BACK TO THE ROOTS

The first triathlon I participated was in the 90´s in Kiel and because of this I decided myself to swallow some sea-water again and travelled with my whole family a week earlier, from Düsseldorf to Rendsburg( 500km), to visit my parents and to get to know the heavy head wind at the coast. In the week before the start, we had lots of rain and storm, it wasn´t like a real holiday for us or some kind of exercise camp for me. Twice I sat on the bike for a longer journey, thru the rain, wind and storm, it was my dad´s bike, because I was to scared to ride my own. Than on raace day, the weather was a little bit better, first it was dry, later it started to drizzle. When you enter the 16degrees warm water, you froze immediately. On my way to the transition area, I tried to get rid of the freezer burn and the cold rigor. My swim time: 28:08min. After I sat on the bike, I had to ride up the Holtenauer bridge for more than 1,5km and crossing the Baltic sea channel. You had to ride the bike curse twice, so you had to ride up the bridge 4x. But at least I was able to hold my position during the bike part and needed 1:17:49h for the 40km. Than, we got my „favourite“ part, the running. You had to run 4 rounds on the shore of the “ KIeler Förde”, surrounded and attended by lots of viewers, spectators and of course my own support team. I had a good day, and let almost everybody pass me, and thought about the  slogan: only the way, is the finish and participating is just the main cause…but in fact I thought, damn it, it´s really exhausting, why the heck I´m doing this???? Afterall, I crossed the finish line with a running time of 52:59min, it wasn´t really slow for myself, and my overall time was 2:38:57h. So, what more, I reached my goal of the season 2011 very early, to finish under 2:40h.   Marco Schröder

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