Africa's Hardest Triathlon

Yeppers, my amazing husband finished what is known as "Africa's Hardest Triathlon" this morning at Sun City and man did he ROCK IT!!! It is an international race, so triathletes from all over the world competed. The winner was an actual Olympian and he was seriously from outer space. He SMOKED everyone, even second place was a good 5 minutes behind him.

First I'll start with the day before his race. We stayed the night in a campsite in Pilanesberg near Sun City because the race started at 7am and Sun City is 2 1/2 hours away. We spent half the day driving around the park before camping out. We had our best giraffe experience. There were 20 giraffes that came to say hi and ate around us for a while. Pretty cool.

The bugs on the road were actually the highlight today. It must be bug season because they were all on the road. It was pretty gross. Here's our friend Mr. Dung:

Ok back to the triathlon:

All I know is that I couldn't have done this race. THE COURSE WAS SO HARD. I seriously would have had a heart attack.

Olympic Triathlon:

1.5km swim (1 mile)
40km bike (25 miles)
10km run (6.2 miles)

Here he is stretching before the swim:


He seriously is the best person to race with because he's always joking and making people laugh around him. They are lucky guys:

The swim was nice, it was SUPER clean water (lucky) and it was in such a beautiful place. Ben really enjoyed the swim (except that his nose clip slipped off because of the sunscreen he'd put on and he doesn't do as well without it).

That's him in the green cap on the left and the guy taking a breath on the right:


DONE!


Telling us about how hard it was to swim without his nose clip:

The bike was SO hilly and it had this half-mile stretch that was almost vertical it was so steep (and he had to do it twice because he had to do 2 laps of 20km). But Ben said it was his favorite part of the race, like me.

Last stretch of the bike, the major hill:




Getting ready for the run:

The run was uphill for the first half hour, and by uphill, I mean UPHILL. Ben said he felt like he was going to pass out. His ankle really started to hurt, but he made friends in each leg and they helped push each other to the finish.

I AM SO PROUD OF HIM!!! Seriously, he did so well considering it was his first, his sprained ankle, only having trained for 9 weeks, the toughness of the course, and the fact that South Africans are obsessed with triathlons (each person we've met doing them has done 10-50 of them) and everyone couldn't believe we were only doing one.

Aren't we so hard core!!?!? And we're good at beating our goals. Ben's was to beat 3 hours and 30 minutes and he got 3:23:48! (The winner, Olympian Sander Berk, got 2:05:30, just to give you an idea of how big this race was).

He is so handsome. This is when he jumped in the pool to relax and cool off:

He practically needs a wheelchair and will be out of commission for a couple days. Good thing he has the next 2 weeks off!! I'm SOO happy! This next week he is taking "Study Leave" and will be busy studying the GMAT all day, but he'll be home at least and that will be nice. And then Friday we leave for CAPE TOWN!!! We seriously can't wait. It's a much needed long vacation that will be so much fun. Can't. Wait.