Today was a busy workout day. Since I didn't get much of a challenging ride in last night due to the downpour I woke up thinking I should get a ride in. I decided it was time to figure out how to upload a route to my garmin on the bike and follow it. So I picked out one of the loops through Cumberland that I had ridden with Nancy sometime ago and uploaded it to my Garmin 310xt and headed out the door on the bike. Plan for the day was to ride 40 miles.
The route that Nancy and I took that day started at Providence Bicycle. So I had to ride there first and then tell the garmin to start the route. Following the 310 took me some time to get used to. Its not like a big ol fancy color gps with roads. You get two choices. Either a big compass arrow that points the direction you should be riding, or a line drawing of your route. Mind you its a single line drawing. Sort of like a scribbled out path with no street names. You just know where you are on the line and which way your bike is pointed. But its enough to figure out when to turn. However you do have to keep looking at it to know when turns are coming up. This process took some getting used to. And once I figured out how best to do it I did quite well. But in the beginning I kept missing turns and it would beep at me telling me I was off the route. So I had quite a few moments when I had to turn around and go back and figure out where I went wrong. BUT... the important thing was it worked, I got to ride a much more interesting route than I would have done on my own without help and I can create new routes at map my ride and then upload them to follow on the bike. So I think I need to do this more often.
After that I got cleaned up and went to work for a bit, watched some Tour De France, and then headed off to a meeting with a client of mine in Barrington. Which was damn convenient as I also had an open water swim scheduled in Barrington as well. I haven't seen this particular client in about six months, and he commented on how I looked even thinner than the last time he saw me. I love it when people say that stuff to me. However his very cute assistant didn't really care for it when he said I was skinnier than she was. I can't say I blame her!
After I left the meeting I hit startbucks up for a coffee and headed to the beach. I got to the beach around 5pm an hour early for the swim as my meeting took less time than I thought it would. I was planning on reading there for a bit but Luis showed up right around the same time. So he and I chatted for a bit and I talked through my race schedule with him and we agreed to do some races together, and I decided to change up my race schedule (Again!)
So now I think my race schedule is looking like this....
8/1 Naval Sprint Tri 1/3 mile ocean swim, 10.5 mile bike, 3 mile run
8/14 Barrington YMCA Spring 1/2 mile ocean swim, 13 mile bike, 5K run
9/12 Some part or quite possible the complete Firm 1/2 1.2 mile ocean swim, 56 mile bike, 13 mile run.
9/18 TDD Sprint (not sure of lengths) This one will just be for fun as its a club race. I'll be too tired to really race it.
As far as the Firm 1/2 goes... my plan is thus. Realistically I've been logging enough training hours that I've been training more for a 1/2 Ironman length race than a sprint. So I already have a decent base for this. I can swim the distance, bike the distance, and run the distance. Can I do all three in one day? I don't know. but I think I have enough time to do some seriously long bricks and find out. If I decide I'm not ready then I'm going to try and either do the Aquabike version of it, or put together a relay team for it and just do a part of it for the experience. I'd really really love to end my season by racing it though. Albeit conservatively. More to cover the distance at a relaxed pace and learn a bit about what it feels like to race / fuel / go at it for that long of a period of time. So thats the new plan.
A little after Luis and I got there Kevan and Kathy M showed up and we headed out for a swim. The water was ridiculously calm. As in pool calm.
So we headed out from the left side of the beach and followed the line of buoys out. I wanted to get a good long swim in today. So when we reached the furthest buoy we decided to head for this little mooring that was further out.... and when we reached that we went even further. I had my garmin in my cap so I know that in total we swam 1.1 miles in the end. Not bad. We did it in something like 45 minutes, but we were stopping to let everyone catch up every so often and I didn't stop the watch in those times. The water out there tasted awful, but it was super smooth so it made for a good swim. On the way back I was having a bitch of a time sighting. The buoys there are all pretty small and you just can't see them till your right on them so its damn hard to know if your going the right direction. On top of that the tide was going out pretty fast so as much as I felt like I was swimming across the beach at the same time I was swimming closer to it, it always felt like I was getting sucked out to sea. I almost had to swim a 45 degree angle into the beach to get a straight line across the beach.
But as you can see from the garmin I did ok. Some of those random jags are when I figured out where a buoy was and changed direction to swim next to it. The nice straight bit near the beach itself is where the swim section is and there are lots of buoys there, the bit to the left is where we were headed for moorings which are pretty far apart and hard to see till you are right on them.
Anyway... on the way back I was really not enjoying the taste of the water at all. Maybe the storm the day before had done something to the water quality? I was feeling a bit nauteous from it. At one point I thought I might throw up when I was almost done with the swim. I couldn't get enough water in my mouth fast enough to rinse it out when we finished. (which reminds me... I need to add a water bottle to T1 to rinse my mouth if conditions are like this again). Anyway, I'm glad we did the mile swim. I was tired going into the workout but I'm glad I toughed it out and got it in. When I exited the water I ran down the beach for a bit and then stripped the wetsuit off nice and quick. Good practice I figure.
So all in all a good day. And I had a nice chat with Luis and Kevan after the swim which was nice too. What was not so nice is that I had the worst upset stomach when I got home. I'm not sure what from. I don't think I ate anything today that could have caused it, so I wonder if it had something to do with the water quality? but I can't see how my stomach would react to that so quickly. Not sure what was up there, but it wasn't pleasant. I know that much.
Next up..... tomorrow morning I'm going for a run with Nancy and then I get to go and play personal trainer with Michelle and get her going on her first light strength training workout. Then head home and try and do laundry, pack, cleanup, packup all my training stuff for the weekend, get swim stuff for friday morning ready and then I'm off to go see that silly Predator movie with my friend Andrew tomorrow night. We have a tradition of going to see bad Sci fi movies together. Should be good silly fun but its going to be a PACKED day. But a good one! Time for me to go to bed.
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