Monday, July 4, 2016

Epic Camp France Day 8

Day 8 of Epic Camp is in the books.  It wasn’t a particularly challenging day, but I’m bushed nonetheless.  I managed to work my way back into yellow by a narrow margin.
The plan for today was to have a friendly triathlon race.  The warmup was biking 30km DOWN to Lake Annecy.  I say down because it was literally 1700 feet down which meant we had to bike back up that during the race.
The swim was wonderful though.  It was pretty close to a 1km swim.  John B let me borrow his extra wetsuit, so I was actually able to swim this time.  I came out of the water 3rd after towing a few people behind me.  It felt like Ben was tapping my feet quite a bit during the swim, but apparently he only tapped 3-4 times according to him.  Sighting was a bit of a challenge at times.  A bunch of red sailboats were chilling at the last buoy, and I don’t think they realized it, but triathletes don’t have x-ray vision.
I got out on the bike pretty quickly.  Shannon was just barely ahead of me and John was long gone.  There’s a traffic light for construction a few KM’s into the ride, and I ended up getting stuck for three and a half minutes.  Thankfully John said we can deduct that from our time, so I wasn’t worried that he was miles up the road.
Once we were able to go again, we got a pretty nice pelaton going.  The traffic light bunched everyone up, so me, JB, Phil, and Shannon were all trading off at the front.  A few people took wrong turns, and eventually JB and I were alone for probably half of the ride.  I felt like I was pushing, but I couldn’t drop him on the climbs.  JB and I rolled into T2 together.
The run was pretty uneventful.  John was over a kilometer up the road, and I had enough of a lead where no one was going to pass.  My biggest concern was how big John’s lead was.  I was praying for less than three and a half minutes, but he ended up winning by almost seven minutes.  He crushed it.  Post-race, we found a cool stream and chilled out (literally) for about ten minutes in ice cold water.  That felt incredible.
After lunch and a solid nap, I decided to do a few tack-ons for points.  I did a 10k run into town, swam 3k, got ice cream, got a haircut, and ran 10k back home.  Only the runs and swim were for extra points though, but damn it felt good to get a haircut.
John took it easy this afternoon, so I nabbed yellow by a little bit.  It’s pretty clear that I can’t beat him at a race, so I’ll have to do a ton of tack-ons if I want yellow.  Luckly I want it pretty badly, so these next three days might be tough.

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