TRIATHALON!

May 22nd, 2010. The triathalon is finally here! Melinda and I signed up back in December for the Women of Steel triathalon in May. We trained for 5 months for this day. Every week on Wednesday we would go swimming together and then run and bike on our own throughout the week. It was so fun to spend time with my sister swimming together and sharing our training stories. We had some trouble when we first started training. Neither of us had ever really swam or ridden bikes before. The first day in the pool was exceptionally bad. We showed up to swim our laps, neither of us had goggles or a swim cap and to top it all off, I was in my two piece swim suit! I'm sure you can guess that we got some WEIRD looks from people. But looking back on it now, we did look pretty ridiculous. The swim was 300 meters long and so we decided that we would 'go the extra mile' and swim 500 meters. We swam it in about 10 minutes and we thought we were awesome! We couldn't wait to tell our family of our accomplishments. We got home and Jeff and Holli were there, we told them what we did and how fast we thought we were. They both just looked at each other confused and told us that swimming 500 meters in 10 minutes on our first swim was crazy! Eventually they figured out that the pool was only 25 meters long instead of 50 meters long, so in all actuality we swam 250 meters in 10 minutes instead of 500 meters in 10 minutes!! That was a bad day. We kept swimming each week and over time we got faster and stronger. We were finally ready for race day. The morning came early (5:00 early) and the weather was bad. It was so cold and it was raining. These were not the conditions we had hoped for. They ended up cancelling the swim (we all would have gotten hypothermia) and added a one mile run in its place. We ran a mile, biked 12 miles and then ran 3 more miles. We actually didn't do too bad. We took places 294and 296 out of 600 people. Our goal was to finish...and not finish last. We accomplished both! It took us 1 hour and 33 minutes to complete it. We did have some minor bike troubles along the way, but overall it was a great day! We were lucky and our family came out to support us and cheer us on. It was so nice when I was tired to hear Brad or my parents or Jeff and Holli cheering for me! They are troopers and stood outside in the cold rain to watch us. Thanks guys! It was such a great experience and I was glad that I was able to complete my first triathalon with my training buddy. We liked it so much that we are planning on doing it again next year! So...START TRAINING GIRLS!