But now it is toward the end of the work day on Tuesday, and I still haven't blathered all about the event of the weekend, Try-a-Tri #2. But I have some decent excuses, like: I was reading bunches of manuals and specs and stuff, and playing with the brain-damaged application. I just got my fileserver account to work this morning, then had to learn cc:Mail (here comes another portability victim).

So on with the exciting tale of my second triathlon. Shall we? We shall. I made this trip alone because Jen wanted to spend time with her older sister (who flew in from Tacoma, won't see her again before joining the Air Force, blah blah blah). After hanging out at the end of the pool for a while, I got somebody to time me. 880 yards in 12'37" - not too bad, a little over twice the time I did half the distance last time. But the guy with the Zipp boomerang-bike did an 11'17" - he's a little taller than me and his arms are unfairly longer than mine. But he didn't have the fastest swim time either, since some tri-geeks from Boise showed up for this race. Yet I was only 5th after the swim, compared to 4th last time with 10 fewer participants. Decent. The "dude!"s from Boise with their Giant CADEXs and tri-spokes figured me for easy meat on the bike, but they were wrong. I caught the two guys ahead of me. Then of course came the run, where not only did those two (who I just caught before the transition) drop me, but seven other guys ran by as well. Some of them even offered encouraging words. How nice. I did manage to catch the 10-year-old son of Mr. Zipp, who thinks this short of a tri is such a joke that he lets his kid run it. Or maybe he runs even slower than I do, who knows. I again posted the second-fastest bike split (missing out on a piece of chocolate by only about 20 seconds), and this time had the third-worst run split (last time was second-worst). And (ooh, almost forgot to put this in!) after the run was over, as the participants were stumbling around - well, I was certainly stumbling around since I did have to sprint to beat the 10-year-old - and exchanging "good race, dude!"s I said to no one in particular (and not for the first time, either) "You know, I really can't run at all." Then a Boise tri-dude said "Yeah, man, but you sure can ride." _Stroke_ my ego, thank you very much.