I'll be posting my race report in the next couple of days but at this time I would like to inform you folks of the most disappointing Tri I have ever done.

First off - Parking, luckily everyone was required to get their bikes in transition the night before, and on that night they instructed us where to park and we were assured that it would be handled smoothly in the morning. Fast forward to sunday morning. Transition opens at 4:30. I left my hotel, approx. 7 miles from the parking area at 4:15. I was literally not moving in traffic all morning. I barely made it in the transition area by 5:45 which was when the closed it. Due to the parking issues they pushed the start by 10 minutes, but I still heard a lot of people didn't get to race due to being stuck in traffic. Reason: one entrance to the parking with only one lane trying to park 2000 people, bad idea.

Second - Swim - I was in the first wave and fairly close to the front and wow did we get lost. The night before they had meetings for everyone and my wave was told that there would be a canoe leading the way for us and everyone else would follow. Problem was is that there were easily 35 canoes in the water and after the first 100m our lead canoe was mixed in with the others. There was more than one occasion when we almost stop swimming to try and get our bearings. They did not use small bouys to mark the course. There were just 5 large ones that marked the turns, problem was that the lake has penisulas (spelling?) that block your view of the next bouy, and with the canoe being gone we were literally swimming blind. After the race there were a few guys furious because they got DQ'd for unknowingly cutting a turn because they couldn't see a bouy.

Third and hopefully final - Run - Not a single mile marker, at every water station people would ask what mile it was and no one had a clue. It became a game of tracking down a guy running with a GPS. Also they had us do a crazy two loop course at the end that was extremely confusing. Basically the idea was that you come to a guy with a bull horn screaming "left" I took the left and when I came back around I started going straight to finish the run, because without mile markers I had no idea how far I had gone. I hear someone yell at me "did you do the left twice?" the left twice? well no but this is my second time at this point, had to turn around and backtrack to do the loop again. Also, post race I heard of a few DQ's because people made the same mistake I did and they didn't get so lucky with a very nice spectator. I heard that later on in the day they had the bullhorn guy switch to say "see me three times" which would have been great at the beginning.

I don't mean to sound like a complainer, I just expected a lot from a race that was this large and had this much prize money ($700,000). There were a ton of first timers that didn't get to race because they were stuck in traffic, and that does not help the image of the sport at all. Basically just a disappointing experience, however, if they can iron out these bugs then it would be a great race because the course was pretty good, minus the two loop run which would have been ok had it been properly labeled and described.

Maybe I'm just bitter cause it was my slowest Oly in 2 years =)

Final time: 2:49. on wait, 2:51. managed to pick up a 2 minute penalty, I blocked, and I know I was blocking so I accept that =).