Carry water, chop wood...sleep.

S - 13,100 yards (appx)
B - 217 miles
R - 23.1 miles

18.07 hours

This week started off with a big bang on the bike in the mountains, which I won't try to recap here.  That being said, I will send you to ICE Racing's blog so you can read up on the epic, brutal experience there...

http://iceracingteam.blogspot.com/2012/06/magnificent-memorial-mountain-massacre.html

Unfortunately, however, this ride put me in a bit of a hole.  It wasn't so much this PARTICULAR ride, but more the fact that it was the culmination of three days' of tough riding.  250 miles and 700+ TSS in 3 days (in the first hot weekend it felt like) left my legs feeling a bit smoked.  My workouts and volume during the week suffered as a consequence.

Was it worth it? YES.  It was a gorgeous day, a gorgeous ride, great training stress, tons of epic, good friends, awesome descents, great mountain dew (but that's taken for granted), snickers, views, etc.  What more could a guy ask for?? Don't answer that...because I know the answer.  Unfortunately, she's currently about to graduate! Alas.

I tried to get excited for the NC 5k OWS championships, but it was tough.  Luckily, I had good company on the drive and in the race (albeit not IN the race as they were too far ahead to play chatty cathy with).  Jenny ended up as the overall female winner (and second overall) just one second ahead of Bill (second male, third overall since Jenny out sprinted him to the timing mat!)  My race recap would be very simple and it would include lots of repeated elements of "stroke, stroke, sight, breathe, stroke, etc" for 5 laps.  The course was apparently 200m long per lap (according to available sources, unfortunately I didn't wear my Garmin in my cap as Bill made fun of that prospect) so with 5 laps that meant a roughly 6000m swim.  Yuck.  Jenny told me later: "Don't take this the wrong way, but I was definitely thinking you'd quit."

So I was happy to have proven her wrong.  AND only be 9 minutes behind her after 6k.  Looks like 25 years of swimming versus 4 years of swimming IS quantifiable.