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Finger Lakes Triathlon

Over the weekend was the Finger Lakes Triathlon.

We came, we saw, we 'won'.

There were six of us, including Liz Alexander, Justin Jiunta, Kyongmii Choi, Keisuke Inoue, Keng (of unspecified last name) and myself. Between the six of us, I think we managed somewhere around 2 hours combined sleep the night before, and the 'Old Folks' (the grad student team) were forced into a celebration involving entirely too much wine the night before. Thank you, leader.

Waking up bleary-eyed after 20 minutes of sleep, slightly hung-over, we collected our charges at the Sci-tech parking lot at 4:30am and proceeded to Canandaigua lake. The ride was not very memorable, perhaps because I was asleep at the wheel most of the time. Just kidding.

We arrived without mishap to slight organizational confusion, but found the starting line without too much trouble. Then we froze. The temperature at the lake was 67 degrees ambient at 6am. That does not sound too bad, but the wind was blowing something fierce, which quickly drove the body heat away.

Keisuke and Liz took up the first leg of the journey, swalking (what happens when you go swimming in water 3.5 - 4 feet deep) through the half-mile water course. The timers were passed off to myself and Keng.

Even though he had a road bike, I managed to stay ahead of him on my trusty Trek 4900 (equipped with road tires). While I must admit that I was passed by no fewer than 18 people (all on several-thousand dollar road bikes...that must have been the reason they could beat me), I did manage to breeze by a number of the old fogies, putting 15 people behind me that I would never see again. You see, I was dropping caltrops throughout the race, chuckling with glee as tires inflated to over 100psi exploded behind me...

Keng and I finished within a minute of each other (we had started with the same gap), so we were certainly equally matched. The timers were passed to Justin and Kyongmii, who dutifully performed their running legs.

While I regret to admit that the young kids (barely) whomped us in the race, we all had a blast. We even survived the drive home.

The scores are already available. The young ones made 6th place, the grad students made 9th out of 15 teams.

Now I need to start training so I can do an individual sprint...

Posted by reid at September 22, 2003 11:01 PM | TrackBack