Momz and I did our 1st race together on Sept 7th at the Nation’s Triathlon. We did the Sprint Relay as the TriForce Family Team. It was my mother’s first race of any kind after picking up cycling just this past year.
Here is a little background…my mother retires about two years ago and one day last fall (rather fall of 2013) she up and says lets go bike shopping. Ummm…say what. We get the bike and then she goes all in and signs up for Spin90, joins a senior ride group, and asks for a trainer for Christmas so she can ride indoors. Seriously?! Cool. How about we do a race together, I say? She doesn’t object (except when I tried to make it an Olympic distance) and tells me that I have to put a training plan together for her. Ummm…okay, den. We train, we spin90 and even after some falls during outdoor spin90, I managed to get her back outside on no/low traffic roads as long as I was with her. She was RET TA GO!
A week before Nation’s she is getting the heebe geebees about how fast she is going to be able to go and how long it is going to take her, so I snatched her cadence, gps & milage meters off her bike and said, “JUST RIDE AND HAVE FUN”. She was going on and on about how she wouldn’t be able to put down more than 8 mph. HUMPH.
She crushed it with an average of 11mph and was cruising at 12.5mph for the 1st 12 miles until we ran out of a little steam heading out and back over the “bumpy” 14th street bridge stretch.
SWIM – NO SWIM (cancelled due to sewage run off from storm the night before)
Nevertheless, everyone had to run into transition as if they were coming off the swim and either go to their bike in transition or meet their relay team member in the relay pen, trade off the timing chip, and then the cyclist goes into transition to get started.
So when my leg is ready to go, I ran as fast as I could into transition into the relay pen. Hand off the timing chip and momz was off…
BIKE – By my momz account…she had a good ride. She was smiling every time I saw her and later told me that the hardest part was the last 4 miles across and back over the 14th street bridge. Those ramps and bumps got to her but she hung in there and brought it into transition with a smile and laughter. I’m still giddy with pride for my mother’s accomplishment. I hope she is too.
RUN – C is for Cookie
I was so damn excited to see my mother come back into transition all happy and ish (prolly cause it was over) that I took off out of transition and made it my mission in life to run down (as much as I could to my ability) the last of the last of the pack. I caught and passed 6 even at my pace of 12:30/12:45. Pure joy and adrenaline carried me through to the finish line.
It was a great day to race with my momz.
I put this slide show together from the race. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed ourselves.
