Poop. No swim. St Anthonys first annual duathlon.

The big cheezes at St Anthonys Triathlon decided to cancel the swim this morning.  The water was pretty choppy and they were having trouble launching the kayak safety patrol.  In the old days they would have put a couple people on surfboards and had at it.  But that was when there were only 1,500 competitors and there was no purple menace.  After having a fatality during the swim a couple years ago, they are rightly erring on the side of caution.   With 4,000 competitors, probably 20% of whom are barely able to complete a 1,500 in the pool, it was a good decision.

That being said, what a bummer.  I was looking forward to the swim since I have been training pretty well.  The bike and run are not bad but the swim would have launched me into a top ten finish and a cool St Anthonys award.  So it goes.

The swim, oops, I mean bike went well.  It was windy as heck and I am not quite to the point of churning over a big gear, but I put in a respectable 1.02 at 24.1 mph.  My times here have been between 59-1.01 in past years.

On the run - I somehow launched off to a 6:10 first mile and a 6:20 second mile, which is faster than I've run off the bike all season.  I slowed down a bit from there but it gives me hope and courage and smiley happy faces for the upcoming sprints throughout North Carolina.  Total finish was 41:39 on the run.

I finished 16th in the M35-39 category in 1:46 something.  

After puttering out the last couple of miles I decided that racing the White Lake half is more than I want to suffer through just now.  If they will switch me to the sprint I'll compete in that, otherwise I'm just going to shout at peeps.

Here is a picture of what the chop looked like to someone who has never seen the ocean or bay.

Here is what it looked like to me.