« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »

March 13, 2008

Trying to find a balance... again!

Well, my training is going really great this week. I also have more free time than I've had for the last few weeks, hence my actually using my blog! How exciting. Anyway I am generally feeling groovy about my year and I am super excited about my new tri club. I went to my first workout on Tuesday and it was great! I was very star struck as one of the girls there just turned pro, or is turning pro this year, or some such thing. She was so fast!! Wow. I was especially excited to see her because she won or got second in my age group in all my tri's last year, so I knew her name and how awesome she is. I also think this whole tri club situation is going to be great for me in general as they seem to have a nice wide range of abilities and personalities, including a pretty cool lady who wants to run together at our workout Saturday morning. I really like having someone to train with who is slightly faster than me, and this lady is at least slightly (you might say 'way') faster than I am. So I think trying to hang with her will be great!

Like always I am just struggling now to avoid over-training as is always my tendency. I love training, so I always want to train as much as possible. This early in the season, training as much as possible is not a great idea. So I am trying to use the principle of moderation in my training, and see how that goes for a while.

My flip turns are becoming pretty natural which is exciting. I am also working on follow through in all my strokes and I may start doing some training with my club so I can get some experts to check out my wretched swimming. Swimming is still by far my weakest event, so if I can improve this year it will be huge for me. I have convinced Matt that we need to ride the Boulder Peak course this Sunday, so that should be a lot of fun. Since that is my nationals qualifier, I am determined to be able to ride that course and not destroy my legs this year. Thus I plan to practice early and often!

Anyway that is about all the news. I woke up at 6:00 and rode my trainer for an hour this morning, and as soon as I get out of here for the evening I will be going for a short run. How exciting! I love these long evenings now!

Posted by barb at 4:07 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2008

i'm still alive and training!

So I have been MIA in blog land once again, but I am training and working and hanging out with the dog and all kinds of fun stuff. I am very excited about my races this summer, of which I have four planned so far. One of them is actually a qualifier for age group nationals which I think would be kind of cool. I've never been to Oregon, so it would be fun to make it just for the experience. The qualifying standard does not seem too hard - top 33% in my age group - and last year, in my second tri ever at this race, I was in the 39th percentage. Wouldn't that be fun?! It would be my opportunity to most likely meet Beth which would be so cool since she has quickly turned into one of my tri idols :)

Anyway right now I am so sore from lifting yesterday. We have all kinds of different machines for the same muscle groups at my gym, and so I was doing the lat pull down with a weight that is normally easy but on this other machine it was so hard. I am actually enjoying lifting right now as I am trying to see it as a way to get faster, rather than a drudgery.

So my schedule right now is all about running less, swimming more, and biking more. I also joined a local tri club, and I think I will be attending my first workout with them tonight. It is a running workout - 4 x 800 at a local track. This seems like kind of a lame workout to me but I am going to give it a try. They are also running this Saturday on a trail I like so I may actually work out with them twice, both on running. I am nervous but also excited, I hope I like the group. I have been missing my Boulder group but it was just way too expensive for one (running-focused) workout a week.

I had been planning on biking on my trainer this morning but I set my cell phone alarm without looking at whether or not it had changed to reflect daylight savings. Sadly it had not, so I woke up at 7:00 feeling very refreshed but without time for a morning ride! Thus I am off to the gym to tool around on the spin bike for a bit. Luckily I have time today, I think the extra sleep was actually a really good thing for my attitude :)

Posted by barb at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)