This morning was the Acuatlon de Panama, in Amador, in the city. It was a beautiful day for a race.

Here’s our crew from Coronodo – that’s me in the front. I’m the oldest, and shortest* 🙂 Then, across left to right, are Karyn, Myles and Tom.
The race was 2.5 k run, 1k swim (hah!) and then a 2.5 k run. My Garmin tells me that the swim was long.
And the run was slow. I’ve been hitting 5k at the start of 5 mile training runs in around 25 minutes, but I was averaging around 9:45 for this race. So either Thursday’s run – which was a big step back for me – signaled the end of this great stretch of running training, or I just found out that both of our local treadmills are lying sacks of poop when it comes to recording distance 🙂
So I’ve ordered a Garmin Foot Pod. That’s a gizmo that you put on your shoe and run outside, and it learns your mechanics, and then it tells you what you’re really doing on the treadmill. We’ll get down to the truth, even if the truth is awful.
This was my second salt-water open water race, and the swim was really nice – the water was calm and it was Panamanian warm, and it’s nice being able to go into an open water swim with no trepidation at all. That’s a long way from the day that I squealed like a girl at St. George.
I’m holding off the “circling the drain” mentality that I often get after a bad race – at least, so far. We’ll see what happens at 3 AM 🙂 The buzzards might appear on the bedpost and inform me that my career in endurance athletics is over.**
I’m asking God for how He wants me to see this, I hope I get an answer that doesn’t involve “woe is me” and trying to sell my bicycles. There’s no Craigslist down here 🙂
*I’m also the only Amurrican. They’re all Canadian.
**If they’re going to do that, I hope that they hurry up, so that when and if we buy down here, I won’t have to have a lap pool 🙂