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Monday, May 28, 2007

Cap Tx Tri Weekend

This weekend didn't quite go the way I'd envisioned it would when I signed up for the Cap TX Tri but overall I think it turned out as good as it could have.
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After returning from Albany I went to UT to attempt to get some work done and then went to the tues night run practice. Let's just say my right ankle wasn't too happy about that decision. It had been feeling a bit sore for the past few days and Tues night was even worse. Best guess is that the tendons connected to my peroneous muscles were strained during the bike crash and they are not in good shape now. Tues run practice turned out to be a 15 min warmup, a couple minutes of drills and a walk back to the car. To say I was struggling mentally and physically would be a bit of an understatement. Tues night was rough!
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So... as the week progressed I went to visit Dr Sellers a couple of times and tried to determine a plan for the weekend. I had a big weekend of training and I was going to train through Cap TX. Thing is, I couldn't run. That left me with three choices: risk it, DNF, or DNS. I struggled with this for a few days; I've never DNF'ed but CdA is more important and it wasn't worth risking it for Cap TX. But that dang race was uber expensive and I could use the swim practice so it just seemed for logical to do part of it and DNF... what to do???
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Friday - my long 'run' day. Uh... yeah... so this turned into a long water jog. 3 loops around the quarry at Pure Austin up North. It took 2:18:00. I have learned that I swim about 3x as fast as I water jog. ( I verified this by swimming 2 loops later in the day) There I was Friday morning, water jogging around the bouy's all by myself. This gave me plenty of time to think. Mainly I wondered what a 2+ hour water jog would equate to in regular running. It just seems so hard to stay at your upper aerobic level while water jogging.
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Saturday - long ride. Michael joined me for almost 5 of the 6hrs. (He's so good to me). The biggest surprise of the day is the fact that we were actually able to ride on the road. The weather forecast had not looked promising the night before and I had prepared myself for the long and mentally challenging trianer ride. But... we lucked out and it was dry in the morning. My spanking clean bike made it about 2 hrs into the ride before it got caked in mud and water, oh well. At 3 hrs into the ride Michael chugged the sample of 5hr energy that I'd got from the shop. Let's just say it didn't work as expected. I think I actually lasted about 45 minutes before his head started to hurt. No worries, this didn't seem to effect the progress on Michael's creative power meter ideas. He spent the majority of the ride trying to invent a cheaper, more stable power meter than the one I'm currently testing. Details on this will have to remain a 'secret' for now ;) After dropping Michael off at home I finished off my ride and then we went to the neighborhood pool to swim a few minutes with Joe and Ali. Note: "with" = at the same time, not the same pace
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Sunday - a swim. I went down to Barton Springs to test out an Xterra wetsuit. I liked it but I didn't really swim long. I was feeling pretty darn tired and the dark clouds overhead didn't get me too excited about the swim. So I went back home and ran around the block to test my ankle out... Not good. Michael came up with a brilliant idea... see if you can switch to relay and I'll do the run. This made me happy b/c I was still having a hard time getting my head around the idea of a DNF. I got everything switched up and we were good to go. I instantly felt a huge cloud lifted from my shoulders and the hype around the race became a lot easier for the rest of the day. I was pretty relaxed about the race but did wonder how the rain was going to effect things. I was happy when Matt and Amy B. said they'd rack my bike for me... that meant I'd be more likely to get a spot that wasn't in the flood zone.
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Monday - Cap TX Tri... Cancelled due to rain. To be honest, I'm not really upset about this. I hadn't tapered for the race and wasn't even going to be able to do the entire thing. The biggest discomfort about the entire situation was the guilt I felt for wishing it would just get cancelled once it started to rain. I felt guilty b/c I have friends who were considering this an important race, there were people who traveled from out of town for it, and there were a lot of people I met in the past few days who were doing this as their first triathlon. But... the rain had it's way and after everything got totally soaked we loaded back into the car and were leaving the race cite over an hour before the relay wave would even be sent off.
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