Virtual Race Update

Here's the e-mail that finally came through late yesterday. Up to that point, no mention or acknowledgement of the weekly or final results (my comments in black):

First let me say that I am completely impressed with everyone's effort and enthusiasm to be active, healthy and to participate in this race. You're motivating me and that is no easy feat.

You've all been very patient with me as I worked through the conversions and the bugs of our first virtual race. This has been a good learning experience and I'm already planning how to do it better the next time. [probably meaning I will either be excluded next year or I will have to bike 20 mph to qualify!]

This was completely unexpected [and unbelieved] so early in the race, but we already have a winner. Congratulations to Vickie Baker who logged 176 miles and virtually biked all the way to the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa. [and let me mention again, it is only 139.5 miles to Traverse City!] Vickie is the winner of the $300 gift card to the destination as well as this week's incentive prize for logging the most miles within the first week.

And yes, I actually got a few congratulations from people in the firm, but of course not from the ones you really hoped would respond!

But not only did I win the "race" and the prize, but I learned a lot about my abilities last week. And I had been offhandedly thinking of doing a week like this for a long time, since I know how much it can boost your endurance in running and swimming. I read somewhere quite a while ago some training tips from one of the pros who said the easiest way to improve your overall fitness (for triathlon anyway) was to do more biking. "You can bike hours every day and not get injured [most likely], but you can't run hours every day and avoid injuries." That has stuck in my mind for a long time, and I was finally able to put that to the test.

I hope to do this again next year because it really made a huge improvement for me. Now if it translates over into a better bike in my next race, I will definitely know it worked!