Race Report: Georgia Veterans' Triathlon 2010

Meanwhile, back at the Woman’s Triathlon….

The Georgia Veterans’ Triathlon is held, appropriately, in Georgia Veterans’ State Park, in Cordele, Georgia: up the road from Tifton, and down the road from Macon on I-75.

The park is fabulous- we’ve camped there twice, in a huge campsite, and stayed at the Lodge once, in a beautiful room (in which I proceeded to put black marks on the wall with my bike- they came off, thank goodness). The park is on Lake Blackshear, and sports both a regular gold course and a disc golf course (giving me two different opportunities to suck at golf). There’s a great museum with some great military memorabilia, a swimming beach and a couple of great restaurants. So, once you’ve finished your morning workout, and have eaten your post-race sausage dog provided by Stripling’s General Store, and take your nap, there are lots of things to do.

As for the race itself- it’s one of my faves.

The swim is a 500 yard beach start in the very nice warm water of Lake Blackshear. The bike course is rolling and a little technical, following the road that follows the edge of Lake Blackshear. The run covers 3.1 miles of park road (and is sometimes brutally hot).
It’s a well-organized, fairly small, laid back race.

The women started in the last couple of waves, so it was basically a Woman’s Triathlon later on the course. This is a very good thing.

I believe that I’ve discussed the phenomenon in other blog posts. An all-woman triathlon is very different from a co-ed triathlon. . I over-generalize, I know- we do have very assertive and aggressive riders in my gender- but there’s a different vibe there, especially amongst us back-of-the-pack female athletes. Although Cordele is, of course, a co-ed triathlon, our starting position created a Virtual Woman’s Triathlon.

Two classic examples of Woman’s Triathlon behavior from the race:

I Had to Use the Mom Voice.

As a rule, I do not mind young people racing triathlon alongside me. There are some excellent young triathletes out there. The kid that I had to deal with on the bike course, that day, was another story entirely.

Kid was an absolute nuisance on the bike. I caught up to him a couple miles into the bike, on one of the more treacherous turns in the course. He was weaving all over the road; he’d call “on your left,” start to pass, change his mind and nearly ride into another cyclist. When someone tried to pass him, he looked over at them and sped up. He drafted. He blocked.

But when Kid finally started riding to the left of the center line, I had about enough. It was time for the Mom Voice.

“You need to get on the right side of the lane NOW! You are breaking the rules, and you are going to get hit by a car and then you won’t grow up to be a pro triathlete (actually, I pray that you don’t grow up to be a pro triathlete, period).”

The Mom Voice worked- at least, long enough to get around the little monster and get some distance between us.

[At this point in the report, I would really like to climb up on my soapbox and express my views about Kid’s participation in this triathlon. But, for the sake of brevity, I will refrain. Perhaps another time. Soon.]

No, No: You Go On. I’m Not Competing Today.

I was, thankfully, past Kid and on the final couple of miles of the bike course. I was thinking about passing the woman in front of me when, suddenly and inexplicably, she flew over her handlebars and lands, faces first, on the ground.

I unclipped and dropped my bike on the grass.

The poor girl was trying to sit up. There was blood dripping from her chin, and she had somehow woven herself into the bike when she crashed. One of her feet had lodged itself in the spokes of the front wheel, of all places. I wiggled her foot out of her shoe to free her, as there seemed to be no way in hell that I could free her shoe from inside of the spokes. We used the sock to put pressure on the gash in her chin, which was now dripping blood steadily onto the asphalt.

No fewer than 4 other women stopped, jumped off their bikes, and came over to help. Another woman slowed down to talk to us.

“Are any of you girls competing today? ‘Cause, if you are, you can go ahead, and I’ll stay with her.”

We all insisted “no, no, we’re fine. You go ahead and go. We’ll stay with her.”

And we all did, until a passing truck driver offered to carry her and her mangled bike back to transition. One of the girls helped her to the truck; another loaded her bike on to the bed of the truck; another loaded her own bike onto the truck and rode with them.

I got on my bike and rode out onto a now empty course. I wasn’t disappointed about the loss of a lot of time in the race, but I really didn’t want people to think that I was last in because I was an incredibly slow pathetic biker. This is also a very classic Woman’s Triathlon attitude: we are pathologically afraid of finishing last, because everyone will laugh at you and point and you will be completely humiliated and never do another triathlon again, if you ever do one to begin with, because what’s the point in doing a triathlon if that’s going to happen to you? This is why, of course, our beloved Sally Edwards always volunteers to be the Final Finisher in her Woman’s Triathlons.



Surprisingly, I was not dead last that day. I did manage to pass a few people on the run. Everything else ended fine. Kid disappeared before I could throw him (and his parents) in Time Out; the injured triathlete, I heard, needed stitches on her chin, but that was about it.

I had my sausage dog, and my nap, and then played a very bad game of disc golf. And I remembered, even though I don’t race as much as I want to, how awesome this sport is—and how awesome women triathletes are.