September 1, 2010

I am the worst blogger ever

Seriously, I just cannot motivate myself to blog. And I feel selfish because I love reading other peoples' blogs, and I do that every day, but I just can't make myself write anything these days! Hopefully I can get back into the habit, slowly but surely, and write a few entries that are not race reports or training reports. Yeah, good luck with that, self!

Anyway time is just ticking away like crazy and I am training a lot which I love! I am a much happier person when I am training all the time, so I guess next year with IM training I will be the happiest person ever. I am not really sure how I'll fit everything in but where there's a will there's a way, and I definitely have the will to train a whole heck of a lot. I am not sure if I will be able to go watch MOO next weekend as I have some family stuff going on, but either way I will be signing up on Monday the 13th which is crazy, expensive, and exciting, all at once!

Let's see what else is happening. I had a heck of a mental toughness building swim yesterday, my goggles were leaking like CRAZY, I really needed new ones. Pretty much every single set they leaked and yet I finished the 5000 meter swim so I am happy about that. Including 900 meters of kicking. Um, seriously, Coach? Seriously?! 900 meters?? I wasn't sure if my arms or legs would fall off after that. Or if my eyeballs would fall out from all the chlorine. Or all three. Luckily I got some new goggles last night so my 3500 meters tonight should be significantly more pleasant - or at least less leaky!

I am also very excited for a three day weekend. Holy buckets I could use an extra weekend day, pretty much every week but especially this week!! I really want to sleep until I wake up, just one day. I think that's the only thing I hate about training, usually on the weekends the latest I'll get up is around 6:30 am and some weekends I don't get to wake up after 6:00 which is kind of brutal. Saturday I will be waking up around 5:00 am so I can do an open water swim up in Boulder and then ride with Katie. I am so excited though, it will be awesome!! And totally worth the early wakeup. Sunday I will not be waking up super early, but I have some brunch plans with my family so I am looking forward to that. Now that I am single I feel like I never go to brunch, which makes me sad, because it is my favorite meal. I think I just need to be more proactive about planning brunches with family and friends though, because everyone loves brunch!

That is about all the news, hopefully I will be back sooner rather than later - I'll try, I promise!!

Posted by barb at 8:03 AM | Comments (2)

August 23, 2010

Camp Report!!!

I am so behind on blogging, what a mess. I swear, I need to cross-post yelp.com restaurant reviews because at least then it would look like I wrote SOMETHING. Anyway what can I say, I am a crappy blogger. But I have been very busy doing fun sporty things, so maybe that's okay. After Lake Stevens I took five days off and was a big fat schlub at a work conference in San Diego. Which was good because it was a million degrees there and training would have been logistically challenging as well as HOT. When I got home to Denver it was also hot but that saying 'oh it's a dry heat' is really true. It was not nearly so unpleasant. Anyway here is my camp report - we did a team camp and it was awesome!

Day One - Friday
Day One was pretty laid back. Um, basically I continued my streak of no training and picked Beth up at the airport. Well actually that is somewhat inaccurate. I arrived from San Diego, hung out at the airport for maybe an hour and a half, and there she was! Perfect timing, we are excellent planners I must say. By the time we got her bike and GINORMOUS suitcase (sorry Beth, I can't help it!!) it was so late and we were about to pass out from starvation so we picked up Noodles and then went home so I could work for the afternoon and Beth could assemble her bicycle. This all took forever so we decided not to stay in Boulder Friday night. Well realistically I decided and Beth was gracious enough to go along with my princessing out.

We met our team for dinner and then went to bed at a reasonable hour to get ready for our big day on Saturday... One fun thing did happen on the way though - I bought a mountain bike frame!! I know, I really need one more bicycle. But mountain biking is so much fun!! Here I am with my new frame (Beth is so nice, she didn't even make fun of me as she took my picture):

Day Two - Saturday
We headed to Boulder around 6:30 and got bagels on the way because I think bagels are the perfect pre-ride breakfast. Also I had really missed my daily bagel stop when I was out of town for a million years.

We met the team and headed out to Ward, then up to Brainard Lake because Luis really wanted to go which was fun since I'd never been and the rest of the ride was pretty standard, and then to Carter Lake. Holy buckets it was a long ride. It was SO much fun though!! I rode pretty much the whole day with Beth, Kelly (one of our most amazing and awe-inspiring teammates), and Nate who is on our team and is my new little brother because he is so fun and adorable. Here is the view of Brainard Lake:

It was so beautiful and I didn't think it was too hard to breathe but we were at over 10,000 feet so that was really intense for the non-altitude people. They are hard core. Nate and I ended up with 114 miles for the day and because I am a glutton for punishment I made him run two miles with me afterwards. Which surprisingly wasn't that bad after the first five minutes which were a total death march.

After the ride we took our sweaty, revolting selves to Whole Foods to get some lunch and then ice bathed in Boulder Creek. It felt AMAZING. There is nothing better than very cold water, both for drinking and for ice baths, after a long, hot crazy ride. Then, because that just wasn't enough or something, we swam about 2000 yards with our team at Rally Sport. It actually wasn't too bad and the cold water felt really nice. I am SO SLOW compared to everyone else in the pool but training with people who are faster is so great for getting faster, so I was happy. After the swim I think I took the longest shower ever and we had dinner and then went to Cathy's to pass out.

Day Three - Sunday
Sunday was a pretty mellow day after the craziness of Saturday - a run clinic at Tom Watson Park followed by a two hour run, then a swim which I estimate at around 2000 yards. I felt decent on the run considering my insane day on Saturday, until we were around 1:50 in, and I just bonked or something. I shuffled in at a ridiculously slow pace, it was almost comical. But the rest of the run was good and it was fun running with Beth and Nate. They are awesome and Nate talks a lot so that makes things go by quickly. After the run we repeated our Whole Foods - natual ice bath routine which was awesome. Then we swam and headed back to Denver. I can't believe how quickly everything passed, it was just so much fun! I am so lucky to be part of the team, it is so inspiring and fun.

Now that camp and my crazy travel is over, it is time to buckle down and train for Austin. I started a new program today and I think I will be very sore tomorrow as I kicked things off by lifting for the first time in four weeks. It was so hard!! Tonight I am riding and I am enjoying being back in my routine. I love to race but I also love to train so I am a happy camper!!

Posted by barb at 1:03 PM | Comments (2)

Lake Stevens 70.3 Race Report - Finally

I actually wrote this entry almost a week ago but couldn't post it until today, freaking technology :) Anyway, enjoy!

Pre-Race
We arrived in Seattle on Friday morning and headed to Mary and Ted’s house (some friends of Michelle’s who are extremely hospitable and generally awesome, and who live in a great area, Green Lake). The Seattle airport is kind of a cluster generally so it took a while to get our bags and bikes and stuff. We headed to lunch with Mary and enjoyed a nice walk right by the lake which was packed as I guess summer in Seattle has been pretty lame so far but it was warm and sunny on Friday. Then we drove up to the registration and tried to pick up our packets but they were making people sit through a meeting first, which was silly and not well publicized. Good to know! So we drove the bike course instead after sitting in crazy traffic (all traffic in Seattle is generally unpredictable and pretty much nuts). The course didn’t look too bad but there were definitely many rolling hills. I thought it looked harder than any other Half IM course I’d raced, just because there were no flat sections. Even at Timberman which is supposedly a pretty legit course there is a 25 mile or so flat section. We were excited though, it looked like an honest, fun, and pretty ride.

After we got back from the race site we put our bicycles together. My rear dropout was jacked but we thought we fixed it. Then we hung out on Mary and Ted’s AMAZING patio and had a BBQ with their very nice friends, and got to bed nice and early.

Saturday we did our workouts and my bicycle seemed to be working fine (foreshadowing!!). Michelle’s wasn’t shifting properly so she got it fixed at a nearby shop, Gregg’s. This shop was awesome, they had a huge selection of just about any bicycle-related product you could possibly want. I thought maybe I should take my bike in just in case but decided against it (more foreshadowing!!). Let’s just say I am a moron and any time your bicycle does not seem to be working 100% properly the day before a race, and you are not an awesome bike mechanic, you should take it into a shop. Better safe than sorry. Anyhoodle, after the workout we relaxed for a bit and then picked up our packets now that we knew the drill. I also ran into a college friend at the expo which was so funny! I went to college in Maine so it was quite random to see someone from Bowdoin in Seattle. His girlfriend was racing and she was in my age group and I always like to have someone to chat with so that was fun. She was so nice!
After the pre-race stuff we headed back to Mary and Ted’s and relaxed, after picking up cupcakes (we are obsessed with cupcakes). Holy cats, Trophy Cupcakes in Seattle is AMAZING. OMG the cupcakes were so good. We had dinner with Mary and Ted and then had pre-race cupcakes. Then I headed to bed around 9:00 for one of the best pre-race sleeps I’ve ever had. The next morning we woke up at 4:00 am (thank heavens for the time change, this didn’t seem all that horrendous) and headed to the race site!

The Swim
The water was calm, around 72 degrees, and absolutely gorgeous. I felt so good!! I was excited. I worked hard on a nice deep catch with both arms (not just the left as I have formerly done) and felt great about how many people from earlier waves I caught. I thought the course might be slightly long as I came out right around 34 minutes and I felt like I was going faster, but whatever. I was still really happy with how good I felt. Got into T1 and only had minor drama as I dropped my bike once, oops! Then I was out on the bike.

The Bike – the Drama!!!
So here is where all my dramatic foreshadowing above comes into play. Almost immediately on the bike I followed some guy into a wrong turn and had to slam on my brakes to turn around and go the right way. After that my rear tire rubbed a groove into my frame and made an awful noise as somehow the rear dropout got hosed again. I stopped and moved the rear out a bit just to make it to a cop and volunteer about 2.7 miles into the bike. Um, excuse my language, but SHIT. I was so annoyed. Not only was the rear dropout jacked but any time I shifted into the hardest gear the chain fell off the cassette. I asked the cop there if he could call Mechanical support and he said all he could do is call the sag van. I said well let’s do that, maybe they have tools (I had neither tools nor know-how to fix my bike). I stood there and watched people streaming by and watched my race end right before my eyes which was disappointing. I thought about just getting picked up by the sag and pulling a DNF but I didn’t want to fly all the way to Seattle to DNF for a mechanical, so I decided to wait for the sag car and finish no matter what if I could get my bike fixed.

Some random guy came by on his bike, just out for a ride, and I didn’t even think to ask him if he had tools but luckily he rode by us, realized what was going on, and came back and asked if he could help. I swear I almost kissed him. Then I told him what was wrong and I said please help me if you can, I just want to finish. Then I kind of went to pieces for a minute because I realized how much I just wanted to finish the race. He fixed my bike (dumping my aero bottle in the process, oops, I had no nutrition because I’d lost the other bottle in T1), I almost hugged him and the very nice volunteer who had kept me sane while I waited, and headed off. It felt like I was standing around for an hour but when I compared my watch time (I hadn’t stopped it when I stopped) to the time I had been going on my bike computer I realized I had been stopped for 20 minutes. I knew my race was over, from the standpoint of place, but I figured I could go as hard as I could and just see what kind of a day I could have, just for personal pride. I was on a mission on the bike and passed a ton of people. I only got passed by pros and then played cat and mouse with a very nice man in 50-54 named Mark (this continued on the run so we chatted for a bit, I think he finished maybe 30 seconds ahead of me). I felt good and this course reminded me that even though I hate rolling courses they really suit me. I passed Michelle at the start of the second lap and told her what happened.

I rolled in from the bike with an official time of 3:06:06, official average of 18.04 MPH, which is kind of embarrassing but I figured anyone who knew me would know something happened. My time was 2:46 which is around 20 MPH. I think it was good for third fastest in my age group. I really love my new fit, it seemed to make a big difference. Hopefully once I get my bicycle issues sorted out I will start cranking on the bike again.

The Run
At this point it was getting HOT. Yeah, I forgot to mention that it was unseasonably warm in Seattle all weekend. The high temperature on Sunday was 96 degrees which was almost unheard of. The run course is a double loop kind of like a figure 8, with the first three miles away from the water and back and the second 3.5 miles along the shore. The first two miles were almost all uphill and hot. The third mile was a pretty fast downhill. On the second out and back there was one big hill that you went over, down, and back over. My splits from ironmanlive are pretty funny, the first 3.25 miles I was going 7:07 pace I think, then the next 6.5 miles I went 7:30 pace, and the last 3.25 I went 8:15 pace! The last hill really killed me. I still ended up with a 1:41:20 I believe which was the second fastest run split in my age group. I was really happy with my run actually, because I always say I don’t run well in the heat, but it was very hot and I feel like I ran decent. I would have liked to have come in under 1:40 but I was really close so I’m very happy.

Overall
Overall my official time was 5:24:29 I believe. Um, somehow I still managed 7th in my age group in spite of my bicycle issues (this race is definitely not the most competitive 70.3 race I’ve done). The thing that makes me sad is that if you subtract 20 minutes from my time, that would be 5:04:29, which would have gotten me second place in my age group. I’ve always wanted to get on the podium in a 70.3 series race, and this would have been my first time. That said, I’ll always know that not only did I make the effort to finish in spite of a 20 minute mechanical delay, I raced hard. I am really proud of myself because it wasn’t about my place – it was about personal pride and finishing something I started. I guess ultimately it was a good way to gain perspective that even though it’s fun to get awards and recognition for racing, I do it for me, because I love it.

Sometimes I think the universe gives people just that much more than they think they can handle. This race was not that big a deal in the big scheme of things – I’ve had a few other personal things going on recently that are much more prominent in my mind, and represent what I think the universe is testing me on, if that makes any sense, but still this was a tough day and I am proud to say that when the universe has recently given me just that much more than I think I can handle, I’ve handled it, and I’ve proven that I’m that much stronger than I thought I was. For that I’ll always be grateful.

Now I am on a plane to San Diego for a conference and I’ll be back in Colorado on Friday for a Team MAO Camp! I’m actually meeting Beth in the airport, I can’t wait!! It’s a busy 10 days but it is going to be a lot of fun. Right now I’m looking forward to a nice week off from training and some mellow walks on the beach.

Posted by barb at 8:27 AM | Comments (2)