Zack's Triathlon Blog

This week was the most challenging week in terms of motivation. The schedule was somewhat light (we had Monday and Wednesday off), however after soooo many rainy days, I could really use some sunshine. For those of you that have not been living in the bay area for this past month, we set a new record for the most rain during March. In fact, we had 4x the amount of rain that Seattle had during the same time period. Wow! To make the week even harder, I ended up training on my own Thursday and Friday.

Thursday night I decided to go out running on my own, after my two running buddies (who will remain nameless) cancelled on me. It felt a bit odd running around the city streets on a cold wet night. There were quite a lot of people out and about eating and such and I got lots of strange looks as I ran 6 miles in the dark. It wasn't fun, it wasn't particularly hard or easy, it just kindof was.

Friday was supposed to be a bike ride, but the rain convinced me to move the workout to the gym instead. Once again on my own, I tried to make it interesting by swimming 1500M and moving on to a stationary bike right afterwards. Riding an exercise bike after doing the real thing was unbelievably miserable.

Today it was finally time to get back into the bay. It was less cold than last weekend, unfortunately it started pouring rain shortly after we got there. We were going to get wet anyway, but it would have been nice for our dry clothes to stay dry for changing into later. We had a great speaker, an accomplished and impressive swimmer named Deann Joslin. In addition to raising 5 kids, she swam in just about every aquatic race possible and even won some of them. She is currently training for a 40 mile swim that is supposed to take 18 hours and has to be done overnight to avoid sunburn. Umm... okay.

Getting into the frigid water was much easier than last week, in fact just about everything today was easier than I remembered. The salt water didn't burn, I didn't swallow as much, and I got into a rhythm much faster. I swam a little over 2/3 of a mile in about 38 minutes. I wasn't breaking any speed records, but I was pleased that I was going straighter and actually covering some distance. I'm looking forward to even more improvement next weekend during our "trial weekend". Next weekend we are going camping at the Wildflower site to do a practice session. The practice will span two days instead of all-at-once like it will be in the real race, but it will still be nice to get acquainted with the real course.