Courtenay Brown

First off, I think this race is everything that a triathlon should be. It’s my new favorite.

As for the gory details, my race was awesome. I’d be more wordy but I just sat in three hours of seminar (or really, circular theoretical normative falsifiable debate class) with some verbose classmates who definitely didn’t spend yesterday racing and traveling .

We jumped off a boat into the San Francisco Bay at 7 a.m. yesterday. Actually I dove, because how often do you get to dive off a boat into the bay. Then we swam to Marina Green, we were supposed to follow a lead boat and not succumb to currents and go in a curve and I don’t even know. I was too busy punching-back age groupers, which wasn’t very nice, but they started it, and seriously we have this whole giant bay, why are you swimming on top of me? Aside from that I stayed focused and moved my arms fast and took periodic glances at the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges! Amazing!

I got out of the water and my bike was in a familiar position: last on the pro racks. But unlike usual, I wasn’t too far back, actually only 7.5 minutes behind the first female and a minute and a half to the closest female. Improvement! I biked my way into 7th place and really enjoyed revisiting the roads I learned to cycle on back in 2003 and 2004. The funny part was my memory of them was much scarier than their reality (my race photos show me in the aero bars about 20% of the time! I hope that’s not an accurate representation of my entire ride!). I biked a 1:17 flat, 5 minutes behind the top female bike split, not too bad but something to improve upon.

Then the run was amazing, gorgeous, and by some miracle I felt fantastic. I say “some miracle” because I have had to cut down my run volume quite a bit this summer, so I expected to be slower and feel worse than I did, but I ran 3rd fastest of the women, only 30 seconds slower than the race winner! It was so much fun! And: Improvement!

So, I finished 6th! Which is much better than I expected going into this race. My first top-ten in a legit pro race! My first prize check! I have arrived! Big smiles all around, and big thanks to my coach and sponsors!