37th Annual Heart O' Dixie Triathlon

The room was cool and the box fan along with the ceiling fan added a nice noise that helped me relax. I slept well. My wife, however, rarely gets a good night's rest when we stay home. Friday, July 22nd was no exception.

I love the background of this race having done 
the first  HOD on August 2, 1980.

We arose Saturday morning, ate a light breakfast, and left Aunt Mary's before 5:00 a.m. Lake Tiak O'Khata is only about ten miles from Noxapater, where we spent the night, so we were at the lake before 6:00 o'clock. The place buzzed with its usual excitement as triathletes picked up timing chips, placed transition bags in trailers, and racked bikes in the swim-bike transition area. I did all of the above as well as pumping up my tires before posing for a few pictures snapped by Penny at the swim start area. Then I waded into the water for a warm up dip.

As usual the water was warm, too warm, but what else is new. I swam easily out to the first buoy and back, then got in line and waited for the start. I thought about my experiences here. Once more, I was internally lamenting my lack of training. Not training in general so much, I did plenty of that, but triathlon specific work. More exactly, I knew I did not pay the price on my bicycle which meant I would pay the price out on the road.

My swim went well, but I was a little slower that last year. I did not start my 100s @ 2:00 early enough in training nor did I do the set often enough to have the stamina I needed to shave that extra 25 seconds off the swim. That set is the gold standard for the kind of swimming needed in an Olympic distance tri. I was passed by one swimmer for the first time in years. I did, however, pass about thirty or forty people in the swim. I was the champ in my age group in the water. On land, however, was a different story.

As usual, the bicycle race was a rolling roast for me as one cyclist after another whizzed past at what seemed the speed of light. And once more, I made a mental list of the things I need to do to improve next year, pretty similar to the one I made last year and the year before and the year before that. It's really not socket rience: I need to ride more. A lot more.

Also like last year and the year before and the year before that was the weather. The cycle portion was accompanied by an overcast sky and air too cool to be true. I was thinking PR for sure. But as soon as I stumbled out of transition 2 like a drunk on Saturday night, it was as if Gabriel himself blew his horn and the angels of God all rolled back the clouds and the sun came scorching through with the force of Hades. Again. Have mercy it got hot and it got that way in a hurry. As good as God is, He will not give us a break on the run portion of the HOD. It seems like heaven has decreed the way Poisidon spoke to Odysseus: "You must suffer!"

With an additional 281 miles of running over the same time in 2015 and a ton of heat training, my suffering wasn't too bad. Actually, I ran better, as I should have, than I did last year. My transitions were also faster. But all of that together wasn't enough to make up the eight plus minutes I lost on the bicycle. I finished in 3:07:33, two minutes and eighteen seconds slower than a year ago.

All things considered, it wasn't a bad race. As I noted earlier, I did not suffer as much as I normally do, and we got to spend some time with Aunt Mary and Uncle Paul. In addition to that, Saturday after the race, we stopped back at Aunt Mary's and we got to see a seldom seen cousin of mine, Ted Roebuck. That was nice. It was all nice. Now to start on that list this time, the one I wrote to do a faster Heart O' Dixie. Or maybe I will just take a nap.