I hate excuses, but yet I feel compelled to share 6 reasons why Pharmie and I opted out of doing the Rochesterfest Triathlon yesterday:
1. My rear derailleur cable broke the night before the race at 8 p.m. I tweeted for help (all local bike shops were closed by then), and Jeremy showed up within the hour. THANKS JEREMY! He worked on swapping out a cable from my mountain bike:
It looks like our clothes line is GIANT or Jeremy is a small person. But he's just on his knees.
The cable ended up being just a few inches too short, so it didn't work! My bike had 2 gears: the hardest gear in the big chainring, or the hardest gear in the small chainring. I was willing to give it a shot at the race. It was just a 10 mile bike.
2. Because my bike was broke, we planned on getting up before 4 a.m. to make the 90 minute drive to the race to hopefully find a mechanic to fix my bike. That never sounded like fun.
3. My shoes were still soaked from getting caught in the storm on Friday night. This is a totally lame excuse, but whatever. I was caught down by the river when the nasty storm rolled in on Friday night. (Between the storm on Thurs night and Friday night, there are places in the Metro that will be without power until Wednesday! We have friends just a few blocks away who have been without power for over 3 days now.) I was seriously afraid for my life for a while, and I was happy I at least had my RoadID "Shoe ID" on my shoe in case something happened to me. The rain was sheeting down so hard (and sideways), that cars were pulling over on the side streets because they didn't want to drive in it. I could only see car lights 1 - 1.5 blocks ahead of me - the wind and the rain were insane. It was like nothing I'd ever been out in.
Shoes still drying on the porch.
The race was in Rochester, and the sh*t was getting ready to move through in the next few hours.
I was still willing to give it a shot, so I loaded up the bikes:
My car with the bikes loaded on the back. I swear. Remember, it was 4 a.m.
It turns out that the race was delayed a few times because of the storm, and then I heard (via Facebook and a twitter post) that it was just a little rainy but REALLY windy for the swim and bike. Yeah, that would NOT have been fun with 2 gears on my bike...
5. We missed pre-race registration. We had to figure out what to do with Henry. Once we got that figured out (he was going to spend the night at a friend's house), we had to wait for race-day registration. So we hadn't paid yet. We heard that there were still spots open, but we didn't know how quickly they'd fill up.
6. We'd been sleeping crappy all week. We've been pooped. When I went up to Pharmie at 4 a.m., I told her about the radar picture and told her it was her call. (I was leaning towards not doing it, but I could've gone either way.) She voted for "being cozy." Done. I unloaded the bikes in the dark, and I went down to the basement bathroom to get my traditional pre-race "porta potty" shot:
Dear God... I never realized that when I redid our basement bathroom
a few years ago that I PAINTED IT (nearly) PORTA-POTTY GREEN!!! HOW PERFECT!!!
The icing on the "signs-not-to-do-the-race" cake was that when I changed out of my tri shorts and back into my FAVORITE pair of boxers (that my parents got in Mexico a few years ago) at 4:15 a.m., my toe caught the seam and TORE A BIG FREAKING HOLE IN THE LEG:
At that moment, I was convinced that all the signs were telling us that if we raced, one of us would have died. I was happy to crawl back into bed with my cozy wife and sleep another 3 hours (instead of driving for 90 minutes, paying $80 each, and racing in a thunderstorm). We woke up just before 8 and I teased Pharmie: "Hey, your race starts in 20 minutes." She sarcastically said "Well then I guess we'd better get going." We didn't get going. We had sex instead.
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