Hmmm that’s not how it was supposed to go.  Mazatlan was pretty bad…I can’t remember the last time I felt that bad in a race.  It’s one thing to have a crap day over a race that’s a few minutes long, another thing entirely to know from the start you feel like crap and still have more than 2 hours to go.  Way more than 2 hours in my case in Mazatlan.  It was like a bad dream where I just couldn’t go no matter how hard I tried.  It was frustrating and disappointing after a winter where I felt like I had really had come into my own as a triathlete.  I won’t dwell on it too much, here are some “highlights”:

- run-in beach starts are awesome.  If only all swims started with an all out 50m running sprint.  However, in order for this to be really beneficial, one must swim all out once she stops running, not just bob around.

- the mango salesman, hoisting his stadium vendor-style platform of the juicy fruit is way too tempting when cycling during the middle of the day in Mexico.  Noticing said mango salesman mid-race should be a huge signal one is not focused on race.

- water baggies are far superior to water bottles, mainly because of the novelty factor. Why don’t they have these at races in the US?

- Jordan totally crushed it and scored his first ITU points with an 11th place finish!  Step away ladies, the 23rd highest ranked American triathlete is all mine =)

- Dan and Matt had great races too, not far off from scoring points.  Ryan suffered from some severe cramping on the run leg, but still finished his first go at the ITU format, which is a great accomplishment.  Cyrus had an unfortunate bad day and suffered the same fate I did in Tuscaloosa, but I wish I could have had his positive attitude about it.

- I forgot how much sunburn sucks, and it sucks even more when you have opaque numbers written all over your limbs.  #84 fo’ life.

- The Mexican TV crew didn’t care how badly I placed, they still interviewed me and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t pretty awesome.

- I finished an ITU race…one step at a time, slowly working my way up to becoming a respectable pro.

The rest of the trip was great, aside from my massive sunburn that kept me in the shade all day Sunday and all of Monday morning.  After lunch on Monday Jordan and I took out some rented surfboards and stayed in the water until it was dark.  I haven’t had that much fun playing in the waves in a long time, and it might’ve been one of my best days ever on a surfboard.  So much fun…totally forgot about the crap race.

Highly recommend Mazatlan!  We stayed at the Hotel Playa Mazatlan and it was superb!  We’re definitely going back next year =)

Thanks to everyone for all of the encouragement after the race…definitely was appreciated! Time to get things moving and ready to go for Alcatraz in a little over a month. Figure out what went wrong, how to prevent it, and get back on the horse.

For more Mazatlan race write-ups check out:

riptidemultisports.com

Ryan Borger

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 9:24 pm and is filed under race, triathlon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.