Emmett Triathlon

Saturday, August 10th, Marc competed in the Emmett Sprint Triathlon. At least one of us has run this race every year for the past 4 years. It's a fun event, good course, don't have to travel too far and comes at the end of the summer so it's usually the "peek" point of training. 

This race was difficult for Marc in a few different ways. He had returned home late the night before from a business trip in Salt Lake in which he sat in meetings all day, and didn't sleep well at night. They had driven from Boise to Salt Lake and back, so he was especially sluggish. Secondly, I made the decision to not go watch him. It's too difficult for me to walk/stand for an extended period of time. I knew that if we went all the way to the race start to watch him swim, I couldn't walk fast enough to get back to the car, drive down the mountain (that is if they even let cars on the course, in the past I've been  majorly detoured) and make it back to watch him start the run or possibly even finish the race. That meant we could go down just to watch the finish line...but both of us felt like it didn't justify the cost in gas to go down for such a short time.

He hitched a ride with Dan Rhoton:

Dan's son Caleb was also competing in the race as part of a team, with 2 other Young Men who Marc works with through church. The boys were out to beat Marc and highly motivated :)

Marc had the best swim he's ever had. He came out of the water feeling great and got a good start on his bike. However, in the middle of the bike, he said his energy just absolutely zeroed out and he felt like was peddling through mud with how heavy his legs felt. 

He made it through the bike, lost a little more time than he wanted to but was still in pretty good position. He said he absolutely zonked on the run. He had to stop and walk a minute (which he never does) and really had to fight through motivating himself to keep running and finish the race. He set small goals for himself to finish the first mile in 9 minutes, the second mile in a lesser time, etc. He finished, but certainly not in the time that he wanted to.

 One of the moms of the young men who was racing snapped a few pictures for us:

Considering the difficulty he had on the bike and run, he still did really well! He is in the most competitive age group and he finished 5th in his age group and 26th overall!

The young men who were out to get him ended up winning the team relay! Marc said the best part of the day was celebrating with them and watching how they handled themselves:

I'm glad there was some friendly faces there to cheer him on! Way to go honey!