B - 50 miles (03:50 hrs)
R - 23 miles (02:53 hrs)
Time - 16.97 hrs
This week was all about one thing and one thing only: get in the swims. Monday morning included a glorious 2000 yard time trial (~24:30), Tuesday was a glorious SwimMAC masters workout with a bunch of stroke, Wednesday was some other stuff, Thursday was some more stuff, Friday morning was some swimming stuff, Friday evening was some more swimming, Saturday morning was some sweet swimming. Hmmm, that kind of all ran together. The most memorable part was obviously the TT at the beginning of the week. An idea courtesy of the Junior Pro we got to it after a hair over 2k yards worth of warmup; only she, myself and Ben Holland dared complete the whole thing. Ben is renowned for having one of the best strokes I've ever seen. Luckily, I'm pretty fit so 2000yards gives me a chance to even it out with someone like him. Well, right before we started I - like the considerate person that I am, obviously - told Jenny that if she caught me (lapped me) to just tap my feet and I'd let her do her thing. She told me - like the antagonistic person she is - that her goal was to lap me 4 times. Needless to say, this put a little fuel in my fire. The fire to be awesome.
I paced it dead even and ended up at roughly 1:13/100 yards. Pretty fast, and better than I expected. Now the swim challenge will be two fold:
1) Get in all the swim workouts assigned to me over the next two weeks (all 16 of them)
2) Get my fly, back and breast strokes to the point where a 1:05 100IM SCY is within reasonable reach. This is because Jenny challenged me with her part throwing down a 1:05 free LCM (w/ dive). Even Mr Ross Handy has joined in with an attempt at a 1:05 or below 100 free SCY. The more the merrier!
The other memorable part of the week was my first ever mountain bike race on Sunday. With my newfound enjoyment of the dirt trails and my sweet mountain bike I decided that any race would be a great workout, no matter if I sucked at it or not. I signed up for the Sport category since I wanted to race longer and I wanted a challenge. Well, I got that. The Renaissance Park short track section is a bit over 4 minutes in length and the race was 45 minutes, so I got in roughly 11 laps. Just like in road crit racing, it started off extremely hard. Once we lined up it was GO through the parking lot, around a u-turn and into the woods.
Through the flowy single track I had trouble going as fast as those in front of me but luckily once through that and up the hill we had a nice wide fire-road climb to pass people, then through a roped off section of field (climb more), and back on the fire road to the parking lot (climb) and back up through the start/finish line, around and back into the woods. So for me, the back half was where I made up all the time and lost a bit of it on the front half.
I ended up finishing in 8th place (I think, based on printed results) roughly 2:55 behind the winner. I'll take it. It was a phenomenally hard workout that is only going to make me better in the long run, both on the trails and on the roads. Hopefully I'll be able to compete again next week!!
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