Today I was in my bathroom and I had my first unique “You know you’re a triathlete when…” moment. Mine is this: You know you’re a triathlete when you realize that you have not showered in your home for many weeks! I realized this when I saw that my “home” towels have not moved from their spots in a long time and probably need to be washed because they have dust on them! Actually, that brings me to another one: you know you’re a triathlete when you have “home” towels and “gym/pool” towels. It is funny to me at how normal it is now to shower in a public shower room and to always be wearing flip flops in the shower!

Alas, I went to the pool today to get in my swim. I ditched out on the 6:30am swim with my training buddies, but was glad to hear that they ditched out too. It was a mutual ditching! We went in the afternoon instead, but at different times. Oh, communication is important! The swim went well, but I was doing my repeat workout when I realized that doing backstroke hurts my neck a ridiculous amount – definitely more than it should. The way the arms move must pinch my neck in “just the right way” to make a big difference in my comfort level with the stroke. In fact, it downright hurts! Other than that, I generally don’t hate backstroke. My coach has said that I can forgo the backstroke in lieu of my second-most-disliked stroke: the free pull. It’s not so much that I don’t like doing it, but I hate pull buoys! More specifically, I hate how when I turn at the end (flip turn or just regular turn) the pull buoy falls “down” from between my knees to between my ankles. This causes me much irritation and I spend most of the next length trying to work its way back to between my knees. Maybe I need to work on holding onto the pull buoys tighter. Oh, the drama in the pool! My coach has accused me of just hating to train… I told him that I love to train when I can just do freestyle!

Tonight I have a bike planned with intervals. It should be fun. I’m going to watch Sex and the City and sweat. I can’t wait to start biking outside! Please, Spring, come sooner rather than later… this is getting ridiculous!

Getting up at 6am on a Saturday is not generally my idea of a good time, but when one is training for Ironman it just has to be done. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one and met 9 other people to get together for a 3-hour ride. One of the guys in the club has the Ironman Coeur d’Alene bike course on his CompuTrainer. So while one person road the course (this morning it was my buddy Peter), the rest of us watched the profile of the course as well as the video of the actual route that was projected onto a screen. It was pretty cool, actually, and very informative. I had been told that IMCDA is a tougher course than Ironman Canada, but today it was very visually obvious. The next months are all about hill training! While we don’t have many hills around these parts, I will be getting very familiar with the hills that we DO have.

Yesterday, I did my repeat swim workout. I really love the 200m breaststroke, 500m freestyle, 200m backstroke sets! Well, I don’t love the back stroke part of the set, but my coach says that it’s good for me. So I take his word for it! Tomorrow my buddy and I are going to do a steady 10K run and I’m hoping to get into the pool in the afternoon. There’s nothing like squeezing in my workouts on the weekend! Well, it’s nothing like last weekend and I’m anticipating a crazy week for work next week.  So I need to get in as much as I can this weekend.

I just wanted to say to anyone who is reading this that has commented that I’m sorry that I haven’t replied! The emails were going to an address that I forgot I had. The situation has been rectified, though, and I will be on top of the comments from now on! Some of the comments that I just read were from a year ago… all of them were so supportive and awesome. I have to admit that I feel a little sheepish for not keeping this blog updated better.

That being said, I will have more time to update the blog and to revamp the website once I get to my “early retirement” as my coach says. As of April 1st (no, this is not a joke!), I will be unemployed from my full-time job. I’ve decided that I want to spend my time training “like a pro.” That means that most of my energy will go into training and eating. Hopefully I will experiment with adding more and more raw foods into my life. I just learned a great recipe for some raw chocolate pudding – just imagine something that tastes so good and is healthy! Oh yeah… that’s the good stuff.

So keep the feedback coming! I appreciate all of the comments that everyone has put up here. Thank you!

On Monday I biked to work in a snow/rain storm in the name of active recovery. I knew that I wouldn’t have the energy to do anything more than that after work. On Tuesday, I took my pup for a much-needed walk in the morning and then for a nice, chilled out run/walk in the evening. I realized on this walk/run that this was what active recovery felt like! And I have to admit that on Wednesday morning, my DOMS (ie. delayed onset muscle soreness) felt much better. My massage later that day also helped! It probably also helped that I had a chiropractic adjustment on Tuesday afternoon as well. My chiro has prescribed an adjustment every 3-4 weeks when I’m training because of my back issues. I can’t help but wonder if strength training and yoga won’t cure my scholiosis. I wonder if there is a way to test it out, other than basing it solely on how I feel. I suppose I could look it up!

All of this brings me to today. This morning I went for a swim, which ended up being a recovery swim as well because my training buddy wanted to chat instead of letting me do my workout. I guess we had stuff to catch up on! Tonight, however, I’m going to get on the trainer for some good ol’ winter fun! We still have a lot of snow here and while I would love to get out onto the road, it’s just not happening right now. I am hoping to get out on the road next week for my long ride if it warms up enough.

The other topic of this blog post is about food. I have been kind of bad with food over the past few months. I have not had much motivation, not only for training, but also when it came to food. I am a lot better at eating more raw fruits and vegetables these days, but I have my moments. Last night I had a “moment.” Instead of cooking a healthy eggplant curry stirfry like I was intending, I ended up eating Multi-grain Cheerios and then soy ice cream! Oh, the guilt!  Repent, repent, repent! The biggest problem with not cooking at night isn’t so much what I ate that night, but that it leaves me lunchless the next day. So I am eating a lot of peanut butter and jam toast today. I have also eaten a pear and will make it through the day with an orange, banana, and more toast. Oh, what I would give for that eggplant curry! Alas, I will make it tonight before the bike trainer fun.

The other night I had the biggest salad I’ve ever eaten! It had a huge amount of tomatoes (my favorite food of all time), a lot of different greens, hemp seeds, and a tahini dressing. It takes a really long time to eat a big salad like that. I have to admit, though, that it has done a bit of a number on my digestive system. I think it’s getting sorted out now, though. I am going to try to have a salad like that every couple of days because I have a ridiculous amount of greens in my house right now. Between salads and green smoothies, I’ll be going through them in no time!

I’m looking forward to a weekend of training and planting my early seeds indoors for my summer garden!

It’s true that I have not trained as much this winter as I had hoped I would. I would even say that the past couple of months I have been in a negative rut, physically, emotionally, and mentally… all very closely related of course. Last week I decided at the last-minute that I was going to sign up for a clinic that the local triathlon club has organized. It was a little out of my budget, but I decided that I could cut back on other things to make it work for me financially. So I spent my weekend with 5-time world triathlon champion, Simon Lessing and runner Darren de Reuck.

On Saturday morning I got up bright and early to be in the pool for 7:45am. Even my training buddies were surprised that I was on time! We jumped right into the swim workout and Simon quickly started correcting my/our hand entry into the water. Apparently I/most of us were entering the water, stretching our hands out straight, and dropping our elbow and shoulder. I spent the whole workout concentrating on keeping my elbow up and entering my hand at a 70-degree angle. This induces a strong catch at the top of the pull. He also stressed the importance of kicking. In triathlon, it is often thought that our kick is not very important because we need to “save” our legs for the bike and run. We also wear wetsuits making our legs more buoyant. However, Simon strongly disagrees with this sentiment and got us to think about our kick. In our acceleration drills, we propelled ourselves faster by kicking faster. It’s all about tempo. This resonated with me, as a fairly strong kicker, and I worked hard to keep my kick strong and will continue to do so throughout my training.

After the swim, we got a few hours to eat and listen to Simon and Darren, who are both originally from South Africa, talk about running, coaching, nutrition, and workouts. It was really informative and I took some good notes. We also got a feel for their great sense of humour. Both Simon and Darren are funny guys and obviously like to have fun and enjoy themselves. They also take their sports very seriously. It was a great mix! We then got our running gear out and headed to the track for a lesson in plyometrics, stretching, and running. It became hurt-so-bad clear to me that I have not been running enough. This did not come as a surprise to me, it was more of a kick-in-the-butt moment. We did some fairly fast 800s, which I am not used to at all. I’ve been doing more slow runs and less runs of anything remotely resembling tempo runs. However, to be honest, I haven’t done a lot of long, slow runs lately, either. It was good for me to realize this. Very good, indeed. Also, I discovered that my shoulders tense up quite a bit when doing tempo work and on Saturday it triggered my never-ending struggle with my neck. Luckily, I stopped doing the intervals before it got too bad. I’m going to try to do some strengthening exercises to see if I can work out the scholiosis so that it doesn’t affect me so much.

We almost immediately hopped on our bikes to do a grueling bike session using  all of our gears and some good intervals. It was really hard, but having 6′2″ Simon walking back and forth getting us to work harder was great motivation. I got home at around 5:30, feeling completely wiped and inspired. However, the evening of triathlon was not over.

The Saskatoon club’s local organizer of the weekend had us all over for a bit of a social. Simon told us a bit about his career and how he made his decision to retire last fall. He has had so many amazing accomplishments in his career and it became painfully obvious to me how difficult it is to be a pro in this sport. I’m sure it is difficult in any sport, but in triathlon the pros train all the time in THREE SPORTS. Also, in the early years of triathlon (in the 1980s and 1990s), it did not sound very pleasant to be a pro. There was even the struggle to find the races to compete in. I have a new-found respect for the pros – I used to think it would be so great to be a pro. Simon’s story also showed how dedicated he has been to the sport. Even in order for him to compete in international competitions, he had to leave South Africa because of the ban of international competitions during the apartheid, which is basically the separation of a group of people based on race. He spent a lot of time in France and somehow ended up on Boulder, Colorado. It was a great social event… I don’t know how the other triathletes were drinking beer and wine. I carefully sipped on my water, thankyouverymuch!

On Sunday, I didn’t feel too bad. A little fatigued, but I was pretty happy to get in the water. That was the case until we actually started the workout! The workout on Sunday wasn’t as hard as on Saturday, but it wasn’t easy. We did quite a bit of kicking, which is good. Simon reiterated (again and again) the importance of kicking and the 70 degree angle of the hand-entry to keep the elbow up. We got done the workout a little early… so we had a relay race. I guess most of the other girls went to do their hair because it was just me and one other woman to be involved in the relay. It was great to have a little race! Also, Simon hopped in the water to school the clinic organizer (a great guy with a great sense of humour) in the art of great swimming. He was so fast!

The run was more about technique and plyometrics than about running – thank goodness for me! Darren did some gait analysis, which was good. He reminded me to relax my shoulders. I really need to work on that. By this point, we had gotten to know Darren and Simon pretty well… I guess well enough for Simon to moon us on the warm-up! That’s right… I was mooned by Simon Lessing, triathlon legend!

After the run and a lesson in stretch band strength training, we headed up to the bike room to set up for our last session of the weekend. We did a similar workout as the day before with some variation. Simon reminded us to keep our shoulders relaxed, our pedal strokes smooth, and our heads up.

All-in-all, it was a great weekend! It was great to re-connect with some local triathletes, meet some new ones, and just be immersed in the sport for the weekend. It has been a while since I’ve been this inspired to train. After last season being such a rough one (my coach calls it “character-building”), it is nice to feel this renewed! Thanks go out to the local organizers and to Simon and Darren for making it a great weekend!