The race I've been writing about for the last couple months is right around the corner - scheduled for May 13th. But there's a problem with that. A couple problems, actually.
First of all, that's Mother's Day. Few things say Happy Mother's Day to my beautiful wife (and mother of my 2 boys) less, than to say "have a great day Honey; I'll see you sometime after lunch!"
Next up is the logistics. This is an early race - the horn blasts at 6:30 am. For me personally, that means waking up sometime around 4:00am to get up, get my wits about me, have a decent breakfast, and drive across the city. Then I can deal with parking, getting my gear set up, and getting into the water with 900 other racers.
And finally there's the fee. I get to pay $135 for the privilege of wrecking Mother's Day and waking up that early for a 3+ hour race. Hmmm.
On the flip side, I've trained hard, and I want to accomplish my goal of running a race at this distance. So my training partners and I came up with an alternate plan - let's run our own race!
We're going to set up a small transition area at the gym, with our bikes locked up & ready to ride, and our food/drinks/nourishment easily accessible. We'll swim in the gym's pool, hop onto our bikes and ride a predetermined course, then lock up our bikes and run like the wind. No entrance fees, t-shirts, or messed up holidays. I'm actually excited about it.
According to Men's Health magazine, this is called a bandit race. Cool - now I know the name for it.
-Chris Butterworth
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