Road to the Tri: Two Days!

Tri training is nearly over and I can’t even believe it.  Then again, yes I can.  It feels like I’ve been training for this thing forever, and it in reality was the entire summer.  I will have trained for 11 weeks officially for this event, just about as long as I’ve ever trained for any of the halfs I’ve done (you know, all two of them).

Week 9 was done in Spain and while I think I did a pretty darn good job staying active there, it still was extremely difficult to stay on top of training while on vacation.  I swam four times in a super cooled pool (because it is so hot there in the summer, they cool their pools the way we heat ours to keep them warmer when it is cool outside.  I rode a bike once for half an hour before I popped the tire; we never were able to get it fixed.  I walked nearly every day but only ran once (between the weird later schedule we kept there and the heat it was hard).   What threw me off more than the lack of training however was the food and drink that got way out of control.

Week 10 has been alright but I’ve been battling jet lag and just generally feeling over the whole training cycle.  We did another mini triathlon training session last Saturday with my girlfriends, including a half an hour in a pool, 8.7 miles on the bike and a 2 mile run/walk.  It was longer than our previous tri run through, and considering I’d just gotten home from Spain, I thought we did well.  I’ve done a long walk, two very slow runs and this morning, a 8.25 mile bike ride.

I feel at this point that I’m as ready as I can be.  I’ve done a lot of “bricking” in the last three weeks and so I think I know how my body will respond on Sunday when the time comes.  I’m wondering what the swim will be like with everyone all around me, but I know I’ll get through it.  I know I start out tired on the bike but I loosen up around Mile 4 so I will keep telling myself that.  I know the first mile after getting off of the bike is going to suck, but I will slog through.

A few weeks ago I had time goals but at this point I have set all of that aside.  I just want to enjoy the experience and get through it without hating it.  It helps that I have a big group of women doing this with me; I am not sure I would have ever tried this on my own.

At this time on Sunday I should be nearly done with my race.  Wish me luck!

Road to the Tri: Week 8

Finally a week back in the game last week.  I’ve been battling a cold all week but still managed to be active every single day doing at least something.  Here’s what it looked like:

Tues:  3.6 mile walk and 1 mile swim
Wed:  2.8 mile walk
Thu:  60 min yoga
Fri:  60 min bootcamp class
Sat:  .4 mile swim, 5 mile bike, 1.7 mile run
Sun:  4.3 mile run (ridiculously slow)
Mon:  60 min “challenge” class which included 1 mile run and kettlebell/weights/other crazy stuff

It was a solid week that I feel good about, especially our “baby tri” run through on Saturday.  Several girlfriends who are doing this triathlon and I all met up at 7am on Saturday at our local park.  The park has a lake and bike trails and it is where we hold our kids’ triathlons.  I knew it would be a great fit for a lower distance run through of our race (frankly we could have a full one there if we wanted to….it is linked to a long enough bike trail).

One of our group wasn’t interested in swimming in our little lake, so she took this shot of the rest of us going towards it for our swim.  I honestly love this shot.  It really encapsulates everything about this process that I love…not worrying about what your body looks like but celebrating what it can do.

We swam for about twenty minutes or so back and forth between those two buoys you see.  Beyond there, there’s a lot of plant life in the water and it just feels gross.  But otherwise, the lake swim was beautiful!  It was calm and clear and the sun was just rising.  I loved it.

From there we came back up the beach to transition to the bike.  This was the part I wanted to practice.  I had packed an extra water bottle to “wash off” my feet.  Then I wiped them with my towel and laid down a little washcloth for my clean feet to rest on while I put on my socks.  It worked perfectly!  I put on my socks and shoes (a challenge with wet feet), then I pulled on my shorts and shirt over my suit and headed for the bike.

All in all, not bad.  Hoping for less than 5 minutes in transition there, we’ll see.

We headed out on our bikes, all four of us:

We intended to go somewhere between four and six miles.  It was less about the distance than worrying about the transitions to be honest.  That said, the bike felt tougher than I had hoped.  I hadn’t biked in over a week at this point and my legs were feeling it, even on our mostly flat trail.  The girls were really hauling it too…my app said that it was my fastest bike ride yet, which might have been why it felt tougher to me.  We nailed five miles in just under 28 minutes.  The girls think we can do our 12 miles on race day in an hour or so, but I’m not so sure.  We clocked this one in at 10.78mi/hour and it felt fast to me.  We’ll see.

Second transition was obviously much faster.  We opted to throw our bikes in our cars which took a few minutes to navigate, and then grab some water before heading around the lake for a run.

There were four of us and as always happens with me, I worried that I was too slow for the group.  Two of us broke out ahead right away, chatting all the while.  The other woman and I held back (I think she was just trying to keep me company and could have gone faster) as the two who don’t talk and run.  Normally I run with headphones, but apparently that’s out for this race, so it was good practice to just run.  The scenery is lovely around our lake but it is a bit hilly (which apparently is exactly the terrain for our tri run so good practice).  After one lap I was out of breath and really ready to stop.  We took a break and two of us went back on their bikes while two of us opted for another lap.  Because I believe in torture, I decided to do a second lap.

I had to walk some of that second lap, around the big hill on the trail, but otherwise, it was a much faster run than I would normally be able to turn in after biking, I think:  chalk one up for friends who run faster pushing me along.  In the end it was still less than two miles but I still felt good about bricking all three together.  It was great practice and I’d like to try it again one more time after I return from vacation.

All in all a great week of solid workouts.  Hoping to keep it up even while traveling….wish me luck!

Road to the Tri: Weeks 5-7

Yeah, I have missed a few weeks of posting.  It’s been a crazy time with two full weeks of family visiting, a quick trip out of town myself and two local musical productions that the entire family is intimately involved in.  Put that all together with ten days of being computerless and I haven’t had a chance to post about my tri training.

And to be honest, the training has suffered because of all of that too.  I’m not terribly worried about it at this point because I’m still working on it but I certainly haven’t been nailing six days a week of exercise as I had been in the early weeks of July.  That said, I have done:

1 awesome 14 mile bike ride
2 amazing open water swims at a local lake, .6 and 1.0 miles respectively
yoga and bootcamp classes
1 “transition” training session consisting of 1 mile hilly bike, .25 mile run, repeated six times
lots of walking and running

…and now I am fighting off a cold, so while I had the best of intentions this week of getting back on track, I ended up walking instead of running and choosing yoga over cardio yesterday.  I am going to try for my regular kickboxing class this morning and fill the weekend with solid workouts each morning.

We will be leaving for our vacation on Wednesday so I know the workouts will suffer there too.  But the rumor is we will have access to a pool and a gym, and if that is true, I can really get at least a few solid workouts in, even if the weather is hot and the terrain is hilly.  I get back eight days before the race so hopefully that’s enough time to get back on track even if things go terribly south.

I do think I will be ready but I don’t want to just be ready.  I want to rock it!

Wednesday Weigh In

I haven’t posted for several weeks, and it’s not for the reason that people who are trying to lose weight usually stop posting.  I had a major computer malfunction that caused me to have to take my computer in to be repaired.  I dreaded leaving it on that Saturday at the Apple store, not knowing what would happen.

I had no idea that it would be more than ten days before my computer was functional again.  Between the much longer repair time than was quoted and then issues with restoring my data from backups, it took a huge amount of time to get back on track.  Add into the mix family visiting from out of town and things were just a mess (hence no real tri training posts either, have to get back on that too).

Anyway, things are just finally settling in and of course they will get thrown all off kilter next week for our summer vacation, but I’m not going to complain about getting away.  I know that is a good thing, despite how it will make tri training and weight loss a challenge.

That being said I actually am down over a pound from my last weigh in, which is a good thing because the numbers were getting downright frightening.  Like “haven’t seen this number on a scale in over a year” frightening.  Plus I hate that awful feeling that comes when clothes don’t fit and I am unhappy about what I see in the mirror.  I mean I’m never super happy about what I see there but when I get into this area it is much, much worse.

What have I been doing?  Nothing too terribly different, trying to pull back on carb consumption.  Unfortunately the workouts have taken a hit in the last few weeks with family visiting but I’m doing what I can.  But I’m still here, and I’m still trying.

Age:  44
BMI:  29.3
+/- since last weigh in:  -2.2 lbs
Pounds to Goal:  15.2