Into the Water

I'm competing in a triathlon this weekend, something I don't care to do too often because my swim is so lousy. But after the last one, which my neighbor talked me into, I started mouthing off, and before I knew it he had entered, so I felt obligated to, and from thus stupid macho challenges are born.

Anyway, I really don't have a race plan. I plan to survive the swim, which while it will likely be wetsuit legal, is still going to be an ocean swim. (I've only been pool swimming, which gives me no reference point for my relative strength and mental abilities in murky and disorienting ocean surf. Meanwhile, it's not like I've been killing myself on the bike and run lately, so I don't know my strength there, either.) The relative length of the swim compared to the rest of the race, however, gives me a definite leg up in that I won't lose too much time to better swimmers. On the bike and run, I intend to try and appreciate the beauty of the park and town through which the race passes.

One side note: Cape Henlopen is well known for being a ground for horseshoe crabs to lay eggs in the springtime. To wit:

The most incredible spectacle at Cape Henlopen comes in May close to the time of the full moon. It is during this time that endangered horseshoe crabs, prehistoric arthropods that have remained unchanged for 360 million years, come to the beaches to mate and lay their eggs. The small green eggs are laid in nests between the high tide and low tide lines and a single female can lay 80,000 eggs during the mating season. It is around this time that hungry shorebirds flying north arrive along the shores of Delaware to the waiting feast just a short distance under the sand. By the end of June the birds have doubled their weight and the horseshoe crabs have returned to the bottom of Delaware Bay.