Race Coverage

Eschewing The Cockatoo...

Tuesday, 06 September 2011 03:10

Race Coverage - Yankton is a pleasant town in South Dakota. You may have heard of it. It was part of the Louisiana Purchase and, according to Wikipedia, was visited in 1804 by a famous explorer girl named Lewis Ann Clark.

Today the town has almost 15,000 residents (the photo--L--is old) and the lowest housing costs in the U.S., if you don't count Detroit. It used to have a college, appropriately named Yankton College, but it was closed in 1984 and converted into a federal ...

prison. There are many fine restaurants in town, including two Subways and a Tastee Treat. Like any great Midwestern town, there are about a zillion bars, including a classy place called, we're not making this up, the Cockatoo Gentlemens Club. (The management was apparently unaware that "gentlemens" is plural possessive and therefore should have an apostrophe after the second "n." Or maybe they just forgot.)

Eden Prairie triathletes, Jack and Becky Youngberg, along with their two or three kids, spent last weekend in Yankton. They didn't have time to visit the prison but did manage to purchase two banana splits at the Tastee Treat. Jack ate both of them. The kids got root beer floats and Becky got a fish sandwich with extra tartar sauce. They did NOT go to the Cockatoo Gentlemens Club, though Jack wanted to.

The couple was in town to visit either friends or family and so Becky could race at the Triple V Triathlon, which she did.

Becky, being a total tri-studdette, did real, real good. So good in fact that she finished 4th overall and absolutely nuked the women's course record. (Note that women's is plural possessive and we did include the apostrophe.) Yup, the mark (1:08:16) that Madison, Wisconsin's Jaime Kulbel set in 2008 was lowered by an undiplomatic 4:25. Closing with an 18:34 5K run, Youngberg's margin of victory on Sunday was nine-plus minutes. (Why was Jaime, a Wisconsin girl, in Yankton, you ask? According to a rumor, Jaime's drug dealer ex-boyfriend, a semi-literate, heavily tattooed one-armed chap who goes by the nickname, "Jimmy One Sleeve," is incarcerated at the federal prison. Jaime visits once a year and brings him cigarettes and circus peanuts; you know, the artificial-banana-flavored candies with the consistency of stale marshmallows.)

Becky now has seven multisport victories this season and 34 in her career.

NOTE: Some of this story is totally made-up. The part about Yankton being a nice town is not. Greg Taylor lives there, you know. And didn't Brian Bich grow up in Yankton? Becky, did you really think you could fly under MTN's radar? Did you really think you could sneak over to SD and race without us learning about it? FYI, we check Allsportscentral.com's race results every weekend. TRIPLE V RESULTS