What Happens to a Dream Deferred? Paris Tri Cancelled!

So my last post was about annoying admin paperwork in sports. It affects organisers, too apparently, not just participants. I just heard that the Paris Triathlon was cancelled due to admin annoyingness! The organisers (Garmin), said that since they were still as of March 1 without the necessary city permits for the July event, and they were unable to go ahead with plans.

Way to defer my dream (or at least training goal) because of too much paperwork, France!

Really disappointed since my goals for the year were the Paris Marathon and the Paris Triathlon! I'd even psyched myself up for the swim in the Seine (gross!) and told everyone that I was almost sure I wouldn't die of pollution or other horrible river-borne illness and it would change my entire relationship with the geography of Paris-- I actually thought it would be cool that post Paris tri, every time I looked at the river, I'd have a completely different experience of it, even if that experience was due to swimming in its grossness. My girlfriends all thought I was crazy and that my skin would peel off due to toxic Seine chemicals. Some people just don't get triathlons...

The silver lining of swimming in the Seine is that it's at least supposed to have a strong current which we swim with, thank God, and this helps everyone hit a PB on the swim part. The guys on the team reassured me that even dead bodies would finish the swimming segment (which although reassuring for weak swimmers like me, made me wonder exactly how many dead bodies might be in the Seine at any given time ...)

So I'm signed up for the sprint tri of Versailles, which was always part of the plan. Paris was a longer distance (olympic as opposed to sprint), so not sure if I should find another olympic distance to replace the Paris goal or just do another sprint later in the season to see if I've improved. It wasn't the olympic distance in particular that appealed to me, but the fact that it was Paris.

A note on distances: a sprint tri means you swim 750 meters in open water, cycle 20k, I think, and run 5k. Olympic distance is longer (but this term does not mean that only olympians can do it!) with a 1.5k swim (yikes), 40k bike ride and a 10k run.

So I'll have to find a new ultimate triathlon goal for this year. Versailles was just part of training (and cool because it's Versailles!) and since it's in early May and triathlon season is all summer, it would be a shame to do only that one... So far, the Enghien Triathlon at the end of May has gotten a lot of recommendations as a replacement olympic distance goal.