Xterra - wedding anniversary

So - in the six weeks between National Hockey Tournament and the Trans-Tasman Challenge in Melbourne, I have two adventure races, a hockey camp, a family holiday, and blimmen Xterra!  My head is in hockey, very focussed, and all other training has fallen off the wagon.  All those races were pre-booked and paid for, team mates expectant, so I'm having to soldier on. 

Xterra doesn't have a teammate as such, it has a husband whom I'm celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary with a weekend away and racing at Xterra.  Normal people go out to a restaurant or stay at a flash hotel and go shopping for extravagant gifts for each other.  We book Nana to babysit and work out how many adventure activities we can cram into a weekend.  This year it's Xterra. 

Xterra has a fantastic MTB, a lovely trail run - I could handle it without specific training if we didn't have to wetsuit up and swim.  I pack a sad pre-race about my complete lack of competence, which is exaggerated by the fact that Tom is now completely triathlon specific and lots of his tri club mates will be racing, all part of this elite group that makes me feel quite inadequate.  But I can't exactly bail from my wedding anniversary (I did contemplate it) so I picked up my bottom lip and went for it.

The swim was not as painful as I expected - being a crap swimmer it actually doesn't make that much difference that I'd done NO swim training - it's just something to get through.

  The bike was on a new course and heavy rain combined with recent logging became an uphill mudbath that was completely unrideable and nearly unwalkable.  This doesn't help my impatience with being back of the pack after the swim, and having to negotiate my was past the road triathletes who are packing themselves on the technical single tracks.  People would get off to walk around a corner, creating the ripple effect where everyone behind them has to get off due to lost momentum, then they'd get back on their bike and ride to the next corner, and down the dominoes would go again.  Blah!!!!!!! 

My success in the run was mostly that I finally managed to own a ridiculous jumping photo.  Nothing else really matters?

2015

Out of 12 women in my age group, 11th in the swim, 6th in the MTB and 7th for the run.  My swim was only a minute slower than last year (I did about ten training swims last year!) and my run was a minute faster (bloody should be after the amount of running I've done this summer.)