ummmm have i mentioned the doughman? (the doughman quadrathon officially!)

i'll just do a quick preamble before the actual recap - i could not have had better (or faster!) teammates. really. these girls are the best. saturday we celebrated our one year friendship anniversary - whatever, we are girls. (it happens to coincide with the doughman and bri's bday. yes last year on that day i met alysia and heard her tell the 'eating a monster burger then sprinting 2 miles' story. i was like WHO is this girl. she then made me do jello shots. ha! and brooke - "this is my friend brooke. she just won ironman arizona". WOW. and of course bri. lightening fast bri. with the big heart - who literally walked me thru my first masters :) ) we've had the greatest time planning and strategizing and practicing these last few, well MONTHS! and it all come together on saturday and i can say we had a blast! and of course will be back next year to take the title. we already started talking smack... thanks team VS. you girls rock!

ok the race.

we all met bright and early, and along with our manager matt- AKA the biggest nc redneck we could muster- headed over to the race start. a few notes:



1- we had the BEST support crew. marty, nicolai and shana on their bikes all around the course and matt and bobby in the SAG vehicle. it was awesome hearing cheers come from all different directions.. oh and matt had a whistle.. ha!


2- we took great pride in creating our uniforms. and at the start, when everyone saw 4 girls in pink underwear and ribbons.. well i dont think anyone took us too seriously. were they in for a surprise..

3- there were some GREAT costumes. 70 total teams competed and most had a pretty good theme going. some were more aerodynamic than others.. and some a little easier to figure out..



our favorite team photo - matt was in character the WHOLE day. so many people did double takes. it was fantastic!


ok so GO time
we had a quick last minute pep talk/group hug and it was time to dominate :) we may have had lots of pink hearts, but we were putting some serious effort into this thing!



first leg:

Brooke- eats a yogurt parfait at Local Yogurt then takes off and bikes 9 miles. here is where it SUCKED! brooke is not your average biker. she is not your above average biker. she is f-a-s-t. but with a 9 mile ride thru downtown durham, on open roads with stop signs and red lights and a freakin train!, a pack formed and she could not get away. ugh. so she rolls into Hog Heaven and inhales (yes she got ahead of alot of the guys) a plate of BBQ and comes into tag Bri in about 6-7th place.





Bri darts around the corner to Broad St Cafe and has to eat 2 slices of pizza - side note: we practiced this leg - like we did the others.. and i have to admit we were a little worried about her eating abilities (sorry bri!).. in our dry run she took twice as long as alysia and i to eat three slices.. AND there were rumors it was a whole pizza.. ruh roh... BUT bri put her game face on and dove into that pie. she passed people eating. yes let me say that again. she PASSED people, including guys, eating. now she had 1.5 miles to run to the pool. have you ever seen bri run. i mean really run? holy shit. she is fast. some dude tried to keep up with her and she smoked him. love it.


ok so she gets to the pool and has to cross it in an intertube.. the guy next to her is Dain - who own's one of the restaurants on the circuit....i think they let him cheat a little... ha. she didnt even take off her shoes. yes, we were in it to win it. :) no time to waste!



she put us in second place. now alysia heads off on a TOUGH leg of the race. she has to run .8 miles to Dain's place and eat a rather large, ok it was HUGE, goat sausage hoagie. but she nailed it. here she is working hard.



now with that in her tummy - she has another 1.6 mile run - she worked so hard on that run! but some stupid collegiate miler (this dude runs sub 5s on a slow day) and some other long legged guy passed her. but not for lack of a great pace on her part!



i was super excited to see her coming around the corner in 4th place! first was pretty out of reach at this point (not to be sore losers... but there is a pretty good chance their biker ran some red lights... just sayin!). second place took off from eating right as she came in and third was mid meal.. so she tags me and i run over to the table to get my plate of mexican. now you may have seen below in another post the lovely dish that they advertised us eating. let me tell you the slop on my plate was nothing like that. it was very slimey scrabled eggs and very soggy thick buckwheat like tortillas. ugh. it was absolutely disgusting. but my grubby little hands shoved it in as fast as i could. about 1/4 thru, 3rd place finished and took of. shoot!

i kept working on my plate trying to convince myself this was not the worst thing i had ever tasted... BAM done. time to run the 1.6 miles. i just took off like a bat out of hell and focused in on the third place guy. he was about a minute up on me and i caught him about 3/4 mile in. i went by him and in my head thought 'later dude' and kept on truckin. reaching the DAP and seeing my three teamates was awesome! we all had one more thing to eat - 2 loco pops and 2 cupcakes between us. i was sucking wind and when the guy told us we could share the desserts i shoved my pop at brooke who took a huge bite. here is the MVP moment of the race.. so she took that bite and a piece about the size of one dice dropped to the ground. she picked it up and threw it in the trash. one of the doughman officials said "oh no, thats not going to work" so without skipping A BEAT! she reaches into the trash, grabs it and yep, pops it into her mouth.



we then had to WALK, ugh so frustrating, down the steps of the DAP and even on part of the warning track. it was soo long till we were allowed to run. we could see second place just ahead and i swear if we had about 1/4 mile more we would have got them! BUT we came in third out of 70 teams. and 2 all guy teams beat us and really no other girls, even teams with one girl on them came in the top 10 :) so we did GREAT! we were all soo happy with our finish. we really represented well.


we even got bronze colored marshmellow and noodle necklaces - that proceeded to melt as one by one each marshmellow took a dive.... oh well..


After the race, the local abc news interviewed some of the finishers. we convinced them they needed to interview Matt. the reporter was laughing so hard at him - im' not sure if he knew that matt wasnt normally "like" that... At the end of the interview, the reporter said, "Well, Coach, your team finished 3rd today. What are you going to do differently next year?" Matt answered without missing a beat, "Side stretches. Lots and lots of side stretches."


here are the top three teams. yep those guys can eat but they had some steller runners too. we werent afraid to talk some smack up there. i think they were a bit scared.. ha!


so i have to say one thing.. coming into the race we were pretty confident in our foot speed. we knew we could compete there. but we were a little worried that the eating would slow us down. i have to say that all four of us KILLED IT. seriously. i think we made up as much if not more time eating!

for some great video of the day check out bri's blog: http://briblog.martygaal.com/