Rachel's older sister Sarah kindly agreed to make her bike available to Rachel for the race. Sarah's bike is a girl's hybrid with gears, a significant improvement over Rachel's very small kid's bike with no gears. Unfortunately Rachel has never ridden this bike before, nor has she ever used gears, or even brakes on the handlebars (her bike brakes by pedalling backwards). So the night before the race we did a few laps up and down the driveway, mainly concentrating on how to use the brakes (which I figured was probably important).
The local triathlons run 2 distances at each event. The smaller Mini distance starts at 7am followed by the longer Sprint distance at 8am. With Rachel competing in the earlier race (and being 2nd wave), we were a little more squeezed for time than usual. Pre-race was spent finding a park, registering, getting in that last toilet stop, finding the club tent, applying stickers to bike and helmet, getting arm numbering, placing everything in transition, getting the wetsuit on and heading down to the swim start. This didn't leave much time for worrying about stuff and before she knew it, Rachel was standing on the start line surrounded by the other competitors in the 15-17 division (both males and females in the same wave).
Being a good swimmer, Rachel breezed through the swim leg and then sped into transition. The wetsuit came off relatively easy, but it took a while for her to put on socks and shoes. More experienced triathletes don't bother with socks, but we didn't think the time savings were worth the risk of blisters. Once out on the bike leg, things slowed down a little. Rachel does very little bike riding. She was riding an unfamiliar and very heavy bike with knobby tires, so we never expected her to be fast on the bike.
Meanwhile, Elaine was also racing the same event. Usually Elaine would race the longer Sprint race, but wanted to race with Rachel to give her more support. Due to the different wave starts, Elaine didn't start her swim until 10 minutes after Rachel. Desperately wanting to make up the deficit, Elaine probably did her fastest ever swim (and without a wetsuit). She sped through transition and then proceeded to push the bike to her absolute limit. With a kilometre or so still to go on the bike, Elaine finally caught up to Rachel. You are not allowed to draft or ride side by side in a triathlon, so Elaine sat 7 metres behind Rachel, slowing down to match Rachel's speed.
Back at transition Elaine leisurely racked her bike and put on her runners only to discover Rachel had whizzed through and was already heading out on the run. There are no rules about drafting on the run, so once Elaine caught back up, they ran side by side for the rest of the race.
Overall Rachel's first ever race went very well. She was understandably a little slow on the bike, but the statistics below (out of 350 starters) show a great result:
Beat 14 Competitors on Overall time
Beat 254 Competitors in the SWIM (including Elaine)
Beat 49 Competitors in Transition One
Beat 11 Competitors on the BIKE
Beat 106 Competitors in Transition Two
Beat 65 Competitors on the RUN
Elaine's effort was a race of 2 halves. She went flat out trying to catch Rachel, and then slowed to complete the race at Rachel's pace. Elaine finished 2nd in her category, missing first place by only 42 seconds with the winner passing her on the run leg (3rd place was another 2.5 minutes back). For the first time ever Elaine registered the fastest swim in her category and probably would have scored the fastest in every leg if she hadn't slowed down. It is worth noting that the Mini races had 10 year age brackets (longer races have 5 year brackets), so not only was there more competitors in the category, she was racing women aged up to 6 years younger.
I didn't race, but instead acted as photographer, although even on automatic settings a lot of my shots ended up out of focus (they were obviously moving too fast). My training week ended up being 10 hours consisting of 2 swims totalling just over 6km, 4 runs for 38km and a 119km bike ride on Saturday morning. I'm currently a little sore with tight calves, hammies, quads, a sore left knee and a saddle sore which it turns out hadn't healed from the 103km ride the week before.
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