Monday, May 12, 2008

Jay Benson and new uniforms!

Seeing as how I didnt race, I probably shouldnt call this a race report. But I did spend most of the day volunteering in the transition area, so I even had a chance to snap a few shots of those who went through during a low volume moment (note, they are mostly butts, as I had to do my job first and shoot later and usually they have already gone past me :).

Quite a nice showing from Triatomics with 15+ racers including Rachael (her older son did the kids tri too!), Tina, Rob, Jim W and his daughter Beth, Jeri, Laurie G, Paul, Karen Y, Jeff, Clay, Amy, Frank, Nathan, Deb K and John B (new club members from Santa Fe).

Everyone did extremely well, with lots of personal bests, age group placings as well as two women and two men in the top 5 overalls!! Click here for results.

So here are some shots with our new uniforms!
Tina is ready to go and waiting for women's start:
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Here is Frank and I believe part of Jim Wendelberger (ahead in mostly red) during the men's start.
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Here is Clay in T1. He came in just behind Nathan Romero from the run. Nathan slipped and fell as he was running out of the transition with his bike - all the spectators and Nathan's whole supportive family gasped as it looked quite painful! Later there were quite a few more of such slips in bike shoes. Be careful running in bike shoes and maybe that's a good argument to try and learn to do it like the top guys and gals - run barefoot with shoes already in pedals. Although dont do what Jeff did yesterday - apparently he accidentally clipped left shoe on the right and right shoe on left pedal and discovered that as he was mounting his bike - but at least he didnt slip while running out :)
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Here is Jeff's backside as he heads out on the bike - he only wore the triatomics shorts, or as his daughter Heidi likes to say "Daddy is naked!!"
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Here is Paul sporting our fancy new gear heading out on the bike on his fast Quintana Roo!
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Here is Amy heading out for the bike. She is also a TriSports.Com athlete, which means she cant wear our cool club tops that often in races (she did get one though! :)
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Also, Sportz Outdoor, as the only sponsor of the event put a lot of money into the race: along with medals, top three in each age group also got gift certificates to Sportz Outdoor and the raffles were amazing! Best of all Clay won a Giro aero helmet in our club colors - couldnt be better as the one he was racing in that day was held together with some carefully placed duct tape (and was blue)! :)

Btw, those of you who've done the race before - they still start women 30min after the men which means top women have to swim around the backend of men's wave. Its totally unfair, both to the top women and the men they are trying to run over! Deb and Amy who got 4th and 5th overall, both had to deal with it and Deb even had a huge bruise on her cheek from a guy kicking her in the face when she tried to squeeze by between him and the lane line as he wouldnt stay right.
Supposedly next year they may consider an elite wave to avoid this scenario - I hope so, although I wonder how they would define 'elite'.

1 comment:

cb2andres said...

Thanks for the posted picture--dorky look and all. It was great to see all the uniforms there. I agree, we really should have taken a pre race picture of us all. So, I was within a minute of my time from last year, and given the progressing osteoarthritis in my back, not too bad. I figure that repeating or improving on a previous time is like inverse aging.