Soma

Soma:

I feel like an athlete by association, is that the way it should be? Does that mean I haven’t been racing enough or does it mean that I’ve lost whatever drive it takes for me to consider myself an athlete? The ironic thing about this whole feeling is that I’m in the final big weeks of training for IMAZ. I think working Soma and the Elephant man and watching everyone compete has made me feel kind of like an outsider. Obviously I’m not but it’s really a strange feeling to shake.

But on to more fun things:

Helping official at the Soma Triathlon was great! Across the board everyone was thankful there were enough Refs on the course to break up any packs that might have formed and hopefully we succeeded. The folks I talked to at the airport didn’t report any large packs or any other problems and everyone seemed to have a good time.

This was my first large race that I was an official at and it was pretty interesting. You really do have the best seat in the house to watch the race. Unfortunately I only got to go out on the motorcycle towards the end of the Half Iron so I missed the burnt of the action. However, I did get to monitor the bike mount/dismount area. There were several athletes that tried getting on the bike without buckling their helmets and fortunately the volunteers did a great job of reminding folks about their helmet straps. Some of the athletes had an amazing dismount process, several came in way to hot and crashed at the dismount line, a couple lost shoes and one guy even unbuckled his helmet before starting to do his flying dismount, right in front of me. That’s focus, and I have to give him credit for an incredible act of agility, however it is against the rules. We will just leave it at that.

I moseyed over to the street next to the mount/dismount area to watch the race and make sure there weren’t any blatantly large packs. Now this is the interesting part. It took about 15 seconds for most riders to go from the top curve, down the hill and into the next curve. This is a long way when you are doing 18-30 mph and I don’t think most of the athletes realized that they could legally draft through that section. I made myself pretty obvious by standing in the middle median, it was pretty hard to miss that bright red shirt. Folks would have outstanding manners while I was around. They would complete passes “just like they intended on doing”, pull to the right and let people pass. Very courteous and rule following while I was there, as soon as I made myself less visible people became much more aggressive and more willing to draft. It was pretty funny because this was all in a little 15 second strip of the course, where I couldn’t really ding them anyway. It has really changed my perspective on how to get the most out of those little sections.

There was one athlete on the dismount zone that was a little ticked off at one of the volunteers trying to get him to slow down, he started to yell something until he spotted me, we made eye contact and he just bit his lip. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been there, and I wonder how that athlete was treating the other volunteers.

I kind of felt like that frustrated cop on the freeway, you know the one that is stuck in traffic doing exactly 65 mph, Cars in front, cars in back, cars to each side but strangely enough, no cars 200 yards beyond or behind him. Everyone “acts” good when they think they might get dinged. Which is fine, I was just hoping just to be visible enough to let some of the less scrupulous folks know that there were officials around.

And really, I just noticed the folks breaking or really pushing the rules everyone else, the vast majority, of the almost 1800 athletes were great and I hope they had a good safe, experience.

Congratulations to all the folks that raced! Special congratulations to DP, who finally raced and completed the race!!