North Shore Spring Triathlon

Today was the 20th anniversary of the North Shore Spring Triathlon. I don't normally participate in this event, to be honest, I haven't even gone out to watch before.



It's a super well attended event and they even have a kids category. Watching them alone is reason enough to go. These kids were tearing it up swimming, biking, and running. Many made it a family affair with both kids and parents participating today.



I was getting picked up at 7am by my teammate Tiffany Fenton. We wanted to get there in time to catch the kids head out. I set my alarm for 6:37 (not to sure how it ended up on that odd number) and when I got up I had a message from Tiff that said, "is it cool if I come at 6:45am". So with 8 minutes to get ready, I grabbed all my stuff and printed out the door. We were meeting our other teammate Ali Shaffer and we got all set up. I know a lot of the triathlon community from working at North Shore Athletics but I have never seen any of them in action. It was awesome to support them out there, cheering them on as they did their thing. I don't think there were too many relay teams but we gave it our all. Tiff came out of the water in under 20 minutes and sprinted barefoot on the pavement to the transition area to tag Ali off on the bike. The bike was 4 laps along the parkway, which made it very spectator friendly. Shaffer had a wicked bike and finished right around 30 minutes to tag me off on the run. The run was 5km on both road and trail. It was so much fun. I felt like I was flying, mainly because everyone else had already spent themselves on the swim and bike and I had extremely fresh legs. The one thing about 5 k's...they hurt. You are pretty much going all out for just under 20 minutes. My heart rate was sky high, though, it slowly started to loosen up over the course of the run and ended up around my waist before I gave it to someone to hold. My number belt also had a malfunction and I ended up holding it in my hand. I came in just over 19 minutes on a pretty hilly course and was spent. My body was full of adrenaline and I just couldn't stop talking about how much fun it was.

After the race Peter and I came home, ate, napped, and then headed out to do some trail maintenance on Powerline. Powerline is this 3 km hill that we will be running up during Iron Knee 25km May 31st. Unfortunately, the trail is really overgrown and is in need of some tender loving care...and a trim. We worked a couple hours on it on Saturday but it needed much more work than that. Here is a before photo on one of the switch backs we were working on.



After over 2 hours on the trail, here is the after:



There is still more work that needs to be done but hopefully we can get it done by the end of this week. Fixing up the trail is super rewarding and I am sure it will make running that section a little more enjoyable knowing I helped keep it in good shape. I'll thank Peter for getting my butt out there. It doesn't take much to do a lot and I encourage any trail users to get out there and volunteer their time doing some trail maintenance in their community.

Well, my 5 day weekend is over and it's back to 5am wake up calls. Enjoy the week!