Hy-Vee

This race has taken place 4 times now and each year is very different. In 2008 they had to move it to West DesMoines because of the flooding and ended up having split transitions. In 2009 they did away with the split transitions and kept it all in the same location. This year would have been the same as last year but mother nature decided against that.
It was a usual race weekend with the race briefings and packet pickup. There was a lot of lounging around time scheduled into the days leading up to it as well. Saturday morning came and some torrential downpours kept the Hy-Vee kids tri from happening. There had to have been a LOT of very unhappy little monsters that morning. (Yes I do refer to small children as monsters. They freak me out).
Sunday morning- 3:00AM, came way too early. Opening transition at 4:00 with a race start of 6am is a little crazy, but it is what it is. The race warmup was going on when over the loudspeaker comes "There is a huge storm coming. This is going to be shortened to a sprint. Everyone will do a time trial start." This was about 30 minutes before the 6am gun. After a little tweaking to the warmup because a sprint is a lot different than an olympic it was go time.
One big issue among the field was the choice to wear a wetsuit or not. Personally I know the wetsuit is faster and I dont have too much of an issue taking it off, so even though it was a short swim it was coming in the water with me. Others opted out of it because they felt it would slow them down in transition or it would slow down their run from the beach. In any case I do not regret my decision at all.
The swim went very quickly. Ended up passing quite a few people so I knew I was sitting alright, but there was a lot of race left. T1 was good minus the huge mud puddle that they called the transition area. There was a little mud still in between my toes when the bike shoes went on.
The bike started well. For the first few minutes there was a group of 3 or so but when we crested the hill they were eating my dust. The guy who was leading the race was really far out in front. This race course was flat and straight and I could not see him until he was coming back the other way. The rest of the bike was boring.
Wasnt sure where the field was sitting coming off the bike but knew that every second counted with the time trial start. The run was pretty boring.
It was funny because at the finish line everyone was looking around asking where they thought they had finished. It was like YEA! I just finished, but have no idea in what place.

The best part of the day was riding back to the car in the rain. NOT!!!!

All in all Hy-vee did a great job of getting a race in and at least making the parents of the angry monsters happy.

Up next: lots of hard training! I'll keep you posted on how that is going.