Penticton - The Race

Well they say all good things must come to an end and at least my vacations have to until I win the lottery or become independently wealthy. Of course before the Penticton vacation was over, there was a small matter of a race for Graeme. His race review can be found here on his new blog.

And here's race day from my view.

I was up at 4:15am with Graeme and out the door just after 5am to walk down to transition. Unlike how I would be if I was ever in this situation, Graeme was appeared to be very calm. He headed into transition and I waited by the gates with another tri club athlete's wife for the final good lucks.

I set up to watch the swim and then headed over to get a view of transition in what I thought was an appropriate time. Less than a minute after I arrived, Graeme was out of the water and I was not ready at all with the camera. I ran over to see him head out on the bike, where I heard a "you're a hard person to keep up to" and when I looked over my shoulder, it was my FIL who had found me in the crowd. Once Graeme went by, his parents and I set out in the car. We did a number of stop, let Graeme pass by, then re-pass and do the same. Each time we would pass him, his mom would roll down the window and give a big cheer.

We had decided ahead of time that we weren't going to drive the Yellow Lake section and instead would take the detour out towards Apex Mountain and back into town, as we had heard that you can get stuck in traffic for hours at Yellow Lake. It turned out that it would have been ok, but this way we did get to grab a sandwich and coffee before heading to the run course. We watched Graeme on the out and back portion in town and then drove further out on the run course to see him again. Unfortunately we ended up missing him at the second point.

Back into town and back to the motel to put the beer in the fridge - something that had to be done! We hung out at the motel for a while before heading back out to Lakeshore and to watch the finish. Graeme was done in 11:09 - pretty much exactly where he had hoped and great on a day which ended up having really smokey conditions for the run portion. We waited while he had his massage and got some pizza. He looked great at the finish! We then all headed back to the motel for more beer and more pizza before his parents took off. I had wanted to stay up until the end as we had done last year, but at around 10:30 I was falling asleep and headed to bed.

I was woken up a bit later by lots of loud cheering. I looked at the clock and it said 11:55. I thought it had to be Sister Madonna Buder finishing and so I ran out to the TV (the race shows on the local station) to try and catch her finish. I was too late to see it but it was her. After watching her come in just after the cutoff last year I was so glad she had made it this time!