Cultus Lake Triathlon

It started off as a little bet and a chance for Mark to do his first triathlon. It ended up being a great weekend with some solid races from the NSTC crew.

This was a role reversal weekend for Mark and I. Normally I am the one racing, while Mark holds all my gear, and cheers me on from the sidelines. This weekend, however, Mark was going to try his hand at a triathlon.

On Saturday morning, we all drove to Cultus Lake to get checked in. As there weren't too many places to eat around the campsite, we ended up going to the Cultus Lake Pub with the whole crew. The night started with dinner and a few pitchers of beer and ended up with the boys on the dance floor and much more beer.... not your regular race ritual!

On Sunday morning, we all got to transition nice and early. My task was to find coffee while the boys got all set up. Luckily it turned out to be a really warm day and Mark didn't freeze to death without a wetsuit for the swim.

Mark had seeded himself pretty far forward for the start of the swim. When we first moved to Vancouver two years ago, Mark could barely swim and if we were in the pool together, I would kick along side him as he swam. Needless to say, he has made some HUGE improvements. As the swim came to an end, Mark was about 20th coming out of the water and looking pretty good.

I personnaly thought that as long as Mark had a good swim, he would be set to take down lots of people on the bike. For those of you that don't know, Mark is a former pro cyclist. That being said, Mark has only rode his ride about 10 times all summer and is still riding his steel framed bike that he last raced with in 2004!

As the bike course was an out and back, I did see much of what was going on until they got back to transition. Mark made up quite a lot of ground on the bike and came off in 5th place. At this point I wasn't quite sure what would happen. Mark claims he really isn't much of a runner, and like the rest of this summer, he hasn't trained much at all.

As I stood at the finish line watching the leaders come through, the next thing I saw was Mark coming in for a solid 4th place! Not bad for his first race, eh?!

In fact, all of the North Shore Tri Club that competed that day had a great race and it was so much fun to watch. We finished off the weekend with a swim in the lake, lunch, and mini golf before heading back home. Hopefully we'll see Mark back in action next summer!