Gregtay's Triathlon Blog

Bringing home some hardware from the place that started is all…. And an example of why you never, ever give up! The summery: Beautiful weather for the BLT this year! I started this sport 5 years ago and never thought I would be very competitive… today I proved I was wrong.  I wasn’t on the swim team in collage, I didn’t run cross country in high school.. and I never really had much in the way of athleticism... I’m just not “that guy”… I was the computer geek kid who got really fat in collage eating too many pints of Ben and Jerry’s while programing late at night and trying to figure out why cheerleaders didn’t like geeks.  So… today I proved that if I can do this, anyone can.  If you are thinking of picking up this crazy sport of triathlon and think you don’t have the body type, aren’t athletic enough, can’t swim, can’t run, etc… well, know that you can overcome all that with some discipline, hard work, pain, and a good team to train and learn with.  It won’t happen overnight.. but

So I came up with something new this year to help me in stay in shape during the off season… which is usually when I gain too much weight and really don’t even want to look at my bike or my running shoes.  So… I went off to Mr. Crampy’s and come home with the new Redline Conquest Team.. yummy!  I am still getting use to a cross bike and hope to do my first race soon(finding time with the new baby adds to the challenge.)  Riding the cross bike is certainly a different feeling… for the last five years anything but asphalt under my tires meant that really bad things were about to happen.  I will post back after my first cyclecross race (which likely means my first few crashes.)

October 2nd, 2011 Here’s a fun little race to finish out the race season… and strangely it was my first “run only” 10K.  My son Kayson was born two weeks before this race and our new little addition to the Taylor family has been consuming all my time… so this race was purely a “wake up and go do it without much thinking” kind of event… my favorite!  The Issaquah 10K course is mostly flat (at least they compared to some of the other course around here) and is part of the big Issaquah Salmon Day’s festival… celebrating the return of the amazing Salmon.  Anyway… on with the race… Typical breakfast then met up with my teammate James to carpool to the race.  Registered, then sat around chatting with teammates and then a little warm up.  Didn’t feel great after the warm up… blah.. oh well.  Race time finally comes and James and I are up front… Gun goes off and we are running… and I can tell I am running WAY too fast but didn’t really do anything to slow down.  At mile #1 I see Coach Jill

1 mile swim | 20 mile bike  |  6.4ish mile run July 24 th , 2011 Olympic distance races have always been a bit of challenge for me… I just have a difficult time figuring out how to pace this distance.  This race was exactly 4 weeks after IMCdA so it seemed like a good step back as a prep for Lake Stevens 70.3 next month and I couldn’t get over to Chelanman this year… so the seafair oly fit the schedule.  I hadn’t raced the Seafair sprint course and the oly was new this year… so lots of unknowns.. but sounded like fun.  Not a ton of goals going into the race other than putting together a solid race and crossing the finish line with nothing left (something I admittedly didn’t do at IMCdA.) Wake up 3:45a, eat, and head out to Seward park.  Got a close parking spot 1 block from transition (really not sure where people park that show up at 6a!), let someone scribble some numbers on my legs and then set up transition which only took a few minutes.  This gave me plenty of time to enj