Earn Your Bat Cap... And Other Musings...

Funny story from the other day... somehow a couple of us got to chatting on Twitter and ended up creating a little challenge because it appears there are some folks who would like to get their hot little hands on one of these Bat Caps.

I don't just give these away so we had to come up with an appropriate challenge to earn them...

So here's what I've come up with... I have 10 caps to give away and I'll give them away this month. IF you want one, here's what you do. During the month of July, swim this set at your local pool:

10x (8x100's @10" rest, 2x100's bands only @10" rest).
Simple, not easy. (I had to make it fit in 140 characters so twitter would accept it. Hence, the simplicity. :)
It must be done in one session, 4 hour cut off time, which works out to 2'/100, or less if you like to take breaks between sets.

Have someone take a picture of you swimming with your feet tied together and send it to me on Twitter or FB, #EarnYourBSCcap. Then, email me your address and I'll mail you your cap! First 10 people to send me the pic get their caps. I think Susan Lacke is planning to be the first as she's swimming the 10K set tomorrow. :)

In other news, I feel fat. BLAH. It's a simple problem of just not paying attention and eating too much food. The fix is less simple. I'm just one of those people who genuinely enjoys eating, so cutting back is tough. Especially when I'm training a lot. You'd think that you could out-train a bad diet, but you can't. So. 10 weeks to Vegas I'm putting it out here publicly that I'm going to be more reasonable about the amount of food I consume with the intent of showing up on that start line in Vegas not feeling like I do right now. Hold me accountable.

Interestingly, I feel like I came out of my Maui weekend with a nice little fitness boost. I haven't ever really felt such an immediate little boost as what I felt today, so I'm just sort of guessing it might be because of the 4 hour "big gear" session I did on Saturday? That climb didn't hurt me, per say, because I was never really digging... It was just a long strength workout. Anyway, my power today on the bike was good! And that was surprising to me because I would have assumed I'd be carrying some fatigue but power meters don't lie. I'll take it. The other thing I've been doing a lot of is mountain running... up (and down!) Tantalus, up (and down!) Haleakala... and I think that strength is translating over to my normal every day running as well. Either that, or the supplemental jump rope I've been doing lately... or maybe both? I don't know exactly but today was the third run in a row where I noted afterward that I felt good and that is just a HUGE relief after ~a month of just CRAP run sessions. I feel like I'm on a little roll here and it's been a long time coming.

The other thing that's been on my mind that I've been meaning to write about is my continuing experience with Crossfit. Before I started CF I must have just been ignoring the whole Crossfit vs Triathlon debate (where apparently athletes just cannot get along) because I really didn't know there was such animosity coming from both sides?!? Now that I've spent some time doing both I have some thoughts on the subject... I wonder if those who have such strong opinions about one camp or the other have actually experienced both types of training?? Those thoughts really deserve their own post so I'll wait til I have more time to type those out. Suffice to say, I did 124 push-ups today (total, not in a row) and I prob won't be able to swim worth crap for the rest of the week. Somehow I always manage to make it to CF on the day they do a ton of push ups. Gah! That said, I keep going back...

Ok let me know if you plan to earn your bat cap this month. :)