Amy

I really enjoyed this event last year, so I decided to do it again rather than The Rookie (evidently I feel I must do some sub-sprint triathlon each Spring). Jamie decided that rather than have me do another 100 mile ride the day before, he'd actually give me a little recovery and taper, to "see what you can do". Ugh. I'd almost rather have the excuse as to why things didn't go as well as I wanted. :)

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With Ironman training and traveling to Madison last week for work and puppies and.. life, I kinda fell behind on my race reporting. I back-dated my two deficient reports, so I'm not sure if anyone will see them (and my heart wasn't in them, but my completionist nature demanded I write them, so they're not very interesting). But! If anyone wants to see them, you probably won't unless you go looking.

So they're here (April Splash&Dash) and here (Red Poppy Ride).

And whew. Caught up on both race reports and workout log. For now. Until life happens again.

(I don't plan to write up anything on my Madison trip, but I've uploaded some of the pictures to flickr here, and hopefully eventually I will grab the rest off my laptop and upload them, as well.)

Okay, last deficient race/ride report, then I'm caught up.

Got a groupon-like-thing to ride Red Poppy for $15, and we'd never done this ride, so I was excited. I was planning on riding Shiner the next weekend as a close-to-century, so I didn't want to do the 100, and Jamie agreed that the 85 sounded good.

We had quite a group assembled to start: me, Karen, Betsy, David, Pam, Jeff, Summer and Nancy. As we headed out, I ended up in the lead, then when we got on calmer roads, Karen rode up beside me and we started chatting, since we hadn't ridden together in ages. At one of the turns, we heard Summer say something behind us, but didn't catch what it was, and were navigating the turn and watching for traffic, and didn't notice she was no longer behind us. We didn't see anyone at all anymore. But we were all doing different distances with different goals, so we knew we weren't all going to end up riding together, so Karen and I rode on. (Evidently Summer had a flat, but fortunately she had many people with her to help. Oops.)

The good: It was nice to ride with Karen again. We caught up on life and training. The volunteers were great. They had delicious cookies and/or cookie bars at the stops we stopped at.

The bad: The wind. It was a tailwind for the first while. Then an unrelenting head/cross wind. Karen is just at the end of her Ironman training, and a stronger rider even when she's untrained, so she was capable of going much stronger than me, and eventually pulled up and let me draft off her. For most of the rest of the time. And even drafting off of her, I kept falling back. It was a hard ride. I felt bad that I was slowing Karen down, but she just kept coming back for me. There wasn't a whole lot of talking for the end of the ride. I was just trying to survive. While Karen was dragging me along into a headwind like there was on wind at all.

We kinda did the ride wrong. We were supposed to start out on the 100 route then turn off onto the 50 at the Poppy Gate. Instead we started on the.. 60ish route? And when we realized our error, we did the 100 mile route for the rest of the way. I was afraid we'd end up back at the school at 50 or 60 miles, but it ended up perfect at 83 miles, which is what Pam said she got having done it the right way.

By the time we got to the school, it was really hot and really windy and really unpleasant. And yet Karen wanted to do 100, so she headed back out to do an out and back to make up the miles. I probably should have been a good friend and offered to join her for that. But I wouldn't have been doing her any favors, as she was probably relieved that she could finally go her own speed without dragging my dying ass along.

So I bid her adieu and changed into my running shoes, happy to have met my goal of finishing my 80 before Matt finished his 100. (Little did I know that Matt was having an incredibly crappy ride, unfortunately due to some of my decisions, and ended up riding 115. Oops again.)

The run was just miserable. Ran back out on the road we'd come in on, and cheered for the cyclists. There was no shoulder, and it wasn't a wide road, so I felt bad for taking up space. But I didn't want to get lost by trying to run elsewhere. It seemed to take forever to get 15 minutes out, and the run back in was just as miserable, but at least I knew I was heading back in toward done.

One of the best parts of the event was the cop at the light right next to the school. Rather than the usual cop standing in the road directing traffic to help protect the cyclists, this cop had the breaker box thing open for the light, and was causing the light to be green for the cyclists to go through. When I was running back in, he had the light green for some cyclists, and I was still a ways off and not moving quickly. But he kept the light green all the way until I got there and went through. Unnecessary, but very much appreciated. It was Hot at that point.

I was very happy to be done. And ate a hot dog.

So.. good event, good course, markings weren't great, volunteers were, race director was soliciting feedback at the end and I think got some good feedback for improvement next year. I'd definitely do this ride again.

Okay, so, a little belated, but my completionist nature demands I write SOMEthing up, and I'm backdating it to the actual date.

It was a decent race. Wetsuit legal, but I felt like it would take me more time to get out of my wetsuit than it would make my swim faster, so I didn't bother.

I lined up second row back, which definitely isn't how fast I swim, but since it was the first S&D of the season, a lot of people didn't want to be up at the front. Laurie lined up behind me, to draft off of me. A healthy Laurie who's been swimming is WAY faster than me (and she was wearing a wetsuit), so I wasn't sure if I was going to be fast enough for her to want to stay behind me.

When they said go, I took off, and quickly lost the fast people in front. I had no luck jumping on anyone's feet, and a girl kept pushing me further off course until I finally slowed down enough to get around her.

I just swam the whole time telling myself, "Laurie's right behind you, keep going fast," but I found out afterward that she was only on my feet until the first dock, then she slowed down. Glad I didn't know that at the time!

Felt decent about my swim, and transitioned fast, going sockless as I only ever do at things with runs that short.

Ran out and heard Matt, who had just races ROTT, so wasn't racing S&D, cheering for me.

Settled in to the run. It was warm, but it was also only in the 80s, and I knew it wasn't ever going to be this cool for a S&D again, so I tried to enjoy it.

I just kept setting my sights on people ahead of me and trying to catch them, and I did so with a number of people, men and women. Each time I'd run past the start line, Matt would cheer for me, and I'd look over to be adored by my puppies, who had also come out to spectate, and I'd see that they were ignoring me completely, and Enzo's face was in Hilda's mouth. Again. Puppies need to work on their spectation skills.

On the third loop, I tried to pick it up some, skipped the water at the water stop, and pushed hard on the straightaway.

Overall I felt decent about my effort, given that my body was still tired from racing ROTT and from having swam earlier in the day.

Alas, not my fastest S&D, and didn't make it either sub-30 or in the top 10. But close, with <a href="http://mychiptime.com/searchevent.php?id=642430:12 and 12th place</a>. Neither my swim nor my run were as fast as my faster times last year. Something to work on! And most importantly, puppies got some good socialization practice in.

Matt wanted to do the Republic of Texas half Ironman distance triathlon in Corpus Christi. I really had no desire to. It's early in my season still. Yeah, I've done all the requisite distances in all the sports already, but I just wasn't really ready to put them together. I'm signed up for a half in June. That seems sufficient.

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All pictures from the weekend can be found here.

I've done the EHCT for the past two years, but both times I just drove down on Saturday and rode that day, then drove home the same day. This year we decided to do all three days: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I'd never ridden more than 2 days in a row before, and not only would this be 3 days, but I also rode for 75 minutes on my trainer on Wednesday and for an hour on Thursday night at our brick workout. So straight from 2 days to 5 days of riding. Yikes.

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Total: 189.48 miles of riding, 3.55 miles of running, ~13 hours of exercising over 3 days.

Now to uh.. taper for that race we have coming up next weekend!

Whee, first charity ride of 2012, and it was great fun!

Ended up doing the entire ride, and the run, with Pam, and it was delightful to catch up with her, and to actually have a riding and running partner! I've done so many of my workouts alone for so long now, it felt foreign to actually be with someone.

The day started out really foggy as we drove to Liberty Hill, but it burned off quickly and it was gorgeous for the ride. And warmed up quickly once the sun came out, but it didn't matter much on the bike.

We started out with me and Pam, Jeff, Eva, Julie, Nicki, and two other TriZones people I didn't know, Nancy and Roy. Jeff was having a rough day, so after a few times of dropping him accidentally and then waiting for him at rest stops, he finally said just to go on and he'd see us at the end. The rest of the gang we ended up leap frogging with the entire day.



Pam has been Ironman training for a bit longer than I have this season, and that combined with her new tiny cranks meant she was making me work the entire time to keep up with her. But it's exactly what I need right now, to be pushed out of my comfort zone on the bike, and ultimately, even though we were chatting and enjoying ourselves the whole time, we ended up averaging 16.3ish mph. (Roughly the same average speed I was all impressed with myself for doing last year, except then I rode 20 miles shorter.) That's super fast for me for a training ride. I was happy.



Also we saw a baby cow right at the fence on a very small and narrow road, and he looked up at us and mooooooooed. My favorite part of the ride, for sure.

Also there were a lot of wildflowers out there.

And hills.

The last few miles with the steep uphills, the headwind and the horrible gravel on the road in that somehow I hadn't noticed on the way out, were by far the longest part of the ride, but we pushed in and stowed our bikes to go run. (Meanwhile, Matt had already finished his ride AND his run.)

Headed back out for the run and discovered.. oh, my.. it was hot. And sunny. Huh, exactly like last year. And I remembered how miserable that course was last year, with no shade. But we just put our heads down and gutted it out. Pam hadn't brought water, so we stopped at the aid station, which also had no shade. And we drank. And we dumped water over our heads. And generally felt like dying. But we kept running out, until we were 20 minutes out. Paused a second to breathe in the shade, then back in. At least we had some wind on the way back in. Stopped at the water again. And then we got to the 1 mile to go sign. That mile took like 0.25 milliseconds when we did it on the bike. It took 0.25 light years when running. We discussed the phenomenon wherein you have to balance feeling tingly and light-headed and trying to just get DONE already. Yeah, sorta passy-outty. Not a great feeling.

But we did our 40 minutes! And our miles were all low 9s and high 8s, for a 9:02 average. Not too shabby at all, given the conditions and it being one of my first bricks of the season, and riding hard for the ride!

Very happy with how strong I'm feeling so early in the season. Hoping to continue that trend.

Once again this was Matt's idea, and I was just tagging along. I really had no emotional investment in this race. I was excited to do it, but I really didn't have any goals or expectations or stress at all. Which was nice! I had my big goal race for early 2012 and I'm happy with how I did, so now everything else is just a fun bonus. Y'know, until that Ironman thing in August.

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Back in April of 2006, while I was training for my first half Ironman, I decided to start a blog to log my workouts. For 5.5 years, I logged Every Single Workout (well, swim, bike and run, anyway). Religiously. Sure, sometimes I'd fall a week behind in logging, but then I'd catch up again and continue logging.

Some time in October 2011, just before the Palo Duro 50 miler, I stopped logging. At first I just fell behind, but intended to catch up. Then I fell further behind. And further. And then I figured I'd just let a few weeks go and start anew. Then I didn't. And finally for nearly half a year, I didn't log a single workout. (Er, I didn't log a single workout on livejournal. I continued to obsessively log my training totals over at beginnertriathlete.com.)

I figured.. well, maybe I'm just done with that. 5 years is a long time to write up a little blurb on every single workout.

But lately I've started to be kinda sad about the lack of logging. Because I do go back and read them. I like to go back and read about my nerve-racking first ride on my tri bike or that time we set our alarms for 3am so we could run 18 miles before Leslie's brother's graduation or one of Karen's awful SoulBuster runs. Now I won't have a log of "that run where Daniel wanted to join me, but wasn't so pleased with that decision when it came time to run 90 minutes at my MGP" or "that run where Matt and I ran together in the rain on the Greenbelt".

And it made me realize that I really should start logging again. Because it's where I store not only my time trial times and fastest miles and progress getting (hopefully) ever faster, but it's where I store my memories.

So as of Friday, I'm logging again. Let's hope it lasts!

So there I was, sitting alone on a bench at 6:30am in downtown New Orleans, listening to Lady Gaga and crying.

Well.. maybe I should back up a little..

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