looking out to the sea which I would soon be swimming in, I thought, "Fuck me." It was not a day to be swimming. There were waves; vicious waves. I completely imagined myself being washed up by the waves whilst flapping about, and having a race marshal run around screaming about an environmental disaster in the form of a whale-sized-marshmallow stranding. I'll admit, I'd been confident about the swim. I thought it would be my strongest discipline. Especially after this little exchange between myself and Worker Jay during a lunchtime swim.

Worker Jay	I generally spend about half an hour in the pool before hitting the showers and going back to work
Marshmallow	Sweet. I can't see the clock from here without my glasses, can you tell me when half an hour is up? I'll do my 300m for the triathlon
Worker Jay	Sure
* Marshmallow swims 300m, 12 lengths
Marshmallow	*puffing* How long have we been here?
Worker Jay	... 8 minutes
Marshmallow	O_O

As I stood there, I was cursing myself for not having done a trial swim in the sea. Having swam 1.5km with Sarah-I last year, I had taken the swim league for granted.

I peeled off my shirt and shorts, looking at the other bodies around me and noticing that I definitely, looked different to everyone else. Everyone else looked lean, slender, and fit. I was wobbly, jiggly, flabby. For a moment I felt like burrowing a whole in the ground and disappearing. Thank god that Worker Jay escorted me down to the swim start, otherwise my Fat Girl insecurities would've had me running more than 3km in some other direction.

Standing on the rocks just near where the swim made me physically feel sick. The fact that I knew my parents had turned up and were right behind me, waving at me and smiling, made me feel even more sick. Who the HELL thought this was a good idea?!

Myself and the other women in my group got in the water, when I exclaimed a very loud "SHIT!!!" in response to the water's temperature. It was pretty damn cold, and what made things insane was that the woman next to me thought I was responding somewhat differently, and said, "I know! It's WAY warmer than I thought it would be!"

Below is a satellite view of the swim league:

The waster was brown, muddy, full of twigs and dirt. And the waves, do I need to tell you again. Even bobbing around in the water, waiting for the race organiser to blow the whistle, the waves kept on coming over us, pushing us towards the shore.

Of course, when the course organiser blew the whistle, we barely heard it, given that a wave had just crashed on our head. We all stood and stared, looking at each other, perplexed, given that we had heard a little squeal and weren't sure whether it was the whistle or some over enthusiastic kid. It was only when the race organiser shouted at us to GO GO GO that we began to make our move, much to the amusement of everyone on the shore.

I began approaching the swim the same way I would approach a swim in the pool. But the moment I ducked my head under, the brown, non-transparent water completely took me by surprise. I gakked when sea water went in my mouth, and was stunned when every arm stroke I made came down on someone else's legs, hips, or shoulders.

I would begin to make a bit of ground forward, and then a wave would come and push us towards the shore, completely cancelling out any distance we were trying to make. You can imagine it like a kid playing with bugs, the kid picking up the bug and putting it somewhere else while its little legs are kicking about trying to run in the other direction. That's how I felt against the force of the sea. Some of the women in front of me gave up on the swimming altogether, and just walked the 300 metres. I swam as much as I could, but was very relieved to see the buoy marking the end of the swim league get closer and closer and finally, close enough to get out of the water and run to where the bikes were to switch over with Worker Jay.

By now, the rain had stopped, but the winds were still harsh and it felt quite disgusting to wipe myself down with my towel, and put on my still VERY wet official triathlon shirt. The thought of trying to manoeuvre myself to try and change out of my swimsuit into my running gear made me shudder, so I just left my swimsuit on and put my running clothes on over the top. I was quite thankful for the advice to 'wear yer bra' underneath the swimsuit, despite being so weirded out by it when I first heard about it.

Worker Jay's boyfriend turned up to support her, after driving aimlessly around the coast trying to find out where the hell we were, as did her parents, and we were a nice little mob standing around near the bikes, waiting for Worker Jay to complete her 12km cycle. It was supposed to be 10km, but they couldn't find a nice turnaround point at 5km, so made everyone cycle out 1km further. Worker Jay was pretty grumbly, and it was just over half an hour when she returned, exclaiming loudly, "That was SHIT!".

With my iPod on my right arm and having taken the timing chip off Worker Jay's ankle and strapping it onto my own again, I began my run. Since I'd made the commitment to run without glasses because of the rain, it was very odd, running off into some unknown fuzzy domain. As I ran along, the sounds of HEY HEY YOU YOU I WANNA BE YOUR GIRLFRIEND blaring in my ears (look, say what you like, but it makes me run, okay?), some sort of anxiety came over me. Where the HELL was I going? With every other run I'd done before, I'd gone to MapMyRun and mapped out my run in advance. Here, I was just following the aimless mob in front of me. I would scan the coastline and think, "Oh, there aren't people running there, so we must turn around soon. Oh wait... are those people? Or road posts?" I had no idea whether to begin to push harder or continue to pace myself.

I had been terrified that every chick and her dog would overtake me, but I found myself running past several bedraggled competitors. I would start to feel good about myself, and then smack myself over the head, recognising that most of these incredible women had just done a 12km cycle, whereas I'd had a half hour break. I became focused on my own goal - running the entire thing.

When I finally saw the turnaround point, I punched the air and did a WOOHOO, much to the astonishment of the race marshal, and to the confuzzlement of the other competitors. Ah bugger you all, I'll woohoo and that'll be the end of that.

Below is a satellite image of the run:

As I approached the home stretch, I saw Worker Jay standing along the side of the road, grinning at me. She had mentioned that she wanted to run the last bit with me and I thought "Ah goddammit!" when she started running alongside me. Fresh after a short little break, her pace was much faster and I was really struggling to keep up and pushed myself hard. The finish line got closer and closer, and I wanted to get to it so badly - and there was a woman just in front of me who wanted to do the same thing. What was initially cute at first was that her son started running alongside her, so there was a mob of the four of us thundering down towards the tiny finishing spot. The woman finished and ran across the timing mat, but the kid stopped cold. Worker Jay and myself, in full flight, nearly collided with the boy trying to cross from the grass onto the carpet. They take official photos at the end, and I'm certain that mine will have an I R NOT IMPRESSED expression on my face, in mid air, legs all over the place, trying to leapfrog this little kid who got in my way.

When I finally did make it over, I was doubled over, gasping for breath, standing up only for a second to have the race marshal drape the finisher medal around my neck.

Much later, I went to the website to find out whether the times had been released. And I was astonished with what I found.

Firstly - how cool is our team name?

Secondly - just look at that official weather description. I ain't making it up.

Thirdly - let's take a closer look at those times.

Both of my times, I am completely astounded. 6:09 for the swim? Less than 20mins for the run?!?! How the CRAP did that happen?! Worker Jay and I were placed 86th out of 392 triathlon participants.

And perhaps prematurely, my thoughts are on how to improve those results 'next time'.