2014 PTARC Triathlon

I ran a triathlon this weekend. I guess maybe that sounds impressive but in reality it was horrible. My legs hurt. Either I trained too much or not enough. It was probably the latter. I went out a few times to ride the bike and get my muscles ready but every time after the first time my legs lost strength really quickly. I thought I was overdoing it and wanted to save up my strength. I guess I should have beat myself earlier and then took the week prior off.

Anyway I thought it would be a cool life goal to cross off my list: Participate in and complete a triathlon so that is why I did it. I would have done it last year but there was a Weird Al concert that weekend so I had to pass. No such distractions this year. I was good to sign up and go.

When I woke up at 5am that morning (2014/06/21) it was raining like crazy and I thought they would call it off but about 2 minutes before I was ready to give up, it stopped raining. I was really worrying about it all that week so I would have felt bad if I wouldn't have showed up.

I found out the week before that there is construction on the Penn Trafford High School pool for the next 2 years so the swimming portion was replaced with a run. So instead of swim, bike, run it was run a mile, bike 13.5 miles then run 2.5 miles. As soon as it started my strength left me. I knew this was not going to be fun. Luckily I wasn't the absolute last person to finish the first run. You could tell a lot of the people who were in this thing had high levels of experience doing it. I think I was the only one that wasn't wearing fancy bike pants.

When we got to the bike part I quickly fell to dead last. The first 2 miles were horrible. It was all steep hills and I had no strength. I was seriously contemplating quitting. The only thing that stopped me was that I knew as a kid I rode my bike seriously long distances and if I could do it then I could do it now. Plus there had to be a point where there were no more uphills and the downhills started. If I could just get that far. It wasn't till the turn onto Lux road that happened. Going through Claridge was awesome compared to the first part. Nice and flat. There were cops or firemen at all the intersections too stopping traffic so I never had to slow down. In fact as hard as it was, I never stopped. Even if I had to get off my bike and push it up the hill (which I did once or twice) I kept my feet moving forward. Now all I had to dread was how the hell was I going to run when (IF?) I could make it past this part.

When I finally showed back up to the venue (the course was one big circle both starting and ending at the municipal building) I could see people were still running. At least I wasn't that far behind that everyone was done before I even got to that part. Ale and Isaac were there to cheer for me as I parked my bike. I love you guys. I started running. It also sucked. Maybe 1/5th of the course was in soggy wet grass mud too which was not cool. At least put some boards down or something. There were volunteers around the track making sure I knew where to go and to clap for us and tell us what a good job we were doing, etc. I guess that was nice.

The hills here were rough too. I probably walked for half of the time as I was destroyed physically but I kept going. I think I clocked in finally at just under 2 hours and as far as I know dead last but I did it. I feel I kind of got screwed that they took out the swimming. Can I still count this as a triathlon? I guess I will. Maybe I'll do it again and if I do I'll definitely train more. Riding your bike on the nice flat Greensburg trail is not enough to be able to handle those hills.

I finished!

Hopefully they will be posting the results here. (At least I see in past years there were people who took longer than 2 hours and even a couple DNFs)

Ale found the results on this other site

Heres my biking info
Heres my running info