Matt's Skylands 09 race report

Relay Day!! All I have to do is swim! Just take the wetsuit and I’m ready. Whoops, make that wetsuit and goggles. I almost oversimplified. That would have made for a much tougher swim.

Get to the race site and meet up with the rest of Team “Steve Austin” (Lee Majors, not Stone Cold). Perhaps the name dates us a bit but I’m all right with that. Steve Austin’s primary mission of the day is to beat KB2 (Genine and Maija). The 2nd goal of course is to win the Male Relay Division.

Feeling pretty good. I guess the party didn’t completely wipe me out. The weather is perfect. Relays are in the last wave but they are starting 5 minutes apart, so there shouldn’t be too much trouble moving through the water. The only challenge is the fact that the buoys aren’t in a very straight line. Hopefully that won’t be a problem.

I line up directly behind Maija and Oscar. I tell them I plan on grabbing onto their wetsuit zipper pulls so that I can water ski behind them. Plan B involves smacking Maija’s feet in an attempt to neutralize her kick. Of course neither of those things happen.

Off we go! The water is murky enough I have no chance of following feet unless I pull my head to sight constantly. I’m concerned about tracking too far to the right so I keep focused on staying close to the buoys. Turns out that wasn’t the best plan. I pass a buoy and the next one looks to be way off to my left. So I correct and make my way over to that one. Once I’m by that one, I decide to spot of the turn around buoy rather than the intermediate buoys. That seemed to work well. As I approached the turn around I notice the person beside me has red sleeves on their wetsuit… It’s Maija. Wahoo! I’m not minutes behind her… yet.
There are a few people from the wave in front of us trying to negotiate the turn. Maija takes a good line and is through them in no time. I on the other hand got too close to one of them and had to deal with being swatted a few times. As a result I lost track of Maija once again. I try to find a sighting point at the beach or at least see what the flow of traffic is so that I don’t get on a bad line back to the beach.
I realize that I’m working way too hard. I’m not feeling my 50 strokes. I try to adapt but I can’t convince myself that I’m not losing ground by easing up. So I spot some caps ahead of me and I work on reeling them in. Next thing I know, I’m running up the beach. I finished my swim in 15:12 (not awesome), 35 seconds behind Maija. They negotiate T1 20 seconds faster than us as well. Now it’s up to Bob to go catch Genine. I go grab the camera out of the car and switch to being a photographer.

Bob bikes the 17 miles 2:58 faster than Genine. KB2 Transitions 16 seconds faster than us in T2. Which gives us a 2:07 second lead starting the run.

As Todd runs out of the park, I yell to him “2 minutes”. Meaning I believe he’s got a 2 minute buffer over KB2. Todd tells me afterwards that “2 minutes” sounded generic so he didn’t believe me. So he continued to push very hard knowing that Maija would be giving it all she had to try and catch him.
He stayed strong and finished in 21:52, Maija finished in 22:34. Neither were thrilled with their run but considering we had raced yesterday, and then partied the rest of the day, it’s not too bad.

Genine and Maija won the Women’s Relay division beating the next women’s team by 34 minutes.
Another team told us that we had won the Male division. The results were not posted for us to confirm this until much later. Then we found out we were beaten by 1:37… so close. Maybe if we hadn’t raced on Saturday??

It was a fun day. I’m guessing we might see “Steve Austin” again someday. Maybe we will take it a bit more seriously next time. Maybe.