I can’t believe I actually qualified!  Talk about setting goals and achieving them.  Well seeing as my qualifying race was only four weeks before nationals, I immediately set up accommodations with my sister who still lived in Omaha, and started downloading some podcasts for the 14-hr drive.  I suppose I could have flown, but didn’t want to mess with the hassle of flying with my bike.  Plus I hadn’t done a nice cross-country drive in a while so what the heck.

The ride to Omaha was uneventful for about 13hrs and 30 minutes; the last 20 minutes were through a terrible thunderstorm (I remembered why I had always wanted to leave Omaha after growing up there).  Winds, torrential rain, I was doing 15mph on the interstate and literally couldn’t see the lane lines.  Fortunately traffic was extremely light, so I made it to my sister’s place in one piece.

I drove up on Thursday and the race was Saturday, so that gave me a day to check out the venue, drive the bike course, and see what was up.  Seeing as I had lived just south of Omaha for almost 20 years, I was expecting a very flat and not super scenic course.  Well south of Omaha and downtown Omaha are two completely different things.  All of downtown Omaha was hills like I had never seen in my entire time of living near there (not that I ever went to downtown which probably explains my ignorance).  The bike course was actually quite flat, except for one BIG hill.  I had previously done some recon using Google Maps, but those cameras don’t do hills justice.  I knew it would be a booger of a hill when my poor Prius was having to rev up (yes I drive a Prius, and don’t knock it till you’ve experienced the gas mileage).

I did a brief ride and run at my sister’s place on Friday (had to have been the hilliest part of Nebraska ever), and then went to the venue to get checked in – bike check in the day before was mandatory.  I saw why when I saw the size of the transition zone and how many bikes were there!  Would have been a disaster to do it race morning.  This was definitely the biggest triathlon I had ever been to.  The lake looked very calm and it wasn’t very big, so I wasn’t worried at all about the swim.  I was aware of the one big hill on the bike, and the run was pancake flat.  So all in all I was excited but feeling quite a bit more stressed than just a home race.  I wanted to do another 3hr race like I had done for qualifying, but I was still a bit in shock that I was actually there, so my goal for the day was just to not be last  🙂

Race morning was a quite crisp 62F (which is quite balmy for NE in August), and I knew to enjoy it while it lasted as NE gets hotter than an oven with gross humidity in the summer.  The swim went great; it was a group start but seeing as I swam considerably slower than all the other 100+ participants in my age group, I had plenty of clear water.  The only trouble I ran into was when I rounded the next to last buoy which then meant I was looking straight into the sun for the last couple hundred meters to the swim exit.  Other than that my swim time was about 35 minutes, so I was happy enough with that.

While I ranked in the bottom handful of athletes for my age group in the swim, bike, and run, I was in the top 25 for transitions so I must be doing something right J  Onto the bike, and my goal was to go in the 1:30 ballpark.  I was cruising along at a rather nice pace until that hill….omg.  There were literally people walking their bikes up this hill.  No joke.  I considered it briefly, but knew if I stopped chances were pretty high I would fall over.  So I toughed it out and climbed that hill!  The downhill on the other side was pretty awesome.  We rode out to the turnaround point in the middle of a random road through a cornfield (I mentioned this was NE right??) and headed back to town.  The hill wasn’t nearly as bad on the way back, and the downhill was even faster.  I had definitely gotten a jump in confidence on my bike strength after Renaissance Man, but nationals kept me grounded – I’m cruising along at a very happy pace and these dudes (and dudettes) with these crazy-sounding carbon getups are whizzing by me like I’m standing still.  For the entire bike portion.  I was like okay – what’s good in my head and what’s actually good are two different things!

Back to transition, there was wide open flat roads so I had no trouble getting my feet out of my shoes so I could just hop off and start running.  Transition was quick (I did take the time to put socks on), I waved at my sister, and was off.  With my 35ish swim and 1:28ish bike, I had again put myself in a fantastic position – all I had to do was keep running for an hour and I would have a great time.  Well as soon as I started running my legs were like “ha! No.”  they never came around, and my run ended up being around a 1:14.  I still finished around 3:20, so not a terrible time for me.  The run was definitely nice and flat, with the occasional shade from buildings. Doing a loop in the baseball stadium was cool too.  By this time it was effing hot…boy was I glad to be done!

I gratefully collected my finisher’s medal and cold water and Gatorade from the finish line volunteers, and found a spot to sit for a while with my sister (who was an excellent Sherpa).  All in all it was a great experience, and I was quite thrilled to be able to compete.  I am still amazed I was able to qualify!  Goal is now to qualify again next year!