Transition 1: Swim to Bike
After I crossed the timing mat, I halfheartedly started trying to remove my wetsuit, and then suddenly there were the wetsuit strippers. I hadn't realized they'd be so close, and I wasn't at all ready for them. I got my suit unzipped and halfway down my arms, then my right sleeve got caught on my Ironman wristband thingy you're required to wear, and progress came to a screeching halt. Meanwhile I had run up to the first set of available strippers, and I just looked at them helplessly, looking like I was wearing a neoprene straitjacket. The guy stripper took hold of my right arm and violently ripped the sleeve down over my wrist, while the female did the same with my left sleeve over my watch. I flopped down on the ground to have them pull off my wetsuit, and realized right as they warned me that my head was in the path of all the athletes. The whole thing was rather a comedy of errors, but they freed me, I checked to make sure my bikini bottoms remained on my body, and then I was up and heading toward the transition tent.
Under normal circumstances, perhaps I wouldn't have been so self-conscious about the bikini bottoms, but transition was a quarter of a mile away from the swim, so there was a hefty run during T1, and I never, ever, ever run in a bathing suit, and I surely don't want potential pictures of that happening. But momentum took over, and I tried to hold my wetsuit in front of me, because throngs of people were cheering and spectating as we all made our run. I heard Betsy yell for me, and I heard a lot of yelling of my name that I figured had to be Sarah and Jamie, and was glad they'd made it there in time.
This is where it became abundantly obvious that it had, in fact, been raining during the swim. The gated-off area we were running through was a river, and the spectators were all wearing ponchos and holding umbrellas. Our path was on the road, but they'd carpetted the very middle section of it, which meant that exactly one person could be on it at once. Which was mostly okay, since most people were running (as much as one can run in bare feet), but then there would be someone walking on the carpet, so you'd have to leave the carpet, and there were some rocks there that you couldn't see because they were in a huge puddle of rainwater. The whole thing was just rather surreal.
Adding to the surreality, when I finally made it to the tents and grabbed my bag from the rack, I ran into the women's changing tent and found it pitch black. The volunteers were saying that there were supposed to be lights, but they had gone out. So I proceeded to transition in a very wet, muddy and dark tent.
A volunteer came over and started pulling things out of my bag and offering them to me. I changed shorts, stuffed some gus in my pockets, put on my socks and shoes, helmet and gloves, and even my sunglasses, though that made it even darker. I don't like riding without eye protection, and I figured I'd need them when the sun came out. At the volunteer's instructions, I left all my stuff in a pile, and she put it back in the bag for me, and I was off and running, back into the rain. Right as I was headed out, the lights came back on.
There were no volunteers outside the tent offering sunscreen, as there was no sun, though I didn't notice that at the time. I heard the volunteers call out my number to the bike volunteers, but when I got to my row, my row's volunteer had someone else's bike out, and she apologized that I had to get my own. Found my bike with no problem, and then proceeded to run/fastwalk it out of transition through a very muddy, grassy field. I commented to someone that it would be interesting to see if we could still clip in after that.
Crossed the timing mat and split my watch and it was under 10 minutes. I couldn't believe that with a quarter mile run from swim to tent, a pitch black changing tent, a change of shorts and a muddy run with the bike, I'd still managed to transition faster than at CdA.