Sorry Lance, it IS about the bike

Ok so I know this isn't what Lance meant by his book title but I thought this post title would be funny....deal with it :-P

To keep the story short, my bike problems may have been solved, at least to get me through IM. There's two parts to this story:

1) The Foundation (my work) was donated a beautiful adult triathlon frame a year or two ago and it's just been sitting in the office. It's a Aegis T2 and here's a pic of one. Mine will be a different color is all.

Basically, as my 'bonus' for assisting on the MiracleKids triathlon I was given this frame and am getting the 650 tires that fit it. I am ecstatic! I happily have handed my old bike and the new frame over to Karl D to let him have fun tearing apart my old bike and building up what we are now affectionately calling "the Dreamsicle" since the frame is bright orange with white lettering. It might look a little funny at first with all my old parts on it but the hopes is to slowly convert parts over so it's more of a real tri bike.

2) So you might be wondering...."two weeks out from the tri, you're tearing apart your old bike? Will you have your new one in time for IM? How will you have time to get used to it?" Answer - I'm borrowing a different bike. Thanks to Tony and his incredible network of friends (and I think some sympathy for my extreme bike issues), he hooked me up to borrow Dave Goldberg's Ti-Phoon for the next few weeks. (He was a 2008 MN All American, 2009 Short Course favorite, and placed 20th at Nationals a few weeks ago!) It's been a blessing and leads me to my post title

It IS about the bike!

It took a bit to get used to the speedplay pedals, shifters on the aero bars, no drops and much flatter positioning but I feel so much better and can get so much more power out of my legs. Our long ride on Saturday actually exhausted my quads which is the first time that's happened in months! On my old bike I just wasn't getting the right positioning to really use my bike legs. We covered 50 miles and I managed to average 15.6 mph. Yay!!! There is hope! I kept enough a pace that I finally made Mark work a little to ride with me :-P

So another thing about Saturday, we found out there was a charity ride for the Carver Scott Humane Society. The exact ride with the stops they had planned was only about 20 miles but the routes and stops were in and around Chanhassen, Excelsior, Minnetonka area so we were able to spend less time at the stops and add a lot of our own miles. Below are pictures of us before the ride. We rode with adoptable animals pics on our backs. Mark rode for Tom, I rode for Posh. I picked her since she looks like my niece's cat Pumpkin. :)

So on to Sunday....

Mark and I raced in the Inaugural Minneapolis Duathlon It was a 5k run / 18mi bike / 5k run. I really didn't know what to expect being on a bike I rode for the first time the day before and really haven't done much in terms of speed training. I'll give more details below, but to start, here are a few pictures.

Mark, as usual, takes a great pic of us before the start.

Mark's brother Michael also completed the Duathlon. He's a great cyclist and this was his first multi-sport event. He said he enjoyed the event and I hope he'll join us for more duathlons in the future. Cari, his wife, was there to cheer us on. It's always awesome seeing someone along the course :)

This event definitely drew athletes of all abilities. I saw everything from super high end triathlon bikes....to bikes with fenders and baskets. This was our favorite :-P

So as for details on the race - it was perfect weather and luckily a calm wind day. My strategy was to push myself a little but concentrate on keeping my heartrate below 175 on both runs. The first run, my body was just sore and tired from biking the day before, so I felt like my heartrate was around 170. But when I looked at my watch, I was only at 163. So despite the aching, I pushed myself a little bit faster. The course was mostly flat except for a couple bridges going across the river.

The bike I was ready to push a little and see what I could do on this bike. Unfortunately my quads were on fire from being burned out the day before and my "girly parts" were sore too from the long ride. The road had a couple rough areas that jammed the saddle up (feeling something like sitting on a pitch fork) and made me throw out a few choice words. So I had to stand and coast through a few sections (which unfortunately was hard on my quads). So I think if I was on fresh legs I could have gotten a better average but now that I'm looking back on it, I am very happy with how I did.

Second run I didn't know what to expect as I haven't run off this new bike yet. It ended up feeling pretty much like running off my old bike. It took me about the first mile to get my legs moving smoothly underneath me. Again my goal was to hold my heartrate around 165-170 which I managed to do except for up an over the last little hill in the final .20 mi.

I was really tired but am now very happy with how I did. I say "now" because I felt like I could have been better at the finish of the race. I was kind of bummed that I had to do the race on sore legs and have an automatic response system that turns on during races that reminds me I have no natural talent and have to bust my tail to maintain an "ok" status in the race world and tend to be jealous of those who do a lot less training and coem to races, exert less effort than myself and still manage to kick my arse. Mark has been patient with me and we've talked through this a few times now. I've been trying to assess this negative mental energy and determine how to turn it off and be proud of the progress I've made over my three multi-sport seasons. I am so greatful to have him to train with and am curious to see how being able to actually put some emphasis on speed training next summer will improve my 'skilz' (or should I say actually GIVE me some).

I'm officially in my 2 week taper now and did my last long swim at Gunther's last night (Monday). Mark did one lap which was a little over a mile and I did two laps which was about 2 miles. We stayed together on the first lap since most people that swim there are much faster than we are. I guess while I was swimming my second lap, Mark was talking with another guy Josh about training and how we do what we can to train together. Josh was saying how that is so awesome and how he really wishes he had someone to train with. Which leads me to my final thoughts for today:

I can't tell you how special and important it is for me to now have someone in my life that accepts and appreciates what I do and wants to train WITH me, even though we are at very different levels. (He's a stallion, I'm a turtle :-P) Yes there are times when he has his races/training days and I have mine but we also can find the joy in completing an event together and worrying less about our individual finish times. He's helped me work on speed and I've taught him about Zone 2. We've been told by many people how awesome that is that we can stick together like we do. And I'll never take that for granted :)

11 days, 19 hours, 17 minutes until IM......