Blankets Creek Dirty, Cold, and Rainy Duathlon

Whew! Another one in the books. As happy as I was yesterday when I was able to mark the course without getting rained on, this morning we were greeted with pretty steady rain that started about 30 minutes after we set up registration. I was fairly concerned when it was 7:15 and there were only about 10 cars in the parking lot. Of course everyone waited till the last minute to show up to registration, so they got to stand in a mile long line, all the while getting rained on. My fingers were frozen from flipping through wet numbers and I couldn't WAIT to get out of registration and get some feeling back in my limbs. We had a fair number of no-shows, so thankfully parking and TA space were not an issue.

The conditions were pretty miserable...steady rain and 40 degrees with a cold breeze every once and again. There wasn't a whole lot of cover, so I was really glad I wasn't racing and could hide under the timing tent.

The run seemed to go pretty well, but the bike was a disaster for a lot of folks. Tons of mechanicals...mostly people walking out with their chains in their hands or brake problems. OutSpokin had a good day, where Thomas Turner and Derek Boyd took first place in the 2 person male and Julia Radmann won the overall women's title. Everyone who finished the bike course was covered from head to toe with mud...most looked like they had rolled around in it, but I don't think that was the case.

Two high end Specialized Bikes were awarded via a banana eating contest, where the much smaller women had to go into triple OT and ended up eating the same number of bananas as the men.

In the end, the only malfunction we had was with the printer as it wouldn't feed the damp paper, so we weren't able to post full results for folks to see. Perhaps that was for the best, as some folks tend to be overly concerned about their split times. Some more pleasant weather would have been nice, but we had a good crowd of spectators and sponsors despite the conditions. Now its time to relax..I wish the weather called for sun tomorrow, as I just don't think I can tolerate any more rain after today.