A Sprint Kinda Weekend in Seattle

Thursday evening I found myself boarding the 5:00 nonstop to Seattle. I was heading west for a weekend full of events; Friday night we had The Boss’s 10 year high school reunion (nothing like giving away his age right?), followed by Saturday morning’s Kirkland Sprint Triathlon, and then Sunday morning- without even time for breakfast- I was on my flight home! Just like that… another weekend down.

Friday morning I woke up and made the morning commute with the fam into downtown Seattle. Since the Boss didn’t arrive from his work trip until that afternoon, I took the opportunity to go check out Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market.

No matter how many times I’ve been there, I still love poking around this downtown market. Hands down, my favorite part about the market is the fresh flowers!

I’m also always amazed by the number of booths and visitors there are. The market sports everything from fresh produce to local craftsmanship.

I hung around for a while before going to my favorite breakfast place…

Mmmm this Russian Bakery has an huge assortment of sweet and savory pastries. I had the Chicken, rice, mushroom, and onion piroshky! Seriously folks, it’s a good think this bakery is on the west coast… otherwise my training/ racing would not be going so well! This stuff is a little rich!

Speaking of training and racing. That leads me into the second event of the weekend! The Kirkland Sprint Triathlon.

Now I have to tell you at this point in the morning I had not been totally honest with the Boss. I was (and still am) feeling like crap. I have been coughing like a 40 year smoker, and I swear I’ve been spitting out my weight in sinus crap for the past 2 days (pretty picture isn’t it?). I think it actually peaked on this morning! I wasn’t totally sure/ convinced that I was going to race or not. BUT I didn’t want to tell him that for fear that he’d feeling bad about racing with me standing on the sidelines. Luckily his swim wave was before mine, so I could send him off with a smooch and a “good luck”, and make my decision after!

So I stand here alone feeling bad for myself and trying to conceal from the Boss’s dad that my eyes that are welling up. “what am I going do??”. 5 minutes later my wave is called, and racing instinct took effect “what the hell are you thinking…get your ass in the water”. So off I went..

… and shortly there after I emerged from the water. I will say that that swim was much easier than the warm-up swim I did earlier in morning when I tried to swim with a mouth full of cough drops. If you haven’t tried that yet…don’t!

Next came the bike. Seattle in true from had rained all morning, adding a super slick surface to what was an already technical course. The bike wasn’t as fast as I’d have liked it to be, but there were several times I had to sacrifice seep for safety. Once you’ve survived one sideways skid for the day you don’t take a second for chance! I will give a super shout out to the organizers of the race for having at least one volunteer on every single intersection; no matter if it was a small side street or major intersection.

Finally my favorite part of the race… the run. With my cough drops in tow I set out to post the fastest female split of the day!

The Cough

The Finish

With a 1st place age group win (4th place overall female) I was pretty happy! Sick yes.. but also pretty pleased with what I actually pulled off. Although I will admit winning really makes it more difficult to convince my Coach that I actually was sick and not just whinny!

So now I’m back on the plane to DC to recover before heading back west to Las Vegas to check out the Interbike Festivities and more importantly for the Las Vegas Olympic Triathlon! I’ve been looking forward to that one all summer!

Posted in: Triathlon