Biathlon = Pain

Yesterday, I didn't go for my normal morning run because I was going to meet David after work. He had gotten an email from Bain's "sports committee", who had informed us about these biathlons that occur over the summer. The biathlon was a 4 KM run and a 300 m swim right afterwards. But before I go into the actual race, I had a very interesting ferry ride. Even though Halloween was the previous day, there were about 30-40 students dressed up in costume, and I mean ALL OUT in costume. People seem to take dressing up pretty seriously.

Most of them were drinking RTDs, which stand for Ready to Drink. These cans are usually mixes of soda and alcohol. Because of their happy state, they started to talk to most of the innocent bystanders that they were bothering. After some started talking to me and had asked me to take a photo of them, and then I whipped out my camera and asked if I could take a photo of them.


And then I shamelessly tried to get off the ferry first and prepare to take photos of them as they left the ferry. Apparently, they were all 11th graders going to their version of prom.




Back to the biathlon. David was very excited to try it out and seemed to think it would be doable. He was the one pushing me to do the race. The race was divided into 5 waves, and we started in Wave 5, which was the group that was last and that would do the race in 30+ minutes.

The rest of the Bain people started much earlier than us. Nicole was a speed demon and finished it in a little less than 24 minutes (I think), while David and I struggled to even finish. The run part wasn't too bad except that it was much hillier than what I normally run, but the first half was mostly uphill, so that the second half was a little easier. The swim part was the worst. The pools in Australia are a combination of chlorine and salt water. So as you are swimming, your tongue/mouth slowly gets this feeling that salt is encrusting it and nothing will relieve it until you are done.

After we finished, David was basically immobile and had claimed to know what death was like, but a couple hours later, he was pumped to do it again next week. I'm still torn on whether or not to torture myself again, but most likely we'll be doing it again...

Australia's strange fact of the day: The concern of obesity. Since I watch the news a decent amount while I'm here, there is always a small segment on how obesity is a huge concern for the country. The irony of this to me is that I haven't seen any obese people compared to Americans, so I'm not really sure where these obese people live. But I've been told that Sydney is like the Hollywood of the US where everyone is skinnier than the rest of the country. Ok, that's fine, but the next ironic thing is how fish and chips are part of the staple diet here. Not only are fish and chips stands more abundant than the Starbucks or McDonalds in the US, but they are also available in almost all restaurants like the Japanese restaurant we went to last night. If you're so concerned about obesity, maybe you should start eating fried foods all the time!