Alcatraz 2004

Okay, it's usually Sandy *nagging* me for a race report but this time it was my *mum* that wanted the story of Alcatraz. As the dutiful, distant daughter that I am, here goes... it was an uneventful race so this will be short and uninteresting...

Saturday June 5th - pre-race preparation
A 2 hour ride followed by a 20 minute run, followed by a 5 hour round-trip drive to Carmel River Valley for Karen and Jamie's wedding (Stanford classmates/housemates). The usual pre-race nutrition rules were out the window after my first sip of the Guava juice and champagne cocktails... thankfully the return drive home limited my intake to just one of these sugary sweet drinks. Sea bass is not my usual pre-race dinner either but what was I going to do? Hmmm, didn't Pete take a bowl of home-made pasta to a wedding last year? No. I was not going to bring out a tupperware bowl of my own home-made food at dinner table 10... Yummy sea bass.

Sunday June 6th - race morning
The alarm went off at 5am and I was not ready to wake up. I hit snooze and started an internal debate about blowing off the Alcatraz race and racing the San Jose Triathlon next Sunday instead. This is the downside of doing a local race where you get to sleep in your own bed the night before. The internal debate continued until 5:30am when breakfast seemed like a reasonable idea. A bowl of oatmeal later and my spirits were improving and I found myself putting air into the tires of my bike. I guess I should do this race? What else am I going to do this morning? Go back to bed? Ride a century? Swim long? Complete the valuation for the pitch to a Texas software company I have to give on Monday? Alcatraz it is!

I ride the one mile downhill to Marina Green, set up transition and board the bus to Pier X to catch the boat. At the pier I seem to bump into every Californian triathlete I know and have ever met. It's self-service body-marking (which is not easy) so a guy approaches and asks a friend and I if we can *mark him up*. His race number is a suspiciously low 6 and I recognize him as pro-triathlete Cam Widoff. We get into a debate about whether he should have "X" or "P" on his calf instead of his age, so I think we gave him an "XP", just to be sure. Haha.

The big change from last year was for all athletes to board a single boat out to the island. Tricalifornia (event organizer) had rented a faux-paddle steamer that from all appearances usually doubled as a floating casino. Rather surreal to be on a mirror and chandelier-interiored *paddle-steamer* among a nervous gaggle of rubber-suited athletes. My life is weird.

The gun goes off at 8am, I jump into the balmy Bay waters and start swimming slowly towards shore. Mercifully, the 6 knot current is carrying me to shore even faster than I swim and I hit dry land after 28 minutes...200 yards short of where I was supposed to beach but everyone else seems to have "washed up in the same place" and is running along the shoreline to T0.5. I discard the wetsuit and run the half mile to T1 to hop on my bike for the uphill/downhill course. Ride went well... the only wrinkle being that I failed to tighten up the clip-on aerobars so they had a tendency to *move* if I put too much weight on them. Oops! Lots of spectators out on the course, including a very rowdy bunch of my Areté team-mates at the Legion of Honor. Areté, baby!

Just over 56 minutes later and I was back at T2, preparing for the 8 mile run. I set out and instantly felt the tightness in my IT band. I was moving slowly and I was being passed by everyone. Quit? Yes? No? This remained the story of the run until the sand ladder. This was the last place I expected to pass anyone but folks seemed to have run out of energy. I caught a girl that had passed me earlier in the run so this spurred me on to a significantly faster run than the first half had set me up for... negative-split runs seem to be the story of my races this year.

I crossed the finish line in 2hrs 40mins 30s, a 35 minute improvement over last year's time, barely scraping me into the top ten for my age group.

Sorry... I guess it was long and uninteresting... next race is Lake Placid...

JC