BrewHAHA

On August 3rd was the 22nd annual Brewhouse Triathlon was held at Pike Lake in Duluth. I did this race two years ago with Cadesdad and mom and couple of highschool friends. Cadesdad and I had a friendly bet on who would win between the two of us. I must mention that Cadesdad is a professional tri-athlete and his wife is even better. Needles to say Cadesdad won the race two years ago.

Last year I was not able to compete because we were in the cities. So this summer the battle was back on with Cadesdad. My worst part of the triathlon is swimming by far. This year I thought I was better prepared but when I did a practice swim on the Wednesday before the race at my parents place at a local lake and my performance was abysmal to say the least. I was forced to admit that during the swim I expected to see every kind of stroke. My goal was to have a little more of the crawl stroke then two years ago which did not exist. The other downer is that Brian is able to crawl the whole way in the water. I knew that would be behind from the beginning.

The swim went as expected. I used every stroke I could think of, yes even the side stroke. When I got out of the water the race really began for me. My transition to the bike went well for me. The bike portions was about 10.5 miles, by the way the swim was a 1/3 of a mile. The biking went well. As I pulled into the transition area I saw Cadesdad heading out on the run. I yelled "you better run fast" or something obnoxious. During the transition from bike to run I had trouble finding my slot with my shoes. I finally found the shoes and hit the pavement. The run was 2.5 miles. As I was getting close to the turnaround I saw Cadesdad and was able to pass him right after the turn. The picture below is one that was in the Duluth News Tribune. The caption under the photo has me from Eagan. You can see Cadesdad in the back ground in the blue and white stripe shirt. When it was over I was able to sneak out a victory by about 20 seconds, but afterwords I found out that Cadesdad had issues with his biking shoes in transition as well as not be able to find his slot for the running segment. In the end his wife beat both of us hands down.

The neat thing is the three of us will join forces on September 6th for the Burrito Union 10 hour triathlon. It should be a great day with great friends.

The Tall Ships Cometh

Last weekend in Duluth three tall ships came into port. The ships were replicas of ships from the 1800s. VisitDuluth was the sponsering agency. Check out their website for the event. They have some great pictures of the ships. The ships arrived Thursday at 4:00 and went through the Lift Bridge at the same time. Apparently there was close to 100,000 thousand people down watching the ships come in. The interesting thing is that Duluth has only about 85,000 for a population. The newspaper reported there were thousands of tourist from out of town. The plan for us to see the ships was to go Firday morning. We were hoping to get there before the weekend crowd. The plan did not go well. The family arrived to Bayfront around 10:00, so did several other thousand people. We parked a ways down from the DECC and headed to the massive crowds. There was a massive line that was on 5th street heading towards downtown. We were not going to wait in that line. We ran into a a guy who was walking the opposite direction and said there was a shorter line behind the Aquarium . We decide to go there and take our chances. We waited for about an hour and 20 minutes. We told the kids it was good practice for Disney World (for which we are going to in October). We got on the Pride of Baltimore. The boat was interesting. Apparently it was used to represent La Amistad. This was the only boat we made to over the whole weekend.