Quick catch up

Well once again I am WAY behind in keeping up to date. So I need to digress back to last weekend. Saturday started with a sore knee as it has been bothering me the past couple weeks. We were doing a mock tri with TNT and I decided to only do the sprint course due to 1- the knee, 2- the LONG ride I had to do that afternoon and 3- the pending triathlon the next morning (I’ll get to that in a bit). That went just fine even with some discouraging words that had been said. But while I’m trying not to let others tell me what’s right for me, it’s still hard not to let it affect me. The weather was nice and I just took it at a medium pace.

After the mock it was off to get to Star Prairie to visit my beautiful little Olive (and here's a pic of one of my other favorite kitties, Brian. He's one of the jumpers :)

Home for Life is closed to visits over the winter so this is the first time I’ve been back to see her since September. She’s still as cute as ever! I brought Mark along with me as he once looked into the possibility of bringing one of his dogs there. He had a blast and cuddled up with a few dogs and cats

Once we left there, we TRIED to grab a couple geocaches but unfortunately the one I really wanted to find gave me a DNF for the day.

We traveled back in to a spot to start a 4-5 hour bike ride. It started out great, weather was nice, course was good. Then about 2 hours in the knee started to give out and slow me down. Two hours later, it was almost 9pm, dark, drizzly and I was trying to pedal with only one leg-power. Ugh!!! Couldn’t have been more frustrated! If I could have blogged right then and there you would have been able to get a very detailed emotional recount of the situation. Which includes a total freak out over the fact that at that pace I likely won’t make the bike cut off at Ironman. But for now I just have to say it “really sucked”

So at 10pm I decided I had made a few bad choices in time management and didn’t get home and to bed until after 11pm. With a very tired, sore, emotionally drained body I went to bed and when I woke up feeling the same as I went to bed, I made the decision I couldn’t go to the Manitou Tri that morning. I was very disappointed but I knew that would have been a dumb push for my body.

So instead of getting the Tri in and a bit of an extra run. We ended up down at Nokomis later in the evening to do a version of “splash and dash” Run one loop around Nokomis (2.7mi) then 500yd swim. We did 5 sessions Run-swim-run-swim-run in all. It actually felt pretty good and was a good modification on a day that I was just supposed to do a long run.

This week was particularly stressful on the personal side and financial side. I realized to keep my head above water I can spend NO extra money each month and pending no unexpected expenses save near to nothing. (panic!!!) But the one nice thing is that I did hear back from USAT and they gave me the part time Regional Assistant position (yay!). So I’m hoping that will help fill in my week and I can get off collecting partial unemployment.

With Ironman now less than 90 days away I find myself in a constant state of worry. Maybe my body won’t hold out on the bike? I didn’t do enough early season work that now I’m screwed. I still don’t eat as well as I should so maybe my fuel intake is messed up. Why does it seem like everyone is stronger and faster and I keep getting weaker? And everyone seems to be doing more than me but I’m following the book. Is it the wrong plan?

I also have been spending a lot of time thinking about my lack of excitement and enthusiasm about my racing. Honestly I think it’s because I think I totally suck. I am “ok” at racing but I have nothing to brag about. I’m one of the slow ones that has to try and rely on pretending “we just race for fun”. And while I do honestly race for fun, I quite often go into a race wanting to be fast or beat last year’s time or whatever and quite often I fail. Then I just tell people the race was good and leave out any statistics about how slowly I finished. I think I may even stop putting stats in my blogs, not sure yet. It’s so hard for me to write out what’s in my head but maybe that is a small glimpse….I’ll leave it for now.