Let's continue the tradition of pre-race audience participation.

I have a duathlon this weekend, friends.

Yes, that one to which I've vaguely alluded over the past few months during which I've trained barely at all. Formally, anyway.

I mean, I have been riding my bike to work this summer, which is a combined total of 40 miles round trip, so that sort of counts as training for this event of 12 miles of cycling, and I have also been running my usual 3x/week schedule of 2 days of intervals and 1 day of distance, so that sort of also counts toward the combined 4 miles of running, but...no official training.

Basically, I haven't trained for the transition at all. And I haven't done any bike to run or run to bike training as proved so eye-opening during my first bout. And I didn't do that awesome I'm Going To Kick Some Mermaid Ass training of a 3M morning run > bike 20 miles to work > 2M run at work thing that I briefly mentioned to Bubba and, like, two other people when I signed up for this thing earlier this summer.

So, to look at my preparation from a traditional training standpoint, you'd probably expect me to impressively suck and also to mortally wound myself and/or others entering and exiting the transition zones this weekend. And, hey, you might be right on.

Or - you might just be totally wrong.

I think you'd probably be sorta wrong.

But, I'll stop laying this off on you as though you're all just sitting out there being big fat doubters, because this is not how I've raised you.

No, you believe in me. Most of the time (or all of the time), you believe in me more than I believe in myself and, gee, that's awfully sweet of you.

Me though - I think I'll be fine. I figure that I can definitely run the distance and I can certainly bike the distance and since I'm at least not heading into this thing with zero confidence in my ability to use clipless pedals (commuting in these shoes has done wonders for my confidence and notfallingoverness), I'm ahead of last year's abilities as I go out to packet pick-up today.

And then, on Sunday when I head to Santa Cruz, I'll also have my new bike rack all full of My Bike Who Still Needs a Name After Two Years and a bib number 716 spots higher than last year.

85? Am I doing this alone?

Oh. I guess the field is a bit larger for Santa Cruz than it was for Alameda.

What? You don't know immediately where Alameda is? Shocking.

Anyway - for audience participation!

Name the bike:

She's spicy. She's orange. She's a 2008 Cannondale Synapse F3 Carbon, for you technical folks. She *can* be fast as shit.

I feel like she needs a name, and for the life of me, I can't come up with a good one.

I didn't have this trouble with Tulip because my neighbor took one look at her and her Dutchie-ness and was all, "Aw! Tulip!" and we were done.

I mean, come on. Could you call her anything other than "Tulip"? No.

But no one looks at a road bike and goes, "Aw...[NAME]!" because road bikes don't have a cutesy bamboo basket or panniers or those rad handles that curve toward you all accommodating-like.

No. They are all carbon-y and clipless pedals-y and don't inspire a lot of sentimentality in passersby. But I'll tell you, after a summer of riding this sexy fast bitch to work on trails and roads and through parks and crazy intersections and falling on my face when I discovered its inability to maintain vertical when crossing loose debris, I have a new affection for it.

And I'm not always screaming as I ride. Truly.

An affection, I'm proud to say, isn't entirely composed of Fear.

This is a big shift, friends - believe me.

So - name her! You come up with a good solid name for this saucy, fast mama and I'll use it every time I talk about cycling or training for a race, which who knows how often that will be but still - cool.

Go on, name away. Meanwhile, I'm going to pick The Nameless One up from the bike shop and get my packet so that HOORAY! I can go off all untrained into the chutes.

I guess I haven't improved much at this racing thing, but I guess that's what happens after six years of this? Yeah, that's it.