A different kind or race experience: spectating!
I guess I’ve been a spectator at a sprint, once last year,
but by all accounts this was the first real Sherpa-duty work I’ve done! Including traveling Friday, pre-race
activities Saturday, race and travel home on Sunday.
And it was a blast!
I kind of thought it might be a little more “difficult”
being a spectator (in terms of “ugh I wish I were racing!”) but I know my plan
and my schedule and it felt right and honestly didn't bug me that much. Until
afterwards; then I was just jealous of everyone in that amazing post-race
bliss. I was jealous of that ;)
Anyway, Mac did the Victoria 70.3, and it was amazing.
Friday: travel. Drive
up to the border. Cross. Drive to the ferry. Wait for the ferry. Take the ferry. Get off the ferry and get to the hotel. All told, it was like a 6 hour trip, I think? But at least it was slightly broken up with
the ferry, and all. Plus, that night we
found the best Italian place
ever! It was a little hole-in-the-wall
place, but it had good yelp reviews and it was JAM-PACKED so we knew it had to
be good. Like, I could barely move my
chair three inches back, before hitting the guy at the table next to us.
Saturday: I was allowed to try running, if my knee felt
ok. After 2 days off, I was itching to
get moving again, and it was feeling decent, so we decided that we would head
over to the race venue in the morning, and I could run the course (trail around
the lake) while Mac did the pre-race stuff.
It actually worked out perfectly—we had to park at one end of the lake, so Mac
rode her bike a couple miles to transition, Allen took the shuttle, and I ran
the trail...and we all met up at transition.
This was the perfect way for me to “test” my knee a bit, but would allow
me to easily stop after a short distance if it hurt (and I could continue on easily too if it was good). Ended up
being a 2.67 mile run to transition, and feeling great! I could still feel it a bit, but it didn’t particularly
feel any worse running then when I wasn’t running, so I decided I could try for
a full loop. After finding them and
letting them know my plan (only problem with a Canada race was no cell phone
use!), I set out for one full 10k loop. And
it still felt good. I was supposed to
run for 2 hours, but in all I ended up just running 1:15. I felt kind of bad about it, but I knew it
was way more important to stop while I still felt good, and not risk it and be
forced to stop because it hurt. It was a
good run, I felt good knowing I was still capable of running (you know, a whole
two days of no workouts will do that), and it was a gorgeous course, and just a really fun trail to run! I was pretty jealous they all got to run it
(2 loops) the next day! It was probably a good call to stop at 1:15, because after all the walking for the rest of the day, it was starting to make itself known a bit more.
Met back up and told them I was calling it, and we walked
around a little (bought a new pair of zoot tri shorts at a great expo price, score!), and headed back
to the hotel. Wandered Victoria and ate
food and wandered some more. We wanted
to go to the same Italian place for dinner, since it was just that delicious,
but of course it was even more crazy-packed with triathletes and we couldn’t even get inside to
get our name on the list sooooo we went somewhere else instead. Then it was time to head back to the hotel,
give Mac time to prep her stuff for the next day, and finally sleep!
Sunday: early race-day morning! I wasn’t up quite as easily as if I were
racing, haha… in fact, I didn’t even hear the alarm clock and Allen had to wake
me up while Mac was in the shower. But,
whatever, and we were out the door at 4am, just as planned! At this point, I knew I needed to just let
Mac do her thing, and I think I may have annoyed her with a little too much
joking and nagging ;) oops. Waiting
patiently outside of transition was weird. On the other hand, it was really, really nice
to not have to stress out about all the bathroom lines! They had a serious shortage, and I was very
thankful I could just wait until the race started and not freak out about
standing in lines to go to the bathroom a million times before racing.
After everything was ready, etc etc etc etc…swim time! Helped Mac get tri-glide-d up, gave her hugs, wished her a great race, and she headed to the beach. She also handed over her phone, since she had
international data on, and I was in charge of photos, texting the framily, and posting to her
facebook real-time :)
Her wave started just on time, at 6:15am. I couldn’t see her, of course, but know
roughly where she would be swimming so I pretended I knew which one was her
;) I also started the timer on my phone,
and figured I could just lap it for each leg/transition, so I could keep track
of (roughly) her total time as well as where she was for each leg. That ended up working really, really well,
especially since I knew roughly how long things should take her, so we were able
to know when to go look for her, etc.
We hung out at the swim exit, and holy cow some of those people are crazy-fast swimmers!!! The first guy out of the water, I think was
actually in the second swim wave.
CRAZY! Alycia was also racing,
and she is not only an incredible athlete and super-fast overall, but she was
a collegiate swimmer so she’s even more ridiculously fast swimming. She swam 1.2 miles in 28 minutes! And not only that, but she was FOURTH out of the water in her age group
(which is also my age group)! Holy
cow. I think that's was when I realized I
was glad I wasn’t racing—these girls would have totally blown me out of the
water (literally and figuratively, on the rest of the course). I was seriously impressed by everyone out there!
Anyway, Mac was out of the water right when we were
expecting her, with a solid swim time! Cheered, snapped a couple
quick photos (although that’s always hard at the swim out), then ran as fast we
could to try to catch her again! Allen
ran to transition to catch her as she was getting her bike, and I ran ahead, up the street a bit to try to catch her at the start of the course. Perfect timing, I got about a
block out from the mounting line, and quickly spotted her neon yellow
helmet getting on the bike. Got some good photos, and told
her to have a great ride! (I think she
said something about “yaaay, bike!”)
Found Allen. We had a
little time to wait before trying to catch her after her first lap. Grabbed some food (a very sad waffle and
eggs), but were told the coffee wasn’t ready, and it would be another 30
minutes. What?? Ate, used the restroom, got back in
line. And waited forever. At this point, I was getting antsy—she was
probably going to finish her first loop in about 20 minutes, but we had a
couple miles to walk to get to where the loop would pass. Finally I went and asked the people, and
nope, “we ran out of coffee and are brewing another batch, it’ll take about an
hour” uhhh yeah, not gonna wait in the line for nothing! (side note: what kind of coffee pot takes
ONE HOUR to brew?! Did they not know
people would want coffee??)
Anyway, we bailed on that, and started walking. I didn’t actually know how long it was, just
had seen it on the map and was worried it was longer than I thought, and really
did not want to miss her! Finally, I decided
to just run it. Hahahaha, I kept getting
really funny looks, but whatever. I’m a
runner. Just wearing my flats and all… Oh well.
Those shoes were not meant for running in, and it was more of a slow
jog, but it was way faster than walking!
Turned out that it was a lot further than I thought, so I’m really glad
I ran! Allen walked, and he ended up
making it a couple minutes before she showed up so walking would have been fine, but I would have been really stressed out so I’m
glad I got there early :)
Again, it was easy to see her bright yellow helmet coming a
while off; I made a mental note that I either needed to borrow Allen’s helmet
(if it fits) or Mac’s helmet, for IMCDA.
Soooo nice to be able to recognize her from a ways off! I waved my arms, hoping she would see it was
me (since I was also wearing neon yellow sleeves still at that point), and
tried to take photos as she rode by but I was also busy yelling at her so my
photos weren’t great. Oh well. She told us later she was so happy and
surprised to see us there, not expecting us to be on the bike course, so that
was good! She looked awesome, riding
strong and making great time, ahead of schedule. Yay!
Headed back to transition, and decided to just wait and
watch from there for the next 40-ish minutes.
We missed Alycia’s first loop, since her wave started ahead of Mac (and she is also
speedy-quick), but figured we could see her bike in. Finally did see her, although the first few
females were way ahead. I’ve never
actually watched Alycia race, only seen her results, so wasn’t really sure if I should
be worried—it was also super confusing because by now the people racing the
sprint were coming in, and relays, etc, so there were lots of people but you didn’t really know
who was in what race. Anyway, we finally
saw her—but we noticed her first when we saw someone taking their feet out of
their shoes SUPER early, and trying to stretch out their leg, etc. I think Allen and I both made comments about “geez
what is that person doing! Don’t get out
of your shoes yet! Are they ok??”…and then we realized it was Alycia!! :-\
She didn’t look super great, slowly coasting down to transition and not
exactly smiling… I was hoping she was just stretching and getting ready to run, and that she was having
a good race. I reminded myself that I haven’t
seen her race, so maybe this was normal :)
And then, after waiting a little more, there was Mac! Still ahead of schedule! Right where I would have expected her on a
really good day, so that was awesome!
More cheering, more photos, then I booked it over to the start of the
run. And this time, it was her neon yellow
hat that made her stand out! Second
mental note: forget the plan to just wear sunglasses on the run, and get a
yellow hat to wear! I was lined up to
get a good running shot, but she saw us and held out her sunglasses, and I knew
I needed to grab them. So I got a couple
photos of her looking super focused on handing off the glasses, then carefully
reached out and safely grabbed them from her. (Managed to drop my phone, but gosh darnit those sunglasses were safe!)
We decided to just stay in the area, and hung out a
bit. Two 10k (ish, they added a little
out and back to make it the full 21.1km total) loops, so I knew we had some
time. Doodeedoo. Again, I was super happy with how it was
working out to keep track of her time on my phone. Yes, we could have stopped and looked at the
time and did the calculations, but keeping track with the phone’s stopwatch
(with the different laps) was so handy because then you could see exactly how
long it had been, etc etc, as well as keep track of total race time. It worked great!
Soon, they were talking about the first finisher getting
close, so we went and watched that. The
guy that won it finished in like 4:09.
Ridiculous! The crazy part is
that we saw Jack (a local 18-year-old, who is so fast it shouldn't be allowed) finish first off the bike, and then this other guy obviously had an
amazing run, and ended up finishing like 13 minutes ahead of him, or something
ridiculous! So crazy.
When it got closer to the time for her to finish her first loop,
we decided to walk a bit and find a better spot, but since it was just a little
trail around the lake, there really wasn’t any space to walk up and camp out on
the course. So, we just moved a little
up course and found a little spot before it really got back into the woods (right next to where one of the photographers was
haha), and waited and cheered for a bit.
By this point, we also saw a few other people we knew and got to cheer for them, as well as lots
we didn’t know—the run is when you always start cheering for people you don’t even
know, because they are getting so close!
Love that part. Saw a handful of Project 13 people (my coach started that team) so I
would cheer for them even though I didn’t know them (“yeah, Project 13, looking
good!”). I got lots of funny looks, as
they tried to figure out who I was haha.
Oh well :) Same for the Ironheart
kits.
Soon enough, we saw that little yellow hat again, bobbing up and down towards us (did I mention
how handy that was?!), and YES, TIME TO YELL!
I had tried to just be nice and motivational until this point, but now
it was one measly 10k to go, and I was allowed to give her a hard time. After all, her coach had told her to give it an
“honest hard effort” (which became the theme for the trip) so I promptly
reminded her of that, plus a few “GO HARDER, GO GO GO GO!” for good measure as she ran off. To which she casually flipped me off (all in good fun!), and I had to yell "love you!!" as she ran off. I was cracking up. The other spectators around me were a little
taken aback, “geez, really? You’re yelling at her that much to go harder?? She obviously didn’t like that” to which I assured
them that she does the same to me, and it’s all good! :) We
were both laughing about it.
Turns out she really did keep that steady pace so I think it
paid off and was worth it ;)
Headed back and laid in the sun for a bit. I kind of forgot Alycia should be finishing
soon, which is too bad because I just heard “blahblahblah…ALYCIA HILL, finishing
first in the 25 to 29 age group!” So I
jumped up, ran to the finish, and saw her as a volunteer tried to hold her up
while she stood, gasping for air, dumping an entire bottle of water on her head...and promptly flop on the ground, sprawled out,
refusing to answer anyone’s questions, and dumping another bottle. I yelled at her and waved and I’m not sure if
she realized it was me or not, but it was still pretty impressive. That’s when I realized—I need to race like that.
That is some hardcore dedication and laser focus right there. I clearly do not race hard enough! She was up soon enough, smiling and congratulating
the 2nd place girl, who I later found out finished a mere 6 seconds behind her! No wonder she was running so hard! Nico texted, and said she also finished 3rd
place overall (2nd amateur)!
Geez! So, apparently her
off-the-bike look was totally normal :)
Soon it was getting close to when Mac should be finishing,
since I knew she would keep holding that strong pace. Got a spot at the finish line, and an older
guy next to me asked who I was waiting for, etc. I told him it was a friend, and he asked if
it was her first time doing one of these…to which I laughed and replied no, not
at all! :) He was impressed when I rattled off her triathlon resume.
Saw another few people I know finish, and then—you guessed
it—that yellow hat was visible behind a row of spectators, rounding the corner
to the finish line! Yeah!! I paid attention to try to actually get good
photos at the finish, as well as scream as much as I could as she came down the chute in an
awesome 5:18. Huge PR, and she looked
AWESOME all day!
Ran to the other side of the finish line. Snagged a couple photos from behind the race,
and then met up with her and got a big sweaty hug. I am always sooo gross and feel so bad when
Allen wants to hug me after a race, and of course she did the same to me (“I’m
so gross!!”) but suddenly I understood why Allen hugs me anyway—I didn’t care at all! Soo proud of that girl and happy for her awesome race.
We waited a bit, sat, looked for food, etc. Finally they had results posted, she finished
10th in her age group! Crazy
fast people. After finally getting all
our stuff loaded (logistics were kind of a nightmare), we headed to find some
food ASAP! I am a big fan of the food
aspect of Sherpa-ing. :)
All in all, it was a great weekend! So much fun to watch a lot of familiar faces
racing, and especially watching Mac kick ass like that! Her training has been paying off, and I’m so
happy we got to go cheer her on in person.
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