Melissa Braswell, you are a Peaman!

As we have blogged about before, Kona is lucky enough to have a series of races put on by local legend Peaman and his Frozen Pea Productions. For anyone who hasn't had the privilege of participating in or witnessing one of Peaman's races, they are some of the best local, grassroots races and fitness extravaganzas that yours truly has ever seen. All of the events are free and they don't require any preregistration: you just go out there, do your best, have a good time, get a numbered popsicle stick at the end of the race, and sign out. Participants range from keiki with water wings, to pro athletes, to people just looking to sweat a little bit and have a good time. December 2009's Peaman event was Peaman's Birthday Bonanza, which was a duathlon consisting of a 1/2 mile swim and a 3.9 mile run.

Melissa and I share a goal of becoming passable open water swimmers. We figure that, being blessed with living in Kona and having year-round access to beautiful and warm blue water, we really have no excuse not to take advantage of it. Melissa is further along in reaching that goal than I am. She has been going to some group swims at Kona Aquatics and has been regularly going for swims at Kailua pier. She decided that Peaman's Birthday Bonanza would be the perfect opportunity to test out her swimming and make her debut in the world of multisport.

The day of the race featured picture-perfect weather--a real surprise, I know--with the temperatures in the mid 70s for the start of the race. After some words of instruction and inspiration from Peaman, the swimmers were off. It was pretty hard to see much of the swim race from my stationary vantage point on the seawall, but the first swimmer, local top fish Nick Garrett was out of the water in around 12 minutes with a gap of about 30 seconds on the field. Melissa finished her swim in about 24 minutes--the fastest she had ever swam a 1/2 mile--and headed for the transition. She looked comfortable, but also glad to be out of the water.

After a quick transition (we had rigged Melissa's Lunaracer flats up with some trigeek chic elastic race laces (available at the Big Island Running Co., of course) that seemed to work really well for her), Melissa was off on the run course. Again, my commentary on the run is a little limited because I was just stationary at the start/finish, but Melissa was strong on the run. She completed the run in about 31 minutes to clock a final time of 55:38. I could tell that she was doing really well on the run because, while she was definitely in the back third of the competitors getting out of the water, she ended up finishing 25th out of 59 participants who finished the full course, a very solid showing indeed! Imagine how she's going to do once she's had a chance to really get into this swimming thing.

As an interesting side note, while Melissa was out on the run course, I saw Lance Armstrong cruise by the pier on his bike. My thinking is that once he takes care of business at le Tour, he's contemplating his debut on the Peaman circuit. Sorry, no pictures of Lance; I was a little too slow with the camera.

Full results and additional pictures from the race are available here.