I love arriving at a race early enough to have a nap before registration and warm-up. For that matter, I love arriving anywhere early enough to have a nap. Conspicuous and unabashed public napping is one of the many eccentricities that I have picked up at university.

So on Sunday, when I arrived at the Niagara Triathlon in Grimbsy while the sun was still rising, I was quite pleased. I curled up on the grass by the transition area and was promptly lulled to sleep by the sound of the waves coming to shore. I would have completely forgotten about the impending race if it weren’t for the tridorks who kept snickering and whispering about me. I think I heard the word “jealous”, as in they were jealous of my supreme napping skills. The word could have also been “homeless”…

After I woke up, I was feeling pretty mellow until it came time to don my wetsuit. I swear that thing has a mind of its own. Some days it is cooperative and slides on instantly, other days it takes all my strength, cunning and persistence to wrestle it on. On Sunday, it was the latter. Once I clawed and strangled the sucker into submission, I ended up having my best swim of the year, exiting the water tied for second.

Early in the bike there is a pretty epic climb up the Niagara Escarpment. Even with in my respectable 39×26 granny gear, I was standing up, grinding and wheezing like a chubby asthmatic. After the climb, I went into damage control and tried to minimize my losses as the race leader continued to pull away.

I also set a new PB of sorts; I went 33km/h over the speed limit going down the escarpment at 73km/h. In addition to speeding, I think it also qualifies as impaired driving because I was pretty jacked up on caffeine and adrenaline. Feeling reckless, I even shot a grin at the police officer controlling traffic in the intersection as I flashed passed.

I came off the bike 1.5 minutes down on the leader and proceeded to get some hurt on. I came tantalizingly close to the leader near the end (~15 seconds) but I ran out of race course to catch him. Story of my life. Nevertheless, it was a great race to cap off the season.

Next year, I have resolved to stop neglecting my biking. I recently acquired a torture device so that I may engage in the masochistic ritual known as “indoor bike training”. Even its name is intimidating: the Cyclops.

I’m going to reshape these chicken legs into twin columns of pure pedal pushing power like this guy. Now those are some curvaceous legs.

My time and splits for the race are 100% fabricated because my timing chip malfunctioned. The organizers told me that this has only happened once before. In the official results, my swim time is accurate (but the course was a little short), my bike time is (sadly) too fast and my run time is (thankfully) too slow. Results