Monterey Bay Triathlon

This race was supposed to be a training exercise. After flogging myself hard to be ready for Wildflower at the start of May, I was pretty fit. May turned into a bunch of 60 hour dotcom weeks, and June had 10 days of vacation in it, so I got fat and irritable.
When I got back from vacation, I turned up the training volume, including spending 2 days up in Marin and Napa with Peter Cook and a bunch of rabid cyclists (you know who you are) over July 4th. By Thursday before the race, I was still wasted from the weekend before, flaking out of an interval session on the bike and just wishing for a nap.
I spent Friday and Saturday doing as little as possible, and then crawled out of bed at 5.15 on Sunday morning to drive to Aptos. I felt OK. Now to the race:

150 triathletes are standing on the sand, shrouded in thick fog. If you squint hard, you can make out the first marker of the swim course. A horn sounds, and the first wave, men under 35, takes off. Some of them swim the right way, some take off for Alaska. After a couple of minutes, they are all safely round the first buoy, and lost to sight in the fog.
Then our wave starts. I run out into the water, trying to dive through the 4 foot surf crashing onto the beach. I get knocked back hard by a wave, then I'm through the surf and swimming. I get a rhythm going, sight up on the first marker, and before I know it I'm there. I swing left parallel to the beach, and get after a bunch of guys in front of me. In the troughs between the swells, I can't see anything but the swimmers right next to me. On the crests, I can see the next course marker, the lifeguards on their surfboards, but no shore, and no orcas, sharks or sea monsters.
After what seemed too short a time, I passed the last marker and turned for shore. In an xterra moment, I used the headlights of a truck on the beach to guide me back to shore. The closer we got to the beach, the more I'd body-surf. One big wave breaks around me, and my hands are hitting the bottom. I stand up and try to run out of the water through the undertow.
At last I'm clear, and I check the time. I've been going 19 minutes, way too short a time for 1500 meters. Either there's a huge current running, or the course was short. OK then. I run across the sand to the trail up from the beach to the transition area. At the bottom of the trail I pull off my wetsuit and put on my running shoes for the half mile run to my bike. Several people go by whilst I do this, but once I get going I pass most of them again. I'm climbing a fairly steep grade, and I'm out of breath. At last I make it over the top and to my bike, where I pull on my bike shoes and my aero helmet (think Lance A. without the fancy graphics), grab my bike and head out for the 25 mile bike ride.
Because I didn't totally kill myself in the swim, I'm feeling pretty good, and I start to pass people right away. There's a short climb up from Seascape Resort to San Andreas Road, then it's a rolling downhill to Manresa State Beach for about 2 miles. I'd run this road about 2 months before, so I knew what to expect. I'd anticipated the long drag up from there to the plateau behind the coast, and I hammer up it as hard as I can. I roll over the top and down a series of steps into the fields south of Watsonville. I start to feel hungry, so I grab a Gu from my pocket, tear the top off it, bring it to my mouth and squeeze hard. Suddenly I'm wearing raspberry cream gel from wrist to shoulder, and all down my left leg too. I hadn't quite ripped off enough of the packet top, so now I'm disgustingly sticky, but at least I taste pretty good!
Once I get out of the fog, I can see the bike course zigzagging away across the lettuce fields all the way to the turnaround. The whole field is strung out in front of me, bouncing over the ruts and mud clods which cover the roads. I'm moving at 23-24 mph with a New Order track running through my head (Your Silent Face - thanks, Alan), picking off riders one by one. I hit the turnaround with about 40 guys in front of me, and start working back. It's pretty obvious why I was going to so fast on the way out - I'm now plugging into a 10mph headwind. To pass the next few folks, I keep on having to go anaerobic, particularly over the climb back up to the top of the course. The fastest guys are long gone, and I'm just scrapping with the best of the rest. It starts to hurt quite a lot, so I ease up slightly.
Somewhere in the last mile my focus goes and I drift right, into the verge. Pretty soon it's clear I'm going down, as my front wheel is scrubbing the curb and I can't steer. I'm doing 20mph, so this is going to hurt. In slow motion, my right handlebar digs into the earth bank at the roadside, and the bike and I rotate around it. My neck gets tweaked by the pointy back of my helmet hitting the ground, then I'm lying on my back, staring at the blue sky, with my bike on top of me. No time to think - I jump up, straighten the saddle, hop on and start riding again. Everything seems functional, although the Gu patches on my leg and arm have bits of grass and dirt stuck in them now. I finish up the bike leg with a quick descent to the transition area, glad to be back safe.
It takes a couple of minutes to get my legs going on the run. Several people cruise by me seemingly effortlessly. After a bit my mojo comes back, and I work through the two out-and-back loops of the run course not much slower than I'd run a 10k two weeks prior. I even catch back one guy who'd put 200 metres into me early on. I cross the finish line alone, in 2:21:20 or so. The guy who removes my chip tells me I'm bleeding, so I wander over to first aid and bleed over there instead. They fix me right up and send me on my way. It's over, I'm done, and it didn't even hurt much.

As they say in South Park, I learned something today. Don't crash your damn bike into the verge!