inauspicio.us

it figures that i would have a huge breakthrough i…

it figures that i would have a huge breakthrough in my swimming right after the most important race of my life so far. that’s life, i guess, but we are talking about a huge, huge improvement, a breakthrough on par with learning the flip-turn. yes, last wednesday i learned how to breathe to the right. ever since i began mediocre competitive swimming as a freshman in high school, i have only been able to breathe to the left. now i can also breathe to my right. for some reason (and i am certainly not complaining about this) i am now way, way faster in the pool at low to medium effort levels. at higher effort levels, i swallow a lot of water so it’s not so helpful. but i am working on resolving this.

in the meantime, i dragged myself out of bed at 4 in the morning this past friday for a classic boulder early-season workout. it is normally done in a group, but i couldn’t find one so i did it myself. the workout is this: leave boulder at 5:15 in the morning on bike, ride 50 miles to fort collins. run in the horsetooth half marathon. ride back to boulder if able. i thought that would be a good endurance workout for me. the executive summary is that it was, in fact, an excellent endurance workout.

the full version is that i woke up way too early and put a rack (!) on my triathlon bike, duct taped my running shoes to it, and adorned myself with enough lights to illuminate a stadium. then i got out the door at the sort of late start time of 5:45, and rode up toward fort collins. stopped along the way to stash my lights (which are HEAVY) behind a building, and then stopped again near fort collins to fix a flat tire. this, combined with my later-than-intended start time, meant that when i got lost in downtown fort collins just before the race, i was a bit nervous.

but i got to the race in just enough time, changed my shoes, locked up my bike, and went to the start line. i was eager to try out my new race clothes, recently acquired from the boulder running company (shorts) and wal-mart (shirt) (really). if i dare say so, it looked pretty slick. not so slick on the body that was determined not to run faster than seven minutes per mile, but it will be cool when the time comes to run faster. here’s a picture, evidently taken right after someone told me a funny joke.

if the point of the race was to run fast or place well, then it didn’t go well at all, but fortunately it was really just to run thirteen hilly miles in the middle of a seven hour day. so i ran pretty slow the first ten miles and then ran tempo to the finish. which meant that i picked off about fifty people in the last five kilometers, and i finished around thirty fifth, in 1:33:00.

then i changed my clothes and rode my bike home, pretty fast. and it took hardly any time at all before i started to get real tired. i bargained with myself, i sang, i yelled, i became fiercely introspective. i did pretty much everything, in fact, except cry or slow down. usually when i’m that far gone i cry, but i managed to hold myself together and made it home ok.

then on tuesday i tried out my new stationary trainer. but that’s a whole nother story. soon.