St. George Triathlon 2008

Skyler and I had such a fun weekend together! We decided to take Friday off so that we wouldn't be rushed driving up to St. George. It was a great idea! We left Thursday night and drove to our trailer in Lake Mead. We were able to sleep in the next morning...something I haven't done in a while! Since we hadn't been swimming in our wetsuits for a few months, we found this little beach north of Echo Bay and took a dip. The water is still pretty chilly (about 60 degrees).
After our swim we started our drive to St. George. There is a shortcut through a small town called Overton. This lets us avoid going back through Vegas. Along the way we found some abandoned(?) trains and let our ongoing interest with trains continue. How could we not take a picture with this lovely train art? Skyler correctly pointed out that this does not do The Hulk justice at all...his muscles are way too tiny.
We arrived in St. George to a pleasant 80 degrees. We did our race check-in, ate dinner at the Pasta Factory, and rode around town on our bikes. My lunch didn't agree with me and after spending much time in the bathroom I was wondering if I was even going to be able to race. Luckily, it was just a food issue and went away as fast as it came.

My family used to drive to Utah every summer for vacation. St. George was the half-way point for us and we have spent a lot of time there. My dad likes to go on tours and I feel like I know about every historical building in St. George. I didn't make Skyler do any tours, but we did stop by the St. George Temple to take a few pictures.
So this pretty much summarizes how we felt about the St. George Triathlon. The thumbs down means bad.
Here is the story: The race has two distances--Sprint and Olympic. The Olympic distance is twice the distance as the Sprint. The Olympic distance started off first with a one mile swim. They went out in waves. Skyler's group was going to be the first wave of the Sprint group. Well, it was super windy that morning, which made the water very choppy. The rescue boats brought in about three loads of people (about 15 people each load) who quit the swim because they couldn't make it. Because of the high number of quitters (wimpy lame people, as we like to call them), the rangers said it was too dangerous to do the swim portion of the race. So none of the people doing the Sprint distance got to do the swim. Can you eve imagine how mad and frustrated we were? The problem is that the people who signed up to do the Olympic distance most likely had never swam in a wetsuit before or in a body of water that wasn't a swimming pool, so when the water got choppy they wimped out. Skyler and I have done a few triathlons in the ocean where there are six foot swells. We concluded that Utah triathletes are babies!
So our race began at the swim finish, but now the race only consisted of the bike and run. Again, it was super windy (approx 50mph), so the bike and run portion were affected by that too. But Skyler and I did so awesome. If you added on our swim time from last year (which is not a true swim time because we have improved a ton since last year) to our partial time from this year, we both improved our times. Skyler finished in 1:14:38 and I finished in 1:20:24 (bike and run only). I kicked butt on the bike. I counted the number of people I passed while biking up the big hill...36! And only 4 people passed me!

My reward for finishing triathlons is usually cupcakes. So I researched to find a cupcake place in St. George. I found one and it was ok. Nothing compared to Sprinkles, but it did the job.
Last, but not least....we drove home from Lake Mead (we spent another day there) on Sunday morning. We arrived home just in time to celebrate Mother's Day with both of our mothers. My family pitched in to buy my mom an awesome coasting bike. It looks like a bike my mom used to have, that she regrets ever getting rid of. She was so excited! Happy Mother's Day Mom Salas and Mom Wallace!