Canmore Triathlon

I'm a little late in putting up this post. I was in Canmore last weekend for the Canmore Tri It Triathlon. The weather was fantastic. I did the Olympic distance and it was the most beautiful race I have done to date - difficult, but beautiful. The day started off on kind of a funny note. At our pre-race briefing, the race director said "Couple of things - there's a moose in the lake". Everybody cracked up. Apparently this moose was coming down to the lake on a daily basis for his morning swim.

The swim was in a small lake called Quarry Lake and it was very clear. I could clearly see bodies in front of me, not green images of something that looked like a body. Three laps of the lake and I was done. My slowest time ever for this distance. I'm going to blame it on the thin mountain air - we were way above Edmonton elevation, after all.

Off to ride 40 km. The route was four laps on the Three Sisters Parkway and it was as smooth as glass, not a crack or pothole along the entire route. I was enjoying the ton of downhills, but where there's a downhill, there's an uphill. Plenty of times I broke the speed limit.

The run was 10 km - 2 laps at the Canmore Nordic Centre - and my first lap was not good. I had stomach cramps and had to walk a lot, but at least the scenery was beautiful. The run path is reserved for biathletes and not open to anyone else, but an exception was made for us on race day. The second lap was much better and I was speeding up, but not fast enough to make my overall time great. This was the slowest triathlon by far that I have ever done. If you're interested, check out my results here. I've never been so far down in the results in my age group, and I'm not just using the thin air and hills as an excuse; it was damn hard. It's nice to know that I still have the fitness to make it through a race, so I feel pretty good about that.

Stay tuned for my next triathlon (my last this year) on August 9 in Devon. The swim is in an outdoor pool, so it will bring back childhood memories. Until then!