Weekend Wrap Up: Music City Tri Edition

After bonking on my long ride / brick last weekend, I went to Cumberland Transit on Friday after work & bought all of this.  Spoiler alert:  it worked.

Saturday was nuts.  I coached my P2T group from 7am - 8am, drove home, changed, grabbed my bike & drove to the Trace.  I rode 30 miles with these awesome ladies, ran 2 miles & then treated myself to Cracker Barrel.  It was after 2pm by the time I got back home.  Oy.

The bike nutrition totally worked.  I put Nuun in one water bottle & Heed in the other.  I took a gel at the one hour mark & took the other one when I got off the bike (2:24).  The end of my ride was really hard, so in hindsight, I should have taken the second gel at the two hour mark.  Lesson learned.  But overall I felt great.  Hooray!

Back at home, Linda was pretty annoyed that I had been gone all day, causing her to miss peak sun time.  She made up for it by spending the entire afternoon on the deck cooking herself.

Turns out, working out for 4 hours makes you insanely hungry.  I ate an entire hamburger & fries at Cracker Barrel & then ate all of this at Korea House a mere 4-ish hours later.

Note to self: ask Mari-Etta if I should adjust my calorie goal on the days I work-out like this because I'm pretty sure I burned WAY more than the 1,400 calories I'm allowed to eat in a day.

On Sunday, I got up early & headed downtown to volunteer for Team Magic at the Music City Tri.  I've never done this tri because it's usually one million degrees, but yesterday it was gorgeous.  I think it was around 68 degrees - which is insane for late July in Tennessee.

I asked to be a volunteer on the run course because I'm better at moral support than race logistics.  They placed me at the foot of the Shelby Street pedestrian bridge.  My job was to corral the runners as they came towards me, get them around the corner & up the bridge.

I had a blast!  I got to see all my friends who did the tri & encourage them as they ran up the bridge.  My friend Karen had asked me in advance if I could run the bridge with her, but I couldn't because I was manning my station alone.  So when she came by, I had my friend Heidi Huerta, who just happened to be standing beside me, run with Karen up the bridge.  It worked - Karen won 2nd Place Athena in her division!

It was a long day.  I was there from 6:45am - 12:45pm & the majority of that 6 hours, I was standing in direct sun waving a flag.  I had a good time, but in hindsight, the station would have worked better broken into two shifts with one person working the first shift & one person working the second shift.  But it was fun & I got a free tech shirt.  I encourage more of you to volunteer at these races.  They typically need way more volunteers than they get, plus, it's just a good way to give back to the sport.