Even if I said I had finished season 2004, I ended signing up for the last triathlon of the 2004 calendar, in Pinedo (hey, it was free after all!). This was a wild idea, even if the triathlon is sprint distance and oriented to attract new people to triathlon, with easy courses for the bike and run. I have not trained at all since I came back from Oxford, and today it showed a bit...

First, I went to Pinedo after having very, very little sleep during the whole weekend, and very tired. I was one of the first guys to get boxes setup, so 40 minutes before the start I was walking around half naked in the cold of dawn.

When it was finally time to get into water to warm up, I started waking into the sea and came across a large rock that was hiding inside the dirty sea water (Pinedo's is the first beach near the entrance to Valencia's big sea harbour, and it sucks), and hit my knee quite hard. I didn't give this much importance besides the usual loud cursing and swearing, and went swimming for a while. When I came out to get ready for the triathlon start, someone told me "hey, what the fuck is that?", pointing at my leg. Eww, it was completely red, from the blood coming out of my knee. It didn't hurt, so I just cleaned it with some water and a few minutes later the race started.

As usual, I got many blows until I got to the first buoy, and I wasn't getting any good sensations. I came out of the sea quite behind my normal positions, I guess, and quickly came out for the cycling. I managed to link with the pack ahead of me and all was well until I completed the second lap of four. Then, the knee started to hurt a little, then a bit more, until I lost my group and a few others that came from behind. I was very close to abandon the race after the third lap, but decided to do the last 5 kilometres to see if the run was ok with my knee.

As soon as I started running, I realized my knee hurted still, so I abandoned after the first 500m because I didn't want to run the full 5 kilometres just to finish. I would if the triathlon was a bit interesting, but not this one...

A pitty, it's the first time I don't finish a triathlon I've started, and I've had worse injuries in other races...

After the race, there was a very cool race, an aquathlon, with phisically disabled people from the Valencian Disabled Sports Federation. It was great to see people who can't walk or have other mobility disorders swim some good 400 metres, get out of water and then race with their wheel chairs down the promenade.

After the adapted race, there were a series of aquathlons for children. I served as "buoy man" for the smaller ones (around 7 years), which had to swim 50 metres, so I stood in the middle of the sea with my teammate Montxi watching them come. That was great too, watching very young kids being introduced to this kind of sports that early.

The aquathlons were the only positive moments of a quite bad morning. I was quite fond of not having abandoned any race until now... :|