Sprint Pics

http://www.asiorders.com/view_user_event.asp?EVENTID=11253&BIB=1313

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http://www.asiorders.com/view_user_photo.asp?PID=&EVENTID=11253&PWD=&ID=24837407&FROM=browser&START=97&SHOW=48&CAT=0&SUB=28765

http://www.asiorders.com/view_user_photo.asp?PID=&EVENTID=11253&PWD=&ID=24839962&FROM=browser&START=2305&SHOW=48&CAT=0&SUB=28765

As always, I'm all smiles at the finish line, even though it wasn't my best performance.

They say the camera adds 10 lbs., but in my case, I think NOT. I'm gonna make that body of mine work harder at the 7/9 sprint. My dad will be watching! But I'm afraid he is going to tell me I'm skinny (he already has and hasn't even seen me in a bikini in YEARS). To which I will reply, "Occupational hazard of being a Crackhead."

2007--I said I wouldn't plan, but here goes....

January: Goofy Challenge, Disney World--1/2 marathon Saturday, full marathon Sunday

May (end): DeSoto Triple T. Team Crackheads (me and my friend Cindy) are competing in the Masters category--where your total age needs to be 80+. Cindy is only 36, yet she is brave enough to team up with me, who will be 50! Friday night is a sprint tri, Saturday we do an Oly in the morning and again in the afternoon (but sports are in a different order), and Sunday is a 1/2 Ironman. Each of us does each race solo, but scoring is based on fastest and we get to draft one another in the 2nd Oly race. I spoke with one of the race directors this evening, and he tells me from other competitors who have done Ironman races that this is harder. BRING IT ON!!! I was looking for a new challenge, and the opening of race registration announcement arrived in my email box this morning, and I just knew I had to do it for once, so I called Cindy to check if she'd be in, and well we are. I really don't care if our team is DFL--just completing this bad boy is a badge of honor. Anyone else who is interested, head to http://hfpregistration.com/ to register now since it's a small race and fills quickly.

July (end): Ironman Lake Placid, The Vengeance. This was my first Ironman race. Cindy's, too. She was faster than me. Who's faster now??? We shall see. It might rain, it might snow, it might be hot, but I know there aren't jellyfish in Mirror Lake, and I doubt it will be 110F.

Rest of year: As tolerated. Maybe I will hang up my bike and run shoes at this point. Who can say?

This is a challenging schedule. If I can get to Disney healthy and not catch any airplane crap, I am good to go, as I will for sure be driving to Ohio for the Triple T and maybe caravaning with Cindy to Lake Placid.

I think this will be more fun than doing 2 Ironman races in a year. I also think I will be kicking myself this winter again thinking "I will NEVER do an early Ironman race." Well, Triple T isn't really an Ironman--it will just feel that way after it's all over. Talk about your long training weekend! I am guessing there will be several double long run weekends between January and May.

Time for sleep, I am so excited though :)

The Bitch is Baaaaaaaack

BITCH=Babe In Total Control of Herself. A woman on the tri-drs list found that acronym, and guess who she thought of first? ME.

I'm feelin' it again. Not the desire to train 18 hours a week (yet!), but enjoying it being hard. Sure I had my little misstep this weekend where I didn't race as well as I should have because I toasted myself, but hey, I think I've recovered. Besides the workouts leading up to and then including the race were awesome. I really enjoy gutting it out day after day. I know, I am sick. But that's what teaches you to keep going in long races--if you've put the hurt to yourself in training, it is like a trained response to do it in a race--the so-called "digging deep." Only you are not really digging that deep if you do it regularly.

Yesterday was my usual Monday of 3 workouts--an easy swim (drills mostly), about 1 hour of strength (I have lost no strength since Brazil), and then an easy :50 run including :10 strides.

The swim went really well--I am going to keep up the drill workouts for awhile--I had my stroke count way down. I think I am just one of those people who needs regular, focused drill work. The strength session was no problem, although I made an executive decision that rather than do 1 set of 20 reps that I would give myself a break and drop the weight just a bit and do 1 set of 25 reps. That worked out well. My muscles still felt pretty abused from the previous 4 days. When I got to the run and started it, I was like fuuuuuuck.....my legs are MIA. For the first time in a long time I was running close to 9 min./mile. But I am so used to things being hard and effort and all, and hey, I'M NOT SICK, so I can do this. I got the job done.

I slept 10.5 hours last night. YA THINK???? Man did I need that! I also tried harder to gag down more carbs yesterday. When I woke up today I felt like I could have slept another 2 hours, so initially I wasn't too optimistic about doing a hard bike ride. But I did my good nutrition, a good early morning stretching session, and figured I would play it by ear.

When I first got on the bike I was like WTF gear is this thing in? It was like I had no power. And I couldn't tell if it was windy or not. Those are sure-fire signs of tired legs, even though the good old SRM was telling me that I DID have power. I extended my warmup a bit, and headed to my interval stomping grounds. There is something psychologically motivating about going to a place where you know you are going to put the hurt to yourself. It is almost like a Pavlovian response: "I am HERE therefore I must CRUSH MYSELF." That is always the objective. And today there was hardly any traffic to stop me in my tracks.

I did the spinups (3' worth) with a smile on my face, then I geared up for some Z3 work. The last few times I've done my interval workouts I think I have gone too hard for the Z3 stuff, but I am just so accustomed to crushing it whenever I can that basic instincts take over. But I did hold back a little more today, because I wanted to see what I could do on the FT intervals.

When I began the first interval (I did 3x8' with 4' rest again), all I could think was this feels harder than normal. I was putting out the watts, and smiling the entire time (another PICTURE PERFECT June day here in Chicagoland), yet I had some concern that I wasn't recovered from the weekend and that maybe I would be hurting myself by kicking it today. But you don't know until you try, right? I didn't even take notice of my average watts for the first interval.

When I began the second interval, I could tell I felt a lot better. There definitely was some wind, and once again I was LOVING it. Wind just makes me work harder, and I don't care (hey, Brazil was windy and I didn't care even though I was freaking sick as a dog). I even had an opportunity to race a car going up a hill, which I totally dug on, and then I screamed down the backside laughing hysterically while trying to catch my breath. I did notice my average watts for this interval and they seemed really good (a little TOO good, actually).

So I wondered what the third one would bring. The effort felt fine, and I pushed and pushed, and it was good and I rode HARD. I was smiling from ear to ear--this is hard, and when I would see people in their cars I kept thinking DON'T YOU WANNA KNOW HOW HARD THIS IS AND WHY I AM SMILING WHILE I AM DOING IT AND OH YEAH I LOOK REALLY GOOD, TOO, BY THE WAY, I CAN SEE YOU STARING AT ME AND YES IT HURTS BUT IT HURTS SO GOOD THERE'S NOTHING ELSE I WOULD RATHER BE DOING RIGHT NOW.

My normalized watts for the 3 intervals were 176, 186 and 184. About what I was hitting the week before Ironman Brazil. She's back!

Then I got to finish up by doing 4x90" best effort with 3' rest. Those are real fun, too. While they are a little squirrelly because of the undulating route, I still push as best I can. I hit 209, 221, 199, 206 watts normalized. I think I can go higher next time.

I may up the interval times to 10' this Friday if my legs feel up to it. It's time to up the ante a bit. Maybe I can even gain a few points on my FT watts? At any rate, it's feeling good to go hard again. My evil coach has trained me to want this stuff, or maybe he just picked up on me having the mentality to do it and LIKE it. Whatever. As long as I am healthy enough to do it, do it I will.

Ciao!

Weekly Workout Totals 06/19/2006-06/25/2006, Great Training Week and Triathlon #51

I had a great training week last week. I got some intensity back in biking and running, well actually quite a bit of intensity, which as it turns out, sabotaged my race yesterday (among other stupid things I did). But I'm OK with how the race turned out--I had so much fun training last week especially after a fairly hard come-back training week the week before. I will post the numbers at the end of this post, since my guess is they are not all that interesting.

I met Lora on Saturday at the registration for the race we did yesterday. I also met her wonderful Mom. We did some dishing, some sand-bagging and had a great time. I told Lora that she would do just fine on Sunday, and that we would have fun. We both got great race numbers--hers was 1001, and mine was 1313.

Sunday morning driving to the race, I could see the clouds out west where I was headed. I had checked the radar (I *LOVE* Doppler Radar) before I left home and didn't think the rain would be significant. It looked like it might just be cloudy all day.

I got to transition and met up with Lora and her mom. It was cool, and we weren't about to get out of transition until we absolutely had to. At some point it started to rain, but not too badly. We hoped it would let up and dry out before the race started, but that didn't happen, either. I put my bike stuff and run stuff in plastic bags so that at least I could put on dry shoes to race in. Both Lora and I downed some of the good old Ultra Violence to get us psyched to race.

I was put into the 50-54 wave just ahead of Lora's 45-49 wave. She told me she was happy that I had been bumped up so she didn't have to compete against me! It didn't matter. I felt ready, but not "race ready."

I just couldn't get it together in the swim. It's in this thing that is man-made, but not really like a pool. The water sloshes in a strange way, and we zig-zagged through "lanes" which at the end were so shallow you got up and walked. Oh well, I thought I'd be fine once out on the bike.

Nope. My legs were dead. D-E-A-D. Sure, I passed a bunch of ladies, but I wasn't going very fast at all. My front brake may have been rubbing somewhat, but I could just tell my legs were not going to cooperate with me today. In retrospect, I know why. Look at what I did the 3 days before:

Thursday: AM swim 2950, PM run 10.4 miles at 8:53 pace (which is some sort of PR for me--don't ask me why I thought I as racing--I was supposed to END the run at tempo, but oh, what the hell, may as well run the whole thing peppy).

Friday: Bike 1:35, including 3x8'(4') at FT and 4x90"(3') "best effort." I really kicked it in this workout, as my legs felt surprisingly good, and all indications are that my FT power hasn't suffered too much since Brazil. And then I ran :30 off the bike at a pretty good clip. I was wearing my low-rider DSS shorts and got plenty of stares. They really are obscene, but I always say the day I look bad in that stuff I will stop wearing it! One man even said something to me while driving by me and waggling his finger at me. I couldn't hear him because I was listening to music, so I just kept on smiling and running.

Saturday: Bike 2:30, including 2x20' at HIM watts and 3x8'(4') at FT watts. I felt sluggish at first, but then I picked it up and had a great ride. About 1 hour after I finished, I met Lora at the race registration, and then when I got home, I met another friend and we walked downtown to the local festival and walked around for almost 3 hours.

I think I may have been fine yesterday had I not walked around in the sun for 3 hours on Saturday afternoon! That is a sure-fire way to sap your energy the day before a race. To top it off, since returning from Brazil, I am just not so much in the mood for carbs, and have been laying down some serious protein consumption. It shows in my physique, but I guess trying to stack 4 consecutive days of rather intense training with an Atkins-like diet isn't the best thing in the world!

Anyway, I still had fun riding my bike in the rain yesterday, and then when I started the run, I was like oh fuck are my legs toasted. But I gotta run. I was even smiling at how bad my legs felt, because you know what? I really didn't care. I don't think I have EVER tapered for a sprint race, and really, it was a buzz to see just how thrashed I could be and still finish this bitch. Which of course I did. I ended up coming in 16th out of 92 in my age group, which is a sucky finish for me (I should have been top 5), but I didn't care, because I got to wait for Lora to come in, and I wanted to run her in at the end.

I went back out on the last .2 miles of the run course and chatted with some people I know and some I didn't know. I just love finish areas of these races--to me the best part is cheering in others AS an athlete. I yelled at all the ladies to pick it up since the remainder was mainly downhill. Luckily, I spotted Lora coming in and then I just left my new-found friends to bring her home.

I was yelling and cheering and leading a pack of girls down the home stretch. I told Lora to grab the imaginary rope that was tied to my waist to make herself go faster. I told her she could puke at the finish line, but not now. She was a real trooper and probably hated that I did that to her. There is no point in being nice to someone at the end of a race--that is when you dig your deepest and go somewhere you may not have been, and I wanted Lora to experience that! The final 25 yards is on grass, at which point I veered off to let Lora do her thing and get her finishing photo taken.

Afterwards, we hung out waiting for transition to open. Lora's mom, who is such an angel, bought Lora AND me a bunch of daisies as congratulations! We found a tent to huddle under, as the rain kept picking up. Lora and I were freezing, and Lora's mom grabbed what we thought was a sheet out of a container and wrapped it around us, which helped. When the "owners" came to the tent, they were a little angry--they said the "sheet" was a table cloth! Oh well, it would wash up just fine.

A 30-ish woman came up to me and complimented me on my physique. She told me I had the best one there out of everyone! And then, of course, she asked me my age. I told her, and she was incredulous. She's a chiropractor, and she said it was so cool that she could see every muscle on me! We chatted a little about diet, exercise and self-care. Too bad she's way too far from me, because she does some interesting things many chiropractors don't do, and since she's an athlete, I'm sure she is very in tune with what we need.

So even though I didn't race up to my potential, I had a great training week (and the race WAS great training), made a new *REAL* friend in Lora, and bonus, was voted "best looking" by several competitors (while waiting in line for the swim a few women made comments to me as well). You know I always say it's better to look good than to feel good, but hey, I like both, and I feel great today, even though I'm a little tired. I get to put it on the line again in 2 weeks, and this time I won't do stupid things that I would tell another athlete not to do right before a race.

Here are the happy slacker totals for last week:

Weekly Totals 06/19/2006-06/25/2006
Swim: 9667 yards in 3.45 hours; 22% of weekly workout time; approx. 1208 calories burned
Bike: Approx. 117.59 miles in 6.72 hours; 42% of weekly workout time; approx. 3123 calories burned
Run: Approx. 28.8 miles in 4.32 hours; 27% of weekly workout time; approx. 2501 calories burned
Strength: 1.38 hours; 9% of weekly workout time; approx. 345 calories burned
All Sports: 15.87 hours; approx. 7177 calories burned
Sleep: 8.07 hours avg./night
Stretching: 1.77 hours

Season Totals 09/12/2005-06/25/2006
Swim: 337695 yards in 119.1 hours
Bike: Approx. 3633.93 miles in 209.45 hours
Run: Approx. 1138.58 miles in 179.54 hours
Strength: 58.7 hours
All Sports: 566.79 hours; approx. 252015 calories burned
Stretching: 61.63 hours

Season Weekly Averages 09/12/2005-06/25/2006
Swim: 8236 yards in 2.9 hours
Bike: Approx. 88.63 miles in 5.11 hours
Run: Approx. 27.77 miles in 4.38 hours
Strength: 1.43 hours
All Sports: 13.82 hours
Sleep: 8.47 hours avg./night
Stretching: 1.99 hours avg./week

Goals from Last Week:

• I gotta sleep more. I did a little better last week, but I guess this is just what happens during the summer. It's nice outside, it's light late, and I want to stay up. I can deal.
• I need to get my stretching back to 2 hours weekly. I got closer, so at least I'm moving in the right direction.
• I want to do really well in the sprint triathlon. FAILED. Due to my own stupidity. But I have no regrets, it was just a sprint, it was great training and I had a fun day!

Accomplishments This Week:

• My legs continued their recovery from Ironman Brazil, as evidenced by achieving my former FTP in bike workouts and doing some solid running.
• Got in a solid slacker training week, including triathlon #51!

Goals for Next Week:

• Move up the stretching a little more, especially since I seem to be keeping up fairly high-intensity workouts.
• Evaluate my plans for the buildup to Racine 1/2 Ironman and consult my coach if I think it's necessary.
• Begin thinking about the dreaded Ironman training, since if I decide to do Ironman Florida, the time I need to begin training will come quickly!
• Keep enjoying the summer, training outdoors, loving life!