INSTALLMENT 2—Friday, May 25, 2007
 
The Big Trip to Southern Ohio
 
I woke up on Friday before the alarm clock, knowing that whatever sleep I had gotten would have to be enough to get me through the day, and that I might not catch up on it over the weekend.  I loaded up my car and drove to Elmhurst to pick up Kevin with a few things (his bike and other stuff was already at Lori’s) and then over to Lori’s house to load our stuff into her van.  I knew that everyone would laugh at how much crap I had packed, but that’s just me.  It always happens that I have something that someone needs that they didn’t have with them—let’s see—this time it was duct tape, Post-It Notes and magic markers.  But 3 bikes (mine, Kevin’s and Marc’s—Lori’s SO), all my crap and everyone else’s crap fitted in Lori’s van, with Lori’s bike up top and some other crap in a car-top carrier.
 
And we were off.  En route, we missed a few turns that didn’t cost us much time at all.  We talked non-stop and knew we’d have to go directly to registration/transition to set up for Race #1 without stopping to check in anywhere.  We weren’t alone in that plan!  There were lots of people arriving and clearly unpacking just what they needed to race.  I changed clothes in the open (as any good triathlete is willing to do), got my bike set up, chugged a can of Mountain Dew (race supplied—see HFP Racing knows about the good stuff) and all I needed was one more thing—my teammate!
 
It was about 4:45 when I spotted Jovan, Cindy’s husband, down the hill from where we were parked.  YES!  Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines, we are ready to race!  I located Cindy, we had hugs (we hadn’t seen one another in months), I showed her a few of her pink things, and we took our stuff down to transition.  We got a SWEET rack position—the center end not too far from the swim in, and there was a no-show team on our rack, so we had plenty of room to spread our stuff out.  One of the nice things about this series of races is that you stay in the same transition spot every day.  In fact, in between races 2 and 3 on Saturday, many people (Team Crackheads included) left their bikes in transition.

Race 1: Prologue

Friday, May 25, 5:00 PM
250m Swim (it was long, but FLAT!) - 5 mi Bike (it was short?) - 1 mi Run (who the hell knows?  At least it was mostly flat)

Bike Course Profile: Basically up the hill towards the Lodge and back down

 
Run Course Profile:  ½ mile out on the below course and ½ mile back, believe it or not, mostly flat.  This is the same course used for all the remaining races.  On Saturday, we go out 3.27 and back each race.  On Sunday, we do the out and back twice.  Nice, huh?
 

 
My words to Cindy before we started the first race were this: “There are 2 rules this weekend.  ONE: No crashes.  TWO: Have fun!”  In the end, we executed quite well on both fronts!  There was an ulterior motive to not feel like total crap and be doing a death march during Sunday’s run.  We did experience periods of crappiness (uh…literally, on my part), but we ran pretty well every race.
 
It was hot that late in the day, but what are you going to do?  The swim was too short for us to use a wetsuit (due to the time it would take to get it off), and most athletes went without.  The water felt cool compared to the air.  We went off at 5-second intervals, with the teams first.  Scott Erdman (head of HFP Racing, the event sponsor), was standing there looking at a watch, and he would just say, “GO.”  Team Crackheads were #41 (me) and #42 (Cindy).  After the teams came the solo athletes, in some sort of USAT ranking order.  There wasn’t a lot of pushing and shoving in the swim, and I got out in a decent time and onto the bike.  I did notice that the swim caps were a bit tight.  Usually, race-supplied caps drown me, so I can only imagine how they felt on giant bobble-headed guys.
 
The first bike ride was straight uphill followed by a little down with a U-turn and then screaming downhill.  I saw a guy crash pretty badly right before the U-turn—I could tell he was coming in hot and really tilted over.  Judging from how hard he went down, it may have been game over for him.
 
I tried not to get caught up in going hard, but what are you supposed to do when everyone is all jacked up with race energy?  GO HARD OR GO HOME!!!  So when I got out on the run, I tried to bring it like everyone else.  I couldn’t run all that fast due to lack of sleep and having spent 7.5 hours driving, but whatever, I gave it my best.  Cindy beat me in this race, as I expected.  We both knew that this short little expedition would have nothing to do with the rest of the weekend.  I also knew from a few years’ back that doing a hard, super-short sprint race the day before another race won’t hurt you.  It helps to wake up your legs, especially if you’ve tapered or spent all day driving! 
 
Sadly, there are no photos of us before or during this race.  It’s almost as if the race never happened…which if you think about it, is how we needed to think, which was pretty easy to do since both Cindy and I are experienced Ironmen (women?), and know that there’s nothing you can do about the past during a race, so you may as well let go of it
 
So now we can check in our stuff and settle in for the night which basically meant get ready for Day Two.  Cindy said she had food back at the cabin and that we didn’t need to stay for the race food, so we executed a “crap exchange” between Lori’s and Cindy’s cars, and Cindy drove her vehicle with Jovan and Matthew holding both bikes while hanging off the tailgate so we could make only one trip back to the cabin.  Under normal racing conditions, I would get all uptight about my bike being transported in this way, but this is Triple T, and there are bigger things to be concerned with.
 
Showering after that race was disgusting.  I had green slime everywhere, and I don’t think you could call it seaweed—it was probably algae, since it “melted” in the shower.  I was extremely glad to rinse it off, all the while shouting epithets from the shower, and then I immediately referred to my spreadsheet checklist to begin getting my stuff ready for the next days’ races.  Cindy and I both donned our matching pink nightshirts to get ourselves in a festive mood.  You can imagine that Jovan and Matthew were rolling their eyes at us two women walking around in matching clothing.  I was sporting my pink shoes with the flashing heels as well.  I call them my “happy shoes,” and I bring them to races to wear when I’m getting stuff ready: 
 

 
It’s really tough to be in a bad mood when you are wearing something like that.  I know other people have their pre-race rituals, so go ahead and laugh at me!  Of course, my toenails were painted pink for the race!  I had emailed Cindy the week before to ensure her toenails were also pink.  I probably didn’t need to tell her to do it, though, since she’s WAY more into the pink thing than I am, if you can imagine that.
 
Cindy’s awesome husband, Jovan, was the grill master for us.  I didn’t have to do a thing!  Cindy had brought along side dishes and between us we had plenty of chips, candy and general nosh food.  I ate 2 chicken sausages on buns, a pile of spicy beans (well at least they were CARBS, huh?), probably inhaled some chips while I was at it, and one Twinkie.  Twinkies can almost be considered a liquid, since when you put them into your mouth, they more or less turn into a viscous mass that you then swallow, but not until you’ve displayed your mouth’s contents to some poor onlooker for full gross-out effect.  In hindsight, I should have brought more Twinkies with me, and now I will go and put that in my packing spreadsheet.
 
Before hitting the sack, I had to take care of the race belt situation.  I thought I had packed some wire that I could use to twist-tie the streamers on, but the wire must have snuck out of one of my amazing bags o’ crap.  So now what?  Cindy and I both have the race belts with the squeeze toggles to go through the bib number holes, so I was going to implement Plan B, which would entail getting the race belt elastic the small holes on the arrow things that normally you jam into the end of a kid’s handlebars.  First I tried a pen—no go.  I tried a key—sorry, no soup for you.  Finally, I got out my tweezers (BRILLIANT!!!), which did the job, and I was ecstatic to show everyone my handiwork.  Jovan got another opportunity to roll his eyes, and Cindy was too busy organizing her own stuff and probably figured I had things under control.  You’ll see pictures of the infamous race belts in Installment 3 of this race report.
 
I think we had lights out at a respectable time, but Saturday’s first race didn’t start until 7:30AM, so there was no excuse not to get some sleep.  But a hard and fast race late in the day, plus getting to spend time with a friend you haven’t seen in months plus preparing for THREE MORE RACES is not exactly conducive to sleep, and I expected this, so I slept rather fitfully and began having THE DREAMS.  You know—the ones where you are racing and forgot half your stuff or you are swimming through sludge or you are late or there’s beer in your aerobottle (yes, I have had that one) or whatever.  I was surprised I hadn’t had THE DREAMS earlier in the week—I think because I knew this was a train-through event that I was more relaxed than usual.  But I’ve come to know you can’t escape from THE DREAMS, and now when I have them they make me laugh when I wake up from them (after .05 seconds of panic, of course).  I had one of those, but in addition, I had a dream featuring hundreds of ticks crawling over me.  Why?  Because on the way into the park you go past something called Tick Ridge, which I didn’t remember seeing until we went past it on one of the bike rides (which are all now this giant blur in my head except for CLIMB, CLIMB, CLIMB and GO LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL DOWN).  Looking back though, especially while scratching these weird bites on my arms and legs, there probably was something crawling on me while I slept.  I’m going to call them “cabin bugs.”  What woodland cabin is free of bugs?  They could have been spiders (Minority Report) or the dreaded chiggers, which I don’t think is an actual name of a bug, but just a bad, buggy-sounding name.