Man did it all come together..
Man did we deserve this...
A year ago I took a gamble by not joining DART but staring my own team with Eric Bone, MerGeo.com, sponsored and owned by him, run by me, surrounding ourselves with strong athletes... Aaron Rinn, Liz Stahl were among them, and these two joined us (just like in the 12h Trioba) to give it one more stab this season. We had raced well before but its hard getting a team to race consistently well, and even with a lot of help and advice from Cyril from DART (he was extremely helpful in helping me out with so much information) we came up short a couple of times.
This race was no different at first... problems in the boat (too tired and mad about it to ramble on) an then a blown out bike tire by Eric (same deal... i ll just suck it up!) made us drop into the middle of the pack, but we recovered after a few hours and got to the bike/run transition in 6th place, about 40 minutes behind DART. Luck changes and this time in our favor.. some of the top teams misnavigated and lost a lot of time on one of the early CPs and all of a sudden we found ourselves in 1st place, hauling butt to get done with the trek and continue towards the finish.
Eric overexerted himself in the effort to stay ahead and started hurling late in the race, and we could slowly see our gains fade.
A last push on the bike saw DART almost catch up with us on the long straight road to Ellensburg, but we dug deep with the motivational shouts of Aaron, towing each other as hard as we could to finish the race just a mere two minutes ahead of DART! We had done it, finally, beat DART, and I could now put that behind me and focus on my next, 2nd season with MerGeo.com!
Liz powers ahead of the boys to get to the last trek/bike TA
