Ecuador…So Weird!

“Why are you here? That’s so weird!”

This statement pretty much sums up the whole experience in Playas, Ecuador last weekend. I suppose if you are a middle-aged Ecuadorian visiting your favorite vacation destination with your family, driving around the Playas downtown area in your Ford Pinto-esque vehicle (with a passenger to seat belt ratio easily exceeding 1.0), and you see five Gringos (The American delegation) walking around with ice cream cones in their hands on a Sunday evening, you can’t help but to just roll down your window and yell, “Why are you here? That’s so weird!” I couldn’t have said it better if I tried!

The trip down was easy enough – a red eye from LAX to Panama City and then a short hop down to Guayaquil, Ecuador (well, I should say that the trip down was easy for Chris Foster and me – Steve Sexton, on the other hand, had possibly the worst trip in the history of taking trips, what with being stranded in Panama City due to passport issues for a good 12 hours or the fact that he collapsed 30ft from the finish line in the race due to heat stroke). Anyways, after the flights it was just a short two hour van ride to Playas. In the United States the van that we took would best be described as a “ten passenger van,” but Ecuador was not about to be limited to such a small number (see picture below). Oh, and our driver took us to her house in Guayaquil before we left and we got to meet her purple dog:

Adults and/or kids. Ha!

I’m pretty sure this dog doesn’t know that somebody spray painted it purple.

I visited Ecuador back in 2005 to see my brother who was teaching English in Cuenca at the time and I can vouch for the fact that Ecuador is a beautiful country. In fact, Ecuador is unique in that it is sort of a microcosm of everything South America has to offer with the Pacific coastline to the west, the Andes mountains cutting through the middle of the country, and the rain forest in the east. However, having said that, I’ll just say that Playas did not live up to that hype at all. Run down roads and buildings, creepy uninhabited sky rise hotels – Why did you hold a triathlon here? That’s just weird!

The race was the most normal thing I did all week. It was pretty textbook. I stayed near the front on the swim and the bike (no heroics or attacking). Two Japanese athletes and a Puerto Rican attacked on the bike and got a 50 second lead going into the run. Out of T2 I paced behind two Brazilian athletes, accelerated on them at around 4k, and caught the final Japanese athlete around 5k. At this point it was around 12:30 PM, 95 degrees, and ridiculously humid. I had a pretty big gap so I just tried to survive – no collapsing right before the finish line! I held on pretty easily (it helped that the run course was only 5.3 miles) and crossed the line to win my first race as a professional! Sweet! Oh and for those that are wondering why it took me 50 minutes and 40 seconds to run 5.3 miles (that’s what the results say), that split is actually the last three laps of the bike + T2 + the run. I don’t know why that happened other than to maximize the weirdness.

This is about 2k into the run.

Chris and I got giant oysters after the race. Don’t worry, it’s cooked.

In other news I spent the night in the emergency room last Wednesday. This race in Ecuador was possibly my last trip south of the border to score ranking points and I thought I had made it out of this phase of my career completely unscathed. About 24 hours after I returned I was having stomach issues and 12 hours after that I had lost 11 lbs, couldn’t eat or drink anything without it coming back up, and had to go the the ER for testing and three 1000 mL IVs. I’m fine now and back to training so no worries! I’m 99% sure it wasn’t the oyster…