Oceanswim

Well it all looked a little like it was going to be a washout just like last year! Friday saw us with torrential rain, it pretty much poured down all day! I very dubiously headed off to registration to pick up my race pack and Nad'ya's as she was out of town. Briefly thought about trying to change Nad-ya into the non wetsuit swim category!! hehe! Decided that would be a bit mean and didn't do it!

Saturday morning was grey and drizzling but no howling southerly which was good and hey you get wet swimming anyway so it wasn't near as bad as it could have been.

Hard to say much about a swimming race really other that I turned up, I swam and I completed the distance. Its weird, lately I don't seem to get nervous before an event, perhaps because everything seems pretty minor in comparison to IM! Saturday was a little bit like turning up for a sea swim with several hundred of your closest friends! The water was lovely and calm which was great, temperature was a little fresh but you get that in the sea so no big deal. I was in the 2nd wave of 3 which were based on our estimated swim times, it was fairly crowded on the way out to the first bouy and thinned out a little from there, I found there was a reasonable amount of biffo and swimming over people on that first stretch but this eased as we covered the distance. And blimey what a distance!! It seemed ages and ages between each bouy and I felt like I was going pretty slowly and was pretty disappointed to see a time of an hour and 5mins when I finished as I had set a goal time of an hour. I was in the process of reworking through my estimated time for the IM swim and rethinking my whole race plan in my head when I very happily found out that the swim distance was long thanks to the organisers placing the bouys the night before. One would have thought you would double check these in the morning eh? The ocean has these interesting things called tides.... Oh well, at least we all had to swim the same distance and I feel better now knowing that I swam further in that time!

Can she blog? Yes she can!

Yeah yeah I know, its been ages! I've been busy! These last few weeks of IM training have been tough, fun but tough! 2 more biggish days tho and then its taper time! Blimey, this time in 2 weeks I will hopefully be asleep getting a good rest before race day!!

So what has been happening? There was another of those fun 180km rides! This time it wasn't roasting hot out tho which was nice, in fact it was pretty chilly and I wore my leg warmers, arm warmers and jacket for the whole 180km, just over 6 and a half hours on the bike, even got rained on a few times. I wore my knob (aero) helmet for this ride just to check out what it would be like to wear it for so long. It was ok actually cos it was cooler out, in fact it kept my ears and head nice and warm which was good. So decision is now made about the helmet, I will wear it at IM unless it is going to be a stinking hot day. Ohh and when you cycle round town wearing it its a little like the compression sock thing, after awhile you just stop noticing the funny looks. One thing that made me decide to wear it for a long practise ride was when someone said 'gosh when I see a cyclist wearing a helmet I just think thank goodness they are wearing one and being safe, I don't think about what kind of helmet it is' Well that was good enough for me! haha

Last week was also the Canterbury Tri Club Classic Tri, a 'nice' Olympic distance on the hilly country roads at Motanau Beach, hmmm not the most fun you could have after a 180km ride the day before. Let's just say that even the swim was hilly, it was hot and hard out there and I can think of far more fun things to do on my birthday!! It was a kinda momentous occasion tho in that it was 5 years to the day that I did my first ever triathlon, yep I did my first ever tri on my birthday, in the rain even!! And here I am 5 years later and only a few weeks away from my first IM. Thats pretty cool I reckon!

Tomorrow is the Corsair Bay Oceanswim, currently the weather outside is nasty so this doesn't bode particularly well for tomorrow but I guess we just go out and do it anyway cos it could be shite on race day! I will however being doing a windtrainer ride tomorrow if it is still raining, it would just be daft to go out and risk sliding off my bike in the wet this close to race day.

I think I have easy weeks sorted now and they just aren't easy, they are still all about pain! Mainly cos you are so buggered from the last 2 weeks that doing what should be easy stuff requires almost as much effort as on a hard week. Also I noticed that on easy weeks I am less careful about what I eat and didn't always eat a proper dinner which wouldn't help for sure. I also noticed that on easy weeks I tend to not set myself goals in my training program which means I have less of a focus on what I am doing which again makes things harder. Things to learn from I guess although that will be the last easy week in a while!

Right, its well past my bedtime now! 11pm!! Yikes! Lucky its a Friday and the Oceanswim doesn't start early! I will be gooder and try and post a little more often! Promise!

That was massive!

The training week that is! Wow, 20+ hours as well as working pretty much full-time (ok, I do have Wednesday afternoons off at the moment to train) and travelling to Wellington for work on Thursday. I am officially buggered but I can say that I have done it all and pretty much done it as planned!

The weekend was huger than massive if thats possible! Saturday was an 80min open water swim, 180km cycle and a 20min run off the bike. Sunday was simple in comparison, just a 3 and a half hour run! Yikes!

Things I learnt:

• I can cycle 180km (was actually 189.9, for about half a sec I contemplated riding the 1.1km to make it 190)
• Old West Coast Rd has to be the most boring stretch of road in the world!
• There isn't a lot of water to be found between Halswell and Oxford
• Lemonade ice blocks at Oxford and Sumner are heavenly!
• Coke and ice blocks are cheaper at the dairy in Oxford than at Shell Linwood
• Shell Linwood has the best ever air-conditioning!
• You can make it to Sumner and back on your own 2 feet!
• The chamois in my new tri-suit is great, my butt was comfy for the whole ride!
• The weather man has no idea what he is talking about, he said little wind for yesterday and rain for today. Well, if that was a little wind I don't want to see a big one and I'm still waiting for todays rain, it would have been quite nice on the run home!
• It is possible to run after having cycled for approx 7 hours and it actually didn't feel too bad???
• Coke goes flat pretty quick when you put it in the bottles on your fuel belt
• You can run with a gel or a pack of red licorice tucked into your running singlet and its not even uncomfy
• You bump into people from work in some strange places when you run that far! Haha, they aren't used to seeing me dressed like that and all sweaty as well!
• No matter how much sunblock you put on, you will still get new tan lines when its that damn hot!

Things I am thankful for:

• Bumping into Zarnia in Oxford cos the lemonade ice-blocks were her idea
• Bumping into Zarnia again today in Sumner so we could have ice-blocks again today
• John Ellis for wiping my 'beard' off when I got out of the water at Corsair Bay yesterday, I hate to think what I must have looked like, all sand and snot no doubt!!
• The ladies at the Courtenay Tennis Club (randomly along Old West Coast Rd) for letting me fill up my water bottles in their kitchen, I was a long long way from water otherwise!
• Geoff's daughter Libby for cooking me tea last night! Food never tasted so good!
• Compression socks, compression tights and anti-flamme!
• Cold Coke and another ice-block at the garage on the way home
• That when it took closer to 4 hours than the scheduled 3 and a half I just kept trucking along till I got home. What you need to know here is that I wanted to pack it in at around the 25min mark!
• A comfy couch to crash on for the afternoon!
• Seeing friendly and familar faces when on a mission that long, saw Kalina's mum, her friend Fran, her husband Tim, got a wave from Nadia, saw Richard Aitken (who would only give me a double home if I pedalled??) and saw a fair number of other familar folk zipping past on their bikes!

Not long now! 5 weeks time we will be done and dusted! Woohoo! Bring it on I say!