Posts Tagged ‘triathlon’

I’ve been focusing on swimming for the past week. I actually got in the pool three times in the last 8 days.  I’m slowly working on building my endurance. Each day I add one more lap.  Right now, I’m at 8 laps which is 16 lengths.  I am LOVING every minute of being in the pool. It’s quiet and cool and surprisingly relaxing.  I even worked on my flip turns yesterday.  (Wow, a lot harder than I remember. I was dizzy after doing a few)

Here’s a picture of the pool where I swim.

An “after swim” picture…chlorine filled hair and all

I sorta fell off the running wagon because I’ve had some pain in my knee (mostly when I bend it or walk up/down stairs) and pain in my heel on the same leg.  I do need to get back on track if I’m going to do the Halloween and Thanksgiving 5ks.

I still need to get a bike because we’re heading into perfect bike riding weather and I want to take advantage of it!

Last Sunday I volunteered at the Chicago Triathlon. It was incredible.  I have a few pictures to post, but since I was actually working the event, I couldn’t take too many.  I had to be there at 6am when the first of the Sprint Distance athletes were just jumping into the water. I was assigned a spot on the running leg, which meant I had to shoo spectators and clueless people off the running path as the runners came by.

Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, there are a lot of people who do not pay attention to the world around them.  I know that’s a shocker.

I was right across from where the athletes left the swimming leg and transitioned to the biking leg. I didn’t get to see any of the biking or even the transition area.  I did get some tips from a fellow volunteer who did the Tri last year.  He made some great suggestions on how to make sure I can find my bike easily.

Here are some photos from my volunteer spot. I had a great location. It was less than half a mile into the run. I spent 4 hours cheering total strangers on. I got hi-fived by a few people. One lady hugged me as she ran by, a guy puked about 3 feet from me, lots of people smiled and said “thanks!” as they ran by.

This is where I stood for four hours, yelling and cheering. It was a great location.

See, a person crossing the path.  At least there were no runners coming!

Right here is where the swimmers came out of the lake.  Then they ran to the bike transition area. I would have liked to seen the start of the swimming leg, which was just south of Buckingham Fountain about half a mile down the road.

This is the start of the swim to bike transition.  You have to run barefoot on this path for quite a ways until you get to the bike area.   Some people left flip flops and sandals there so they didn’t have to run barefoot, but most people didn’t.  Everyone was peeling their wet suits off as they ran.

I am SO glad that I did it this year. I feel like I know exactly where our friends and family should stand next year to get the best view of us possible. I also have a better idea of what to expect.  I will say that it was so inspiring to see all the different levels of athletes (the Pros started after the Sprint distance and boy you could tell they are IN SHAPE.  That was double the distance which was a 1 mile swim, 25 mile bike and a 10k run)

Even more determined to get here next year. I have seven or eight people coming along for the ride, too.  Awesome!

This will be short because I didn’t do much this week. I was out of town relaxing before school starts for a few days. I brought my shoes to possibly run on the treadmill at the hotel, but when I went to look at the fitness room, it scared me and I decided against it. It wasn’t very clean and it a pretty secluded part of the hotel.  Comfort level was not there.

Then I (briefly) thought about running outside until I realized it was going to be 98 degrees the whole time.  No thanks.  On a positive note, I did a lot of walking on Monday and Tuesday, so I don’t feel like a total slug.

Running: Back on track this week if I’m going to make my mini goal of a Halloween 5k.
Swimming: still working on making the limited availability of the open lanes work with my schedule.
Biking: No progress on acquiring a bike, so I’ll tackle that this weekend.

I still have to to publish my shoe post!

I kinda sorta forgot about updating this the past two weeks.  Hey, I’ve been busy.

I finally got running shoes (post is almost done, look for it tomorrow) and that’s made a difference in the overall health of my feet, but I’ve had a slight setback with the running. I’m back down to four sets instead of 5. I’ve had a bit of shin pain this week, so I’m just slowing down a bit. It could be the fact that I’m actually running in shoes that fit, but it’s taking a little getting used to. I’m trying to break them in and have been wearing them to school to loosen up a bit.

In other news, I’ve decided to do the Chicago Triathlon next year (August 2011) so that goal is firmly in my mind. If I can do a sprint distance triathlon earlier in the summer, that would be terrific.

• Running – 2 days this week (been back at school, so I’ve been exhausted) That’s no  excuse, I know, but I have to figure out how to mesh my workouts with the, you know, real world.
• Biking – didn’t get to it this week — tomorrow (Friday) is my goal
• Swimming – haven’t had time and the pool schedule isn’t exactly matching up with mine. I need to work on that situation.

Thanks for all the supportive messages, people. I really do appreciate all the kind words, and they are keeping me motivated when I want to just rest on the couch.

I know it’s not Thursday and technically not my update day, but guess what!!?!!

Today, July 17, 2010 is the first day I ran all
4 of my 60 second runs the entire way through!

This is big news people, I have been running for almost a month and couldn’t get through 3 of them and today I did all 4!

I feel really, really wiped out, but exhilarated. There almost was a treadmill accident when I closed my eyes for a nanosecond midway during rotation #2 and almost ran into the shelf behind me.  My foot got stuck on some shelves, but I managed to free it without losing my running pace.  Not sure how, I think angels were looking out for me.

I felt so good after the fourth rotation that I almost pushed for a 5th one, but I decided that I should:

A.  check on my foot, which was starting to hurt

B.  not press my luck and just push for 5 rotations on my next run.

End of update! Yay for me!

P.S. my foot is fine, just a little scraped up.