The Tritons posted a number of PR's at the San Jose Internation Triathlon, however were missing a crucial 3rd male to qualify for a team score.

Six of us made the trek up to San Jose for the San Jose International Triathlon on Sunday the 24th. We successfully halved the MPG capabilities of Dan Anderson’s Prius by putting four bikes on the roof. We hit almost no traffic, but when we did Chris was quick to optimistically point out that at least we were getting better gas mileage. A lot of the time was spent reading the “If…” book and learning a lot about each other…

We left La Jolla Saturday morning and met Andrew at on exit off the 5 fwy and drove the rest of the way in two cars. On the way up it was Dan Anderson, Blair Ryan, Tammy Wildgoose, Andrew Radin and our personal ‘race sherpa’ Chris Burnham. Darlene was at a conference near Boston and was flying across the country to join us for this race. We regrouped with her at Tom Scherbart’s house where we stayed for the night. Tom’s parents made us a delicious dinner that was perfect after such a long drive and race ahead. Saturday night we made some minor and not so minor bike adjustments in Tom’s driveway, and struggled to get the our tires above 80 PSI using Dan’s bike pump.  With a 7:00am start we were up early. Left Tom’s house by 5:15, and drove to the course, attempting to choke down some calories that early in the morning (I still don’t know if Darlene was successful.)

We were expecting reserved collegiate racks, but that was not the case and we set up in a random spot. Pre race was not too eventful except for the extra strides I got in trying to find the bike repair tent after an official pointed out that I was missing a bar end…my solution “oh, ok I have electrical tape” wasn’t going to cut it this time…Thank you Specialized tent... Julie Moss was announcing in and around the transition area, keeping people entertained. Our wave went off to a bagpipe version of Amazing Grace.       

Chris Burnham who had the best perspective on the race wrote this next section:

We had a particularly good showing on the women's side. All three of our girls broke into the top ten! Darlene Hunt was the first woman out of the water to no surprise and was able to hold off all but two women on the bike. She held strong on the run only allowing one more woman to squeak by and finished in a PR time of 2:25:36 in 4th place. Blair Ryan and Tammy Wildgoose had a little innerteam battle going on in the race. Blair came out of the water ahead of Tammy, but Tammy was able to push hard on the bike and caught and passed Blair. But Blair, having her cross-country running background, was able to use her leg speed to catch back up to Tammy on the run. Blair and Tammy both finished in very respectable times of 2:30:27 and 2:33:00 respectively, placing 6th and 9th, and both earning PRs.

On the men's side is where our problems lay! We needed 3 men to have the required 3 women/3 men to score as a team, but we only had 2. Despite knowing we weren't going to score Dan Anderson and Andrew Radin both gave it their all. Both raced well with Dan rounding out the top ten finishing in a time of 2:09:46 and Andrew finished in a time of 2:29:47, which was good enough for 41st.

We left the course relatively quickly because of the long drive we had ahead of us. We stopped for fresh pie, as per request by Andrew Radin, and Dan, Chris and Darlene couldn’t get enough fruit bars at our rest stops.  We departed from Andrew just above Los Angeles and had a cozy ride down the 405 and 5 back home.Good job to all who raced!