Pumpkinman Sprint

Despite the torrential rain that we drove through to get to the Pumpkinman race, the race itself actually had pretty good weather. The rain cleared up just as we arrived to the race, a little bit later than we had expected. After Janda got registered, we heard an announcement that there was 10 minutes left until transition closed. Since Janda's bike was still in the car, that was a bit of a time crunch. Janda's warmup consisted of running his bike to transition, running back to the car to get his googles, and running to the swim start. Not exactly ideal.

The swim got off to a pretty good start for Janda. He hung onto Dean's heels for a bit and then came out of the water only about 45 seconds back from the top 3 guys, Dean, Nick and Tony Delonge. After he ran up a super-steep hill to transition, he was out on the bike. Not surprisingly, Dean killed everyone on the bike and it was up to the other guys to try to run him down. Janda had to make up over a minute on Tony and over two minutes on Dean, so it all came down to the run. He chased Nick out of transition and had the fastest run of the day, but it wasn't fast enough to catch Dean and Tony so he finished third overall. He was on the podium and got a paycheck, so not bad all things considered.

Running up the killer hill in a wetsuit!

Speeding out of transition.

Coming down the finish chute.

After the race we waited to see how Janda's other athletes were doing. Despite the poor conditions, every did really well. Craig was 8th overall and creamed his age-group and Amanda finished third woman overall and had the fastest female bike split of the day. After everyone finished and cooled down, we hit the food tent. There was a large variety of food: clam chowder, chili, pasta salad, bagels, fruit, muffins and the piece de resistance- two flavors of whoopie pies, chocolate and pumpkin. Everything was really good and there were even some left over mini chocolate whoopie pies to bring home for later!

The award ceremony was nice and after the ceremony the race winner told me and I quote "I like your blog" That might have been the highlight of the day for me, even cool as a cucumber Janda thought that was pretty cool.

Podium shot: Dean, Tony and Janda
(They are all on different height podiums, Dean's just THAT tall!)

After the ceremony ended we headed home, making a quick stop at the Kittery Outlets where I got some running tights and casual shoes at the Nike outlet and Janda found a new pair of racing flats for his last two races of the season. All in all it was a very successful day and we were back home mid-afternoon.