Triathlon sounds hard. If I mention this habit, people are either wowed because it sounds difficult or confused as to why I would bother and think I am really weird. Arguably, anyone who's in decent physical shape can finish a sprint triathlon - and there are always a few competitors with beer bellies spilling over their bike shorts.
Nevertheless, I don't talk about it too much. But I am discussing it here with you because a) you can't talk back and ask me a lot of questions and if you give me bewildered looks I can't see them, and b) yesterday, I competed in the Wasserstadt (water city) Triathlon in Limmer.
Limmer is a sort of first-ring suburb on the edge of Hannover. It's known the water city because it is where the Leine River, the Leine Canal, and the Hannover-Linden Stichkanal all intersect. I just looked up the translation for Stichkanal and I got "random channel". Sometimes Google translate is funny. Anyway, beyond Limmer, these canals come together and flow into the Mittelland Canal, which is home to Hannover's main harbor. The Mittelland runs east to west across Germany, connecting major rivers that flow north to south. Hannover's VW plant and Continental Tire factories are located near the canal so they can ship their stuff out via the waterways.
I jumped in the Stichkanal yesterday afternoon (Germans like to sleep in on the weekends) into the water which was 15.8 degrees. It's good that they measure in Celsius because I only have a rough idea of how cold that is. If you told me the water was just 60 degrees Farenheit, I might have dreaded it a little more.
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| This is the swim course. Don't look for me in this picture; I think it's from last year's race |
The race was cool, windy, but at least dry. It has been raining here for at least a week and it feels like November. I can't tell you exactly how I did. There were two divisions for the short course: one for competitors who had a Deutsche Triathlon Union member card, and one for everyone else. If you look me up in the "everyone else" category, I took 3rd of 50 women. If you put them all together, I was 30th of 152 women. (There were around 550 competitors altogether. I am still amazed at how few women do competitive sports in this country). So do I compare myself with the people in my division or with the people who do enough races to make it worth paying 170 euros for the member card? I don't know. I did take extra satisfaction, with my 3 euro one-day license, in passing those people. My muscles tell me this morning that I raced hard and they are not happy with me, so I did something right.
I even had a small fan club. Brian was there of course, and so were our friends Andrew, Katja, and Sankey. It was not a good course for spectators. While we were biking through small towns and running in the woods, there wasn't much to see. They did get a good view of chilly people in wetsuits getting out of the canal, though. Thankfully, neoprene holds in the beer bellies.
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| My intrepid fans: Sankey, Andrew, Katja |
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