Finger Lakes

Yesterday I finally arrived in Geneva, New York. It’s beautiful here. I’m staying with the Blume family, which is famous here for being Victor Plata’s host for three weeks last year (Victor won the race, then stayed for a few weeks to do the NYC Triathlon and another race in Canada). Tomorrow’s the 5th Musselman Triathlon and the second Musselman ITU Pan-American Cup. The water is a pleasant 72 degrees, which is about 22.2 Celsius, and (thankfully) just above the wetsuit cutoff. I find ITU races with wetsuits are way more aggressive in the swim because talent doesn’t seem to make as much of a difference with who can hang in. Maybe that’s cocky (or wimpy because I like open water), but there is a big difference in the way a race gets spread out in wetsuit swims vs non-wetsuit. Tomorrow there will not be neoprene, and that makes me happy.

What would make me even happier is if today’s upper 70’s and rain would stick around another day. I’m pretty sure nobody else in the field has dealt with as much rain the past nine months as Seattlites, and I love racing in cold weather. Unfortunately, we can’t always get what we want, and tomorrow will be a high in the mid-90’s with all of today’s rain evaporating to make a nice humid sweat bath for our 2pm race start. Apparently Geneva rarely gets this hot in the summers. I think that means we’re lucky!

The start list for this race went from 17 to 41 in the final week before registration was cut off. This means there were a lot of guys waiting until the last minute to choose a race, and hoping for easy ITU points. I will note that, while I did decide on this race over Life Time Fitness just a couple weeks ago, I was still one of the initial 17 on the list.

I’m getting my stuff together tonight rather lazily. The 2pm start time has me procrastinating on number placement and all that wonderful pre-race organization. Swim, bike, and run races are so easy to prepare for individually, why is it that when they’re all together it takes so much more thought?