Coach Liz's Amazing Triathlon Adventure: July 2009

My blog entries have been rather trite of late and for good reason. There is not much to blog about. After getting home from Buffalo Springs 70.3 I had one week of partial recovery and partial pain management. My bike crash left my hands pretty torn up. Because of the open and weeping wounds I had to stay out of the pool and lifting weights was out of the question. Riding a bike was painful as well. That left me with doing some running. I did a few runs, but you can't run every day without going a little nuts. I did a bike ride on the 4th of July with my bike mechanic and a roadie friend of his and they made me work. We did 38 miles in 1:40 minutes. One week after a race it was challenging, but I was working hard to not be dropped off the back. I tacked on a run during the neighborhood parade to round out the fun. It was a good workout and it left me with that good soreness.

The next week was spent getting everything organized for the Kiwanis Kids' Triathlon that I am the race director for. I had 88 fantastic volunteers from my tri club and Team in Training teams that I have coached give 100 kids a great triathlon experience. Everything went off well on race day. Leading up to race day, it was crazy. Our original venue backed out on us 4 weeks before the event to hold a large swim meet. The county did not give us permission to use the road adjacent to the new venue because they needed 4-6 weeks to have engineers work on traffic redirection flow map. I was told this 3 days before the event. The 4th of July holiday kept them from getting it done on time. I had lots of traffic cones, traffic flagging and volunteers that kept the bike course safe and as race director I had to lay down the law about no passing on the bike. The parents were furious and I had some dad get in my face and curse me out in front of children and parents at the awards ceremony because his kid tied with another one for 2nd place but he saw his kid come across the line first. He said my $#%%^@ rule kept his kid from getting the trophy he deserved and that my *^#@%&! volunteers needed to pay attention to the kids coming across the finish line more than they did trying to keep parents out of transition or from other places. It was ugly. My husband was too far away from the action and not in this guys route of escape to his truck to leave. If he would have been, it would have been ugly since El Esposo likes to pack heat. I have officially stepped down as race director after 4 years and I have two super volunteers of mine who have stepped up to take over. I will be working with them over the year to help them put on a great race. I always get comments that our race, out of the series, is the most organized and well run race. I want to help Ron and Willie shine on their first time up to bat.

My kid said best thing after A-hole Father chews me out, "Come on! We're not qualifying for Kona here. It's for fun. Chill Out!" He totally busted the tension, but A-hole Father was clearly pissed.

Pedal, Pedal, Pedal!!!

Run Buddy! Run!!!

Last week I just did not have any mojo to workout. I was recovering from that Kids' Tri. I was also eating everything in my path ahead of hormone upheaval in the body. I felt like I had a tape worm or a hollow leg but my brain kept on reminding me of my calorie count. I ended up crunching on ice to just chew on something. I took Buddy and one of his friends to go see the new Harry Potter movie on Thursday. I liked it, but was bummed that some of the stuff from the book did not make the cut to the big screen. I got my act together on Friday and lifted weights and stepped up the weights on the squats and lunges since it was time for a boost. On Friday evening I treated the family to go see the Cirque du Soliel show Saltimbanco. I am always amazed at the upper body strength and flexibility of these performers. The proprioception and balance that they have is crazy! I had to keep reminding Buddy and El Esposo that the only act they could try to replicate at home was the juggling act. I told Buddy I would even pop for a box of ping pong balls for him.

On Saturday I met up early with Greyhound to go ride with the Shama Cycles gang. I knew that I would be invading the "Roadie" show with my tri bike so I tried to be low key wearing my favorite Otter Pops cycling jersey and hoped that I looked like I was a non-threat.

Not long into the ride I found myself up at the front with one of the fast guys who was freaking me out with his latte in one hand and who periodically would sit up and cruise down the road without his hands on the handle bars. I got a compliment from him on my way cool SRM computer mount on my aero bottle. I will have to tell the shop guys that it got noticed. We were pedaling the streets of Houston and it was fun. I have not been riding around town in years. It is usually too dangerous to do it alone, but with a group of 15 we had strength in numbers. This was a quick group and I just tried to keep my head down and follow along. They had good communication and everyone held their line. Greyhound got a flat at mile 22 and after a good rest stop at a service station the two of us headed back towards the start on a modified route and we let the rest of the group finish out the 50 mile ride. We ended up getting in another 13 miles to get back to the cars for a grand total of 35 miles. I was supposed to do a brick, but that did not happen. It was hot and I was hungry so I packed it up to go meet the family for lunch.

We took a car ride out to Zube Park where I also start rides from and we took a ride on the model steam engines. It has been one of Buddy's favorites since he was big into Thomas the Tank Engine.

Yes, I feel like a dork riding these trains, but hey...it's free.

The rest of the day I did laundry and we got a huge thunder storm that blew out the power for a whopping 3 minutes. We needed the rain so bad. It had been something like 50 days with out rain in our area. It also helped bring the temperature down into the high eighties with the cloud cover. I made some chocolate cupcakes after diner and watched Shanghi Noon and put my feet up.

On Sunday morning I got up early and went out to run. The temps were in the low 70's and it was cool and humid. It felt great. I headed out and decided I would venture into a neighborhood that I had not done a lot of running in. This neighborhood has a golf course that has been used in the Shell Houston Open and some other big gold tournament. The homes on the course are huge. I have no idea what these people do for a living who live in these homes, but it has to be a well paying job. One of the homes for sale was advertising that it had just been reduced $25,000.00 dollars to a selling price of $600,000.00. What a bargain!

This is what $600,000.00 will get you in northwest Houston.

I made it home after two hours of good running except for the last 10 minutes when the need to go to the bathroom exponentially grew the closer I got to my house. I thought that I was going to have an accident as I was running down my street. I had to hop in the shower and get cleaned up for church and by the time I made it out to the car, I was so stiff from not stretching. I heaved myself out of the car and winced as I sat back down in the car after service. I spent the rest of the day on the couch being a slug and finishing off a scarf that I was knitting. I am sore, but it is a good sore.