Saturday, April 15, 2006

wet and wild

It started to rain just I headed out to my car to meet up with tri-club at Inspiration Point. The bike portion of the brick was cancelled and became a 3 mile run instead. By the time I arrived (5 minutes late) the grp had already taken off. I checked in with the club director, Hae Wan, than headed out alone. It wasn't long before I saw the group heading back.
I waved and kept going.

I had already decided to go longer, my usual 8 mile loop. Today was the first time I ever ran in more than a "mist". I don't want to say it really poured but the rain was coming down steadily and with the winds whipping around it got pretty wild at times.

It was the perfect backdrop for my dark mood. Me fighting the elements, myself, the process. Just the kind of thing this drama queen eats up. It was awesome! Exhilirating actually.

My wimpy windbreaker didn't hold up so well . I was soaked by mile 3 so I just took it off. Plus I was all hot and steamy anyways.
Of course this means I have buy proper rain gear now.
Not a bad investment really, considering it's never going to stop raining around here!
For as windy as it was I wasn't cold at all.

I finished in 85 minutes.

Once again running saves the day.

My newly installed granite counter top helped too:)





Tri-Life Lessons

Earlier I was saying that I don't have the need to yak about TRI stuff here.
I was wrong.
It seemed like ever since I started writing about my new thing, the comments (the few comments I get, but love so ) were even scarcer, I thought maybe I was stepping out of line by digressing into a different arena. But that's crazy, I NEED to write about this stuff, all of it related or not. So, here it goes.

A friend at work gave me 2 articles to read. One was on the subject of cadence and seat position of the bike . The other was on overtraining. I immediately dismissed article #2 in favor of the bike article.

The idea of me overtraining is ridiculous at best. I don't push myself that hard.
Or so I thought.

I have placed a big challenge before myself. I can honestly say that learning to swim is by far the biggest challenge I ever set out to do. But what makes it even more of a challenge is that I've attached it to a triathlon (albeit a Sprint) there's a mental factor to contend w/that I sorely underestimated.

I'm more worried about NOT learning enough in time. Expressing my worries is a bit worrisome too. The swim coach, trying to be a comfort (I think) said, "hey if you can't do the tri, it's not the end of the world" True it's not, but do I need to give that possibility serious consideration so early in the game? I was talking about how hard swimming is at work and a c0-worker who is typically very supportive, and she indicated that my AGE could be a factor. WTF?
There are plenty of swimmer's ALOT older than me, swimming just fine thank you very much!!
To suggest that I'm too old to learn, well that just pisses me off! I'm 42 for god sakes, I just want to learn to swim better not enter the Olympics!

I'm not scared in the water, in fact I seem to do better in the group lessons and solo practicing drills than I did 1:1 with Lindsey. I'm hoping the Total Immersion video arrives today so I can continue to work on things on my own. I'm actually making some headway w/side breathing, doing better on my right side. I'm not consistent at all and I fatigue rather easily , but I see small improvements beginning to merge. It's true what they say about muscle memory, what I'm reading and doing in the pool is slowly starting to make sense.

I don't think the problem is overtraining so much as training differently. I've said in the past that I'd like a running buddy, and the idea of hooking up w/the tri-club seemed a good way to make this happen. Not so much though, this group is a little funny. There are few "clicks" and
and with the majority of us being working folk it's a different batch of people nearly everytime we get together. People are busy, myself included and I get the sense that people are not so interested in making social connections so much as achieving personal goals.

That said, I also have found myself struggling a bit with the group trainings. Example right now this very minute I'm soooo ready to go for a run, but I need to wait until 9am when we as a group do our first brick today: bike and a run.


For the record, M and I had a nice time yesterday afternoon at the pool. We got there around 2:30 and swam for a little over an hour. When we got home T took us out to dinner and I hit the hay around 9:30.

Sleep has restorative qualities not to be underestimated that's for sure.

It's looking rather bleak outside at the moment, we'll see what happens.
Since sunday I've swam 4x's, ran once (not including today yet) and biked once on the trainer for 20 minutes. Hardly qualifies as overtraining...everything I've read indicates I should be focusing on my weakest area..SWIMMING.......so I think I'm on track.