TempE.Coli Town Lake, my old friend.

Today I returned to your concrete shores to test my swimming skills at Splash N Dash, Race 3 – 1,000 meters of lake-bound excitement plus 5,000 meters of running fun.

Not only did I test my skills, I bested them in 32 minutes, 10.9 seconds – reducing my exposure to toxic algae by a staggering 4 minutes, 20 seconds since the last time I treaded these intrepid waters (36:30.7). Plus, I managed to best my Lake Un-Pleasant time by 2 minutes (34:21.3). In the NFL, that’s a least two commercial breaks before the half.

Unfortunately I also finished last. Dead last. 80th place of 80 contestants. Last, as in, they shut down the course after I crossed the finish line, took my requisite bow, and then tripped over the loudspeakers en route to collapsing in the abandoned transition area.

According to the official results, there was just one Did Not Finisher behind me. According to the World Population Counter at the US Census Bureau, there were 6,915,542,689 Did Not Starters for this race, but that does nothing to change the fact my rear brought up the rear with a cumulative time of 1 hour, 10 minutes, 32.5 seconds.

You can see for yourself here – just scroll down to the very bottom of the page… keep scrolling… keep scrolling. Yeah, that’s me in last place before the DNF… and the sad part is, on the swim, I was actually fifth-from-last (an improvement) while being next-to-last on the run (38:21.6 – not so much), but my aggregate time still put me at dead last.

At least I wasn’t dead… and at least I didn’t cling to the turn-buoy while gasping for air and waving off offers of help from the safety kayakers, like that guy – the Cling-On who looked like he could bench-press twice his own weight, but for some reason couldn’t put together two, unassisted laps around TempE.coli Town Lake.

Yet I still finished the race after Mr. Wind-Sucker McCling-On. He should have been penalized at least two minutes for holding onto the turn-buoy, but NOOOO…

And at least I didn’t quit midstream like that girl – the one who literally cut me off, swimming perpendicular to the field at the starting gun to get back to the boat ramp so she could get the hell out of there. Granted, I thought about it – I didn’t have any teammates relying on me this time out – but still… Because she didn’t officially start the race, she didn’t officially “did not finish,” leaving me to seize last by my lonesome.

With my sweet husband three hours away at a motorcycle event and my poor father unable to toss me a life-ring from 2,000 miles out, my friend John stood in as the surrogate dad, ready to alert the safety kayaks to my apparent distress. This is the same John that provided me all sorts of helpful training tips from his days doing relays at the Bud Light National Triathlon in the ’80s and early ’90s. A reminder: He was the runner, so his job was to wait for everyone else to finish swimming then biking and bring it home on the run. His swimming experience consists of spectating, which he is apparently very good at.

I could actually hear John shouting his unsolicited encouragement when I was splashing and thrashing around in the lake. It’s remarkably easy to hear people from the shore when you are swimming by yourself. I wore my distinctive pink skull-and-crossbones swim cap so he could pick me out from the crowd, which by this point had already left me flailing in the distance – so it was even easier to see me and offer helpful suggestions: “You can do it! Keep your head down! Almost there!” It’s also easy to carry on a conversation with the four people I was trying to beat out of the water (including the aforementioned Cling-On), because we were all flopping around at roughly the same speed, which was the nautical equivalent of a salted slug… except for the Cling-On, who was not making forward progress and therefore was allowed to hump the course marker in a pathetic endeavor to conserve energy for his dominating transition and Usain Bolt-like run.

Obviously, that worked out pretty well for the Cling-On, who did not finish last (unless his name was Dorothy W., in which case s/he did not finish).

Sitting in a lawn chair at the start-finish area for the run, John had all sorts of encouragement for me on the transition. Apparently, if I’d been 2 minutes, 43 seconds more efficient in removing my wetsuit, dusting the grass off my ass, toweling the E.coli out of my hair, changing shirts, re-applying my Chapstick, finding the right music on my iPod, and generally psyching myself up for the run, then I could have given Tinna O. a run for her money at 79th place.

So where do we go from here? And don’t say, “The only place you can go is up!” because on a swim, there are worse alternatives to last place.

On Saturday, I’ll be back in TempE.coli Town Lake – provided I’m not hospitalized with E.coli, botulism or ptomaine poisoning. (Pardon me, while I polish off this tasty tuna salad that I left in the car this afternoon). With me as our lead-off swimmer, my teammate, the aforementioned Kristi, still plans to ride her bike and do the run, as the Bad@ss Bitche$ return to the site of our previous triumph (unless, of course, someone were to steal her bike and slash her car tires, rendering her unable to get to the race on time – and oh, look, is that a $100 bill in my wallet?). Then again, the same misfortune could befall the Rio Salado Triathlon that befell our maiden Marquee Triathlon – massive rain, threat of E.coli / toxic algae bloom, lake closure (and I am currently stockpiling farm-animal waste for a Tempe Town Lake Compost Delivery, should you need a disposal site for yours). This set of circumstances could once again render my swim an asphalt aquacade – though after stinking up the run course today, I’m not sure Kristi wants me jogging the first leg of the triathlon anyway.

Or I could be in jail, awaiting trial for tying a rock around the ankle of the Cling-On if I ever see him again… but I digress.

The forthcoming Rio Salado Triathlon has a 1,500-meter swim attached to it – which means Kristi could probably buy a new bike and then patch, mount and balance her full set of tires before I crawl out of the water. Rain is nowhere in the forecast, and apparently you can’t just go out and rent a dump-truck from Avis for fertilizer delivery to a public gathering place. Ergo, Kristi’s pretty much stuck with me, and I have one week to figure out how to increase my distance and shrink my swim-time by a third… while choking down this delightful cup of sun-brewed milk.

Truth is, I’d actually been training pretty hard for Splash N Dash Race 3 (because Race 2 was canceled due to toxic algae). I put in more distance in the pool, while abandoning my running regime completely (you could tell, couldn’t you?), taking my allergy medication semi-religiously, and just trying to do anything to avoid making a complete fool of myself, which I managed to do anyway.

There is an old saying: “Nice guys finish last.” If the Splash N Dash is any indicator, so do spectacularly cranky / profanity-free girls.

Last place: It’s not just for losers anymore.