Lake Stevens 70.3 was a race my coach convinced me to do. He said I needed more experience racing before Whistler, and this would be a good chance since it’s a nice local race, and ~30 team mates would be doing.

Going into the race I wasn’t too worried. We had ridden the bike course several times, and it was very hilly (particularly compared to flat Galveston), but I ha conquered the hills several times. I was convinced my overall time would be slower, so no pressure 🙂

Race day was cold, and involved a 45min drive up to the race start since we opted to stay at home not a hotel. I finally started to get excited once I saw all my teammates, and coaches at the swim start! My coaches instructions about the race were to swim faster, have faster transitions, and run faster. 🙂

The swim start was fun since one of my teammates Alexa was in my wave. Then the gun went off, and I swam like hell, faster than Galveston. I found someone to draft off, and just kept following right through the thick of everything. I finally got punched in the face while swimming, but I kept going.

I started the bike feeling pretty good, and since I had ridden course before I was feeling confident. My coach had said zone 3 for watts, and so I pushed it. Up the hills, down the hills, up the hills, down the hills. Never a flat moment, but I was having fun flying past people, and the adrenaline and race euphoria was definitely kicking in!

I started the run, and decided to run (no walking aid stations) the entire first loop at my assigned pace. I was feeling pretty good, and it was awesome seeing all of my teammates out on run! I was feeling downright giddy and euphoric, racing was a drug and it felt great :-). Lap two rolled around, and I decided to tough it out, and run the whole dang half marathon!  Crossing the finish line was definitely the highlight of the day, and unbeknownst to me at the time I had accomplished a new PR with a time of 5:38:17, a whole 12mintues faster then Galveston!

Thanks to everyone out there racing and cheering, it was definitely a fun race to see some many wonderful teammates! 🙂

The two awesome parts about these times are, my swim time was only 8 second slower than Guido’s and this is a new half marathon PR by 7 minutes!

Age group ranking: 17^th

Result