Shawn’s Tango 2008 Report

Let’s jump right into it. I met my team the night before the race. I already knew Jim, of course, though not exceedingly well, but well enough. Marty and Heather were brand new to me. It was nice to meet them both. I had heard a lot about them. We got our race packets and suffered through some echo-y pre-race stuff in the gym, then we headed home to Craig’s parents’ house to get some sleep.

The next morning, we assembled for the start. I looked at a few bikes hanging on cars, including a nice Tri-cross bike. Heather got ready and was trying to decide whether to wear her soft-shell or not and decided she would be warm shortly so took it off. Everyone lined up, Thad gave the prayer and shortly thereafter, the comically unexciting “Go.” Greg and I got in the car and headed up to the beach.

We arrived and got a nice spot near the transition area, and my dad pulled in next to us. Good plan as it turned out, since we would have to move one of those cars to the swim start. I got my bike all ready, loaded up my two water bottles, including my handlebar special, and did a few warm-up laps.

Runners soon started showing up. Already? Dang. 72 minutes for a half marathon. A few minutes later (or so it seemed to me), Heather showed up and I didn’t recognize her. I wasn’t sure it was her! She didn’t look at me and I didn’t hear her say her number, so I looked at a couple of other people to verify that it was in fact her. She was dressed differently, I swear, and she was sweaty and flushed, and I am not terribly good at recognizing women in the first place. Please bear with me, I barely knew her and had only met her the night before. It was in fact her so I took off on the bike.

The first…what, 6 miles of the bike course is uphill. Those of you who know me know that uphills are not my favorite thing, and a hill that rises hundreds of vertical feet in one straight shot is not up there with brown paper bags tied up with strings. I was passed by a fair number of people during this portion. Four of them pretty directly after crossing the bridge. I was actually gaining ground on a skinny young guy up until the turn up the hill, then he pulled away and I never saw him again. Oh, how I long for a flat bike course in some race. I slogged on for quite a while. Craig passed me near the top of the paved portion and I kept him in sight over a few humps on the dirt road but he eventually escaped from view.

From this point forward, I think I passed about as many people as passed me, which is helpful to my tender self-image. One of the guys who passed me up on the plateau was the guy on the Tri-cross bike I liked so much. Nice bike. Much lighter guy too. My favorite moment was when a guy passed me right near the top of the entire course, then we started down and I blew past him, never to see him again. Here is a guy who had to have made up numerous minutes on me over the last 45, and now, finally, when we stop going up, I can go fast enough that he can’t even catch me on the rolling hills to come. Maybe downhill biking is where I missed my calling. I am an inertial dynamo!

Coming down the last big dirt downhill, I passed the winning Tango co-ed team, and a few other people. The last couple of miles were on paved road, and I was doing pretty well there. Had a bit of back and forth with another guy, who ended up getting into the transition moments before me. As I come squealing in, I hear everyone from my support team yelling “Over here, over here.” I didn’t know where they had set up my transition, so I was somewhat surprised to see them where they were, and I turned the wheel to head that way. Instantly, the front wheel slips out and I crash to the ground, pretty hard. I heard a collective gasp from the entire assembled crowd, but immediately yelled “That’s just my normal dismount.” I got my feet unclipped, ran over to my towel and started getting my wetsuit ready.

Before I get too far, my teammate Jim says “We have some bad news.” My mind raced. What could be bad? I just did the last leg and I’m doing the next leg. There isn’t anything that could hang us up right now. He says “You know that safety canoe we paid for? It isn’t here.” I’m thinking okay, fine, what am I going to do about that? Just then, Thad, the race director comes over and says (to make a long story short, and a short transition longer) “I am going to let you swim, but you need to get across the lake first, then swim along the shore over there.” That’s cool. I can do that. It isn’t ideal, not the straight line I was hoping to take, but I’ll take whatever at this point since I don’t want to forfeit or wait until someone can go get a canoe and get back. So I finish putting my wetsuit on (thanks to Bart for mopping up the blood from my knee before I did that), grab my fins and webbed gloves and head down to the dock. I had never tried these gloves before this day, so it was going to be a fun experiment. I jumped in.

I swam toward the other shore at a reasonable angle, not directly, but trying to make it look like I was doing what Thad said. After getting over there, I hear someone yell “Hey!” right in my ear. I flip over and start doing the backstroke, seeing two guys on a jet ski right next to me. It is the aquatic safety director. “Where’s your safety canoe?” I stare at him for a moment during which he may have thought I was deaf. I then say “I talked to Thad about this” and proceeded to fill him in on the whole sordid tale, all the while trying to keep swimming. He says “You are a moving target out here. You could get killed! You didn’t even hear me coming right up next to you.” I replied “That’s true. I didn’t hear a thing!” He says “You gotta find a canoe. If you don’t, I’ll have to kick you out of the race.” I’m thinking that finding a safety canoe doesn’t seem likely. If I catch up to someone, they are obviously going too slow, and if someone catches me (unheard of, of course!) I won’t be able to keep up with them. Whatever, I’m gonna stay close to the shore just to try to appease him. So I swim on. Soon I come to a bit of a bay, and I have to decide whether to cross the bay directly or go the roundabout way following the shoreline. I say “Screw it, I need to keep moving here.” There were no boats over by the edge where I was anyway. So I went straight, risking a sanction. Next thing I know, here comes the jet ski again. What timing! I flip over to the backstroke, he looks down at me and says “You’re doing pretty well!” All I could say was thanks to that. He says “Where are you from?” I say “Oh, I grew up in Warren but I live in State College now” and other details of my current situation. He says it’s great that I am supporting this race and that I make the trip back every year for it. Yes, my friends, we had a conversation about urban flight, prodigal sons and global economics in the middle of this race. Eventually he says “Okay, just stay close to the shore here and I think you’ll be okay.” I was thankful that our safety director had had a change of heart, but I don’t know what inspired it. Whatever it was, he never approached me again and I was able to finish the swim uneventfully. As I approached the “turn” in the course, the point that sticks out before you can see the beach, I was gaining on several swimmers, one of whom turned out to be Matt. Wahoo! I’m making up time. I passed Matt a little before the beach and some other guy and a girl about at the same time. I arrive at the bikini-clad flag waver where you are supposed to exit the water (Nice touch, Tango), and I attempted to stand up. Not so easy. No blood there. I got to my feet and just stood still for a moment, then began a slow amble up to the transition box. I was dying. Those gloves had been much bigger than I had expected and had pumped my arms up considerably. No blood in the legs. I eventually got to the box and informed them that we were immediately beginning the orienteering leg.

Jim grabbed the map and I started to get undressed. Jim offered me a Gatorade, which I drank in seconds. More please. “Greg, go get my water bottle off my bike, please.” He did and I was ready to climb the mountain.

Considering the walk from the beach to the transition was difficult, it should be easily surmised that I was not ready to hike up the incline that we chose to climb for our initial ascent. My whole water bottle was empty before we made it to the top. I was still thirsty. I could tell I was already approaching dehydration. The first point was a little challenging, though we found it pretty readily after a slight veer off course. The next two points were a snap. Through all this, Jim was very pleasant and happy to let me go at my own lugubrious pace. The last point was where the trouble started. Well, assuming you don’t think it’s trouble to walk half the leg. We missed our last point several times and lost a good twenty minutes if not a half hour or more trying to find that one. What I learned was we need to pay more attention to how many steps we take and how those steps translate to distance. I think we didn’t care too much because all the other points were pretty much right where we expected them to be so we didn’t expect that we would need to be too accurate. Suffice it to say it would have been better to expect that. We came together in confusion with about 10 other racers and all decided to fan out in the same direction and within minutes someone saw the point. That moment was the only time in our orienteering leg when Jim couldn’t keep up with me. I plowed through the brush like a Bull Elephant in the jungles of India and Jim was getting tangled with his spindly legs and little mass. I waited at the point for him to catch up, and we then headed for the road and down the hill. We walked and jogged the rest of the way and made it to the transition with little fanfare, and Jim took off. Those spindly legs and little mass were about to pay off!

I headed for the canoe launch. It seemed like Jim was halfway there when we passed him. I got to the canoe and chatted with Marty (my canoe partner) for a moment, then he went to wait for Jim at the transition while I readied the boat. I was so thirsty. I put every bit of liquid I had left in my car into my igloo cooler, including a bottle of Gatorade and three of my daughter’s Capri-Suns. We got two double-ended paddles that Craig and Matt chose not to take, so that was cool, and I was still trying to get stuff figured out when Marty comes running down the hill. Jim was already there! He rocked the run.

Ah, heck, everything in the canoe and Bart pushed us out into the water. My goodness, was I thirsty…The Gatorate was not enough. Before long, I had to have more liquid. Those Capri suns were like the bald guy from Raiders of the Lost Ark, shriveling up in the face of the Holy Spirit. I felt like a giant vampire bat desiccating a victim in one desperate inhale. All three of them were gone in short order. I have to give some serious props to Marty who was a paddling machine during this part of the race. It was great to have him in the canoe with me. He did a good job of sighting obstacles and never stopped swinging that paddle the whole time.

That Igloo cooler came in handy a little later when we had to bail out a few inches of water from the canoe. I think we took on that water after walking through a section of river, then climbing back in. For some reason, our canoe was sitting pretty low in the water when Marty and I were in it. I wonder why that was? Anyway, I scooped out the water with the empty cooler and we were much lighter and moving on. That whole “sitting lower in the water” thing came back to haunt us a bit later. But before that, we came upon two beautiful women struggling to move their canoe forward. I had a bit of a giggle at Maija’s swimsuit, that rather ironically said “Fast” on the butt. Admittedly, that was certainly true on all her other legs, but it wasn’t holding up here. Marty and I diplomatically decided not to offer any paddling advice to avoid a wicked splashing or possible paddle to the head.

Shortly after that, the real excitement started. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. Just as we had Matt and Craig in our sights with some possibility of catching them, we entered the dreaded “Class II” rapids of the Allegheny River. Well, as it turned out, that massive tongue of untamed wilderness took our canoe under, and I mean completely under. It disappeared beneath the waves and our life jackets came up around our ears (still wearing them for safety!). My cooler, Marty’s wife’s Lexan water bottle and one paddle floated away. We had a few goofy attempts at getting the canoe flipped back over while remaining empty, but got it on the third try, I think. We hopped back in, refreshed from our dip in the refinery’s hydrological exhaust port. Craig and Matt had gained a bit on us during that episode, and it no longer looked like we could catch them before the end, but we decided to see if we could still post a good canoe split, so we paddled on vigorously. We recaptured all our floating debris except the water bottle. We saw our friends finish, still a couple minutes ahead of us but we kept up the good fight until we crossed the line.

Ah, it was over. I felt good. Nothing hurt too much, my performance was satisfying, considering I think I was the second heaviest guy in the race (after one biker), and I had done 4 of the 6 legs, which was 100 percent more than last year. Next year, I’m going for six.

Post race activities have been detailed elsewhere on this site, so I’ll refrain, other than saying Thank you to Jon and Joyce, Bart and Family, Greg O, Scotty, Tony and Judy, my Dad, Heather, Marty and Jim, and everyone else who made this day fun and functional.