i did it!

As I have told a few people (who i hope realise i was not serious...) I am definitely official multi sport athlete now because... i have a number in permanent texta on my arm :)

however, before i even think of myself in the same sentence as athlete i will need to work on my swimming!! (and my running but in this case mostly the swimming.

As per usual I got there early... registered, added myself to 'wave 5' (of 6) which had the target time 31-33mins. met up with my friend (sort of work associate) mike who is speedy. he went with wave 2... there were a lot of fast striders there than I recognised but have never met. They have usually left any striders event by the time I finish...

Anyway obviously it was a quiet week this week and I decided to go with wave 4 otherwise wave 5 would have been ...me. but turns out that was a good plan because after starting at the back of the pack I would have passed 20 people in the first k. One or two people passed me later on. I was thinking that I had gone out too fast because it was hurting and the 2k split was 10.30. However, the 4k split was 21mins so i was spot on. (interesting to compare that 4k with my 4k Mothers Day race in May this year which was pretty much the same course - 22.34 - i thought i'd improved more than that...)

OK - so with a transition (you have to walk down the stairs and the length of the pool, get changed and jump in lane 3) and only 300m swim i finished in 30.12. That is over 9 mins for the transition and swim. That is REALLY slow!!!!!!! I struggled with the swimming after being free to breathe during the run. To suddenly be having to hold my breath was rough. Plus i'm slow swimmer. I was overtaken by two people and overtook two others.

anyway - lots of learnings... i think i wasted lots of time getting out of my running gear and need to streamline that a bit. Maybe elastic laces :) that would definitely gain me 10 mins or so...