Chattanooga

One week late, but better late than never. It was a pretty good race. Kendrick and I drove to his house in Guntersville on Friday night and his dad grilled out some monster steaks while his mom prepared some homemade-picked that morning-plum cobbler. We drove up to Chattanooga the next morning, got our motel, and met J on the race course and picked up packets, etc. There happened to be a cheap movie theater downtown, so that killed the rest of the afternoon.
The race started on Sunday morning at 7:30 am, so we got there at like 5:30 am or so to go through body marking, warm up, and put our bikes in transition. At about 7:10 am, a shuttle took our age group down to the swim start. Since the race was so big (1200 racers I think), they started in age reverse order, so the younger racers were at the end. About 20 minutes before our start, it started raining. Great. I hate racing in the rain. Actually, I hate cycling in the rain; it's just dangerous with some real slick race tires.
Anyways, the swim started off good. You could feel a little bit of a current, and I was trying to lengthen out my stroke in order to take advantage of it. The only downside of the swim was that there was no warm-up time, which sucks because it always takes me like 300 meters to get my arms loose. Oh well.
The bike started out crappy. I had the worst mount ever, haha. I just got some tri shoes and I had only practiced a few times, but apparently that wasn't enough. Not a big deal though, probably cost me 15 seconds or so. It had quit raining during the swim but it was still pretty wet, but nothing dangerous. However, after the turnaround on mile 14 or so, it started pouring! It continued to pour until about mile 24 or so.
Overall, the run went pretty well. I had previously been doing 7:30's off the bike for a 5k, so I was kind of hoping to hit around 8 min/mi average. I started off the first 5 miles hitting around 7:45 to 7:55's. However, with 1.2 to go, there was a nasty hill that slowed me down a little bit, which sucked. Oh well. I think I ended up with slightly under and 8 average .
My final time was 2:33 something, and I was 11th out of 31 in the 20-24 AG. This race was a special qualifying race for Age Group National Championships; the top 33% in each age group qualified...(do the math)...I barely missed out. They even round up, but 33% of 31 is 10.23, which is .27 away from rounding up to me, arrrghhh!