~I raced a little local run>swim biathlon this morning. It's actually a series of races... I missed the first one but did the last two and really had fun! These short races put me outside my comfort zone for sure but that's pretty much the reason I wanted to do them. :) Anyway, have you ever tried swimming immediately following a hard 5K run?? It's hypoxic and hard! Last month I was a bit disappointed in myself for what a wimp I was about the swim... I ran what was (for me!) a pretty solid 5K but then floated through the 1K swim. At the time it seemed right to just swim easy and I had no desire to do it any other way, but 10" after crossing the finish line I was kinda like BLAH I wimped out on myself! That's a crappy feeing, you know? So today my goal was once again to give it on the run but then NOT wimp out of the swim... and I managed to do that. It made the race more fun b/c I stayed competitive in my head and worked in the water to catch/pass athletes who had run faster than me. I don't know how many I passed (a lot!) and I ended up 15th OA, 5th female, and first in my age group. I sort of consider myself first 'adult' female b/c now that I am 40+ (OMG almost 41 more on that next), gals who are "20-somethings" seem so young! That's not meant to be an insult, just me being old. ;)
~Ok speaking of being old, I turn 41 on Wednesday!! Last year my birthday felt like kind of a big deal. This year notsomuch. If you know me at all, you know I always celebrate with a big swim set... Used to be age x 100's... then from 36-39 that changed to age x 200's... Last year we did 10x400's plus a bunch of other wacky fun stuff including a ton of beer all day (proper celebration for a 40th, I think). This year I left it up to Marilyn and she gave me a 4100M TT in the pool! Sweet! I'm not sure I would have thought of that on my own, but now that it's been proposed I'm kind of salivating at the opportunity. Mostly wondering if I can crack an hour? My long course pool is a slow one (no lane lines!) so holding/repeating 1:27-1:28 is a big ask (sometimes achievable, sometimes not). To add to the fun I recruited Lectie to join me and also put it on the schedule for some of my athletes who I thought might get a kick out of it (or fire me, one or the other).
~The last two weeks I had a couple of my athletes from the mainland here visiting and training. It's always great when I have an opportunity to train in person with athletes because we get to know each other so much better... Makes my job coaching them easier and makes their job as athletes easier as well b/c they leave having a better understanding of what I'm asking/expecting during different sessions. Though I guess to be fair, I guess their job as athletes actually tends to get quite a bit harder b/c I see them train and almost always think um, you have the ability to go (much) harder/faster... In the end though Katie left here with an extra suitcase full of confidence and Monika left with a whole bunch of extra fitness (that one was hard to crack, I tell ya!). We put in some solid miles swim bike and run while they were here and it was all good.
~In other news, a week from today I am going to be in Tucson at the Endurance Corner Camp! I am pretty pumped about this. Marilyn bumped up my training volume a lot over the last 4-6 weeks and I finally feel like I am fit enough to not just survive camp but ideally to really benefit from it (vs it being too much and crushing me). So of course I am excited about the training but even more than that I am excited about the learning opportunities presented each evening... This camp is run by a group of coaches for whom I have tremendous respect and I cannot wait to learn from them, even if it means I am going to freeze my ass off all week in 50 degrees. (yes, I know)
Ok so in a nutshell that sums up the last few weeks! This week I'm finally back to regularly scheduled programming which is great because I love my life routine... I feel like my life is really humming along quite nicely recently and my satisfaction with things is running high. I don't take this for granted!
Aloha...
