Monday, August 23, 2010

What a weekend!

Tomorrow is looming, well I guess technically tomorrow is always looming, but anyway tomorrow is the 3rd worst day for teachers. The first would be the first day of school realizing you have 179 more and then the day before Christmas break. Luckily this past year a blizzard saved us from that one. But enough talk about teacher days instead I am going to focus on this past weekend and what a weekend it was!
If you are wondering what happened to the veggie week blog well I guess being able to blog for a whole week was overzealous of me, we completed it and have decided to do Meatless Mondays from here on out. I still have the post-it notes from veggie week maybe I'll get back to writing those up. And since only 3 people read/follow the blog it's probably not a big deal.
Back to this weekend. Saturday was a filled day, mass in the morning for my 92 year old grandparents celebrating their 69th wedding anniversary! Hi Grandma and Grandpa! That was a mental message to them, they are 92 they know what a computer is and well that's about it. They won't ever read this. It's ok they are 92 I'll let them slide on this one. So after that we had a family breakfast then it was time for a swim meet at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) pool! I have been wanting to swim in this pool for the past 11 years! I almost chose to go to UMCP because of this facility even though I had no hope of making the swim team. I barely made it onto the Towson team. I have watch the World Cup of swimming there and finally finally I was going to swim in this beautiful facility.
The meet was the Colonies Zone LC Championship. There were no qualifying times so I am not really sure how it is a championship but oh well it gave me a chance to swim there and they had it configured to 50 meters! I haven't swam 50 metered pools since college and I love them, less walls and more time to build up speed. You would expect me to say that I was shaved and tapered for this meet right? Well umm no we have totally slacked on the morning swimming this summer and we just got back from a cruise so add a couple pounds too. Oh well I still get to swim in the pool! We did warm ups and I didn't do a predetermined set or anything I just wanted to get a feel for the pool and swimming. We signed up for the 200 free and the 1500 free. That means 4 lengths of the pool (200 free) and 30 lengths of the pool (1500 free). I thought the 1500 would be great since it would give me plenty of time in the facility I have bee
n lusting over. The 200 was the absolute worst race I have ever had! My goggles fell off, I repeat my goggles fell off! This isn't supposed to happen I have been swimming forever! This happens to 8 year olds but not 28 year olds who have been swimming their whole lives! I made a choice right then to take them off my face (instead of keeping them around my neck) and throw them when I got to the wall. This meant I had to do an open turn and not my normal flip turn. By this time I was behind my whole heat, embarrassingly behind my heat and when I was done swimming with no goggles I looked like I was on drugs, my eyes were so red. I finished 15 sec slower than my estimated seed time and quite last. And now I had a 1500 ahead of me to do. I decided if my goggles fell off again I would stop and fix them at a wall since I can't do 30 lengths without goggles. For the 1500 I opted not to warm up even though I had the ability to (yea probably should have warmed up). I went off and was determined to have a better swim I stayed with my heat for the first 100 to 150 but then the much older person next to me who had wished me luck sped up and I couldn't keep up. They lapped me further on....sigh...I opted not to watch my times on the electronic board as I swam. I was not feeling good and figured it would just depress me. On the really cool side you didn't have to get wet when you counted for someone! They had sticks that you attach the lap counter to. I ended up not getting last in my heat (yay!) and was only 55 sec off my estimated time not too bad given the length of the event. I got a silver medal for my age group (yay right? well there were only 3 of us oh and I got 4th in the 200 free...out of 4...sigh) So basically it was my reality check that I need to get my butt back to swim practice. I forgot to mention this was the longest freakin meet ever! Usually masters meets are pretty quick, men and women swim together and there are only a few heats of each event. They took their sweet time for this one except we had an anniversary party to get to! We ended up getting there an hour late. The hubby also had a crap-tastic 200 free and got a gold medal (only one in his age group) but did a kick butt 1500 free. He was well under our estimated seed time and beat the 83 year old next to him!
So Sunday was the Columbia Iron Girl triathlon. The past two years I have competed in it. There is a lot of fun pomp and circumstance that goes along with it. It's a fun yet challenging women's only triathlon. Well if its that fun why didn't you enter? Here's the story I thought about it. This is one of those events where you have to decide ahead of time and sign up right away. If you take time to think you lose out and boy did I. I was deciding between Iron Girl or Diamond Girl. Diamond Girl is also a womens only tri but this one was significantly longer and I have been trying to work on longer stuff. So Iron Girl closed out and it made my decision for me. That's ok decision by elimination right? Well it was until I got an email while on vacation informing me that only 22 people entered the race in upstate NY and they were switched everyone to the shorter sprint one. Well I don't want to sound like a snooty athlete since I hate it when people do things like this but that was way too far (5hr drive) for a sprint distance. So basically I am a loser twice over in this case. I had been trying to decide if I wanted to do the Diamondman Half Ironman distance event or not. I was going to use the Diamond Girl race to make the decision but since that wasn't a go I just asked them to transfer my registration to Diamond Man. There is a decent chance I am in way over my head.
So back to Iron Girl. The hubby and I decided to volunteer to body mark (write the athlete's number on their body) at Iron Girl. It gives you a free shirt and access to the athletes (all our friends) and free food. We were assigned the pros and paratriathletes! Cool! There was one paratriathlete we were really looking forward to seeing Sarah Reinertsen. She was the first above-the-knee-amputee to finish the Kona Iron Man and she was on The Amazing Race. The hubby really wanted to meet her but alas she came up to meet for her marking. I felt bad for the hubby but he had a line of people and you can't really say "Hey can you hold on my husband wants to body mark you." After we finished marking we set out to watch the race. We got to see Sarah multiple times and she was totally awesome to watch. It was very inspiring! If she can finish an Ironman anyone can right? Umm well no but it was totally cool to see her none the less. She always had a smile on her face! Our good buddy Suzy took 4th out of all the pro and elite athletes there! She is headed to Ironman Louisville this week and Kona in October. Not only was Sarah there but also pro Laurel Wassner who had cancer as a young adult and now races triathlons as a pro. She came in first! Laurel and Suzy both race for Team Fight which supports young adults with cancer or affected by a parent with cancer. So all in all it was a very fun day to support everyone out there and I guess this year I will be signing up on time and not thinking about it.
So today (Monday) went on a bike ride. I realize Mondays aren't part of the weekend unless it is a holiday but when you go back to work tomorrow it really is part of the weekend. We (hubby and I) decided to schedule a 50 mile bike ride to get ready for this Half Ironman we have committed ourselves to. The actual event consists of a 1.2 mile swim (easy part for me), 56 mile bike ride, and 13.1 mile (half marathon) run. Yikes! I know right?! So clearly some 50 miler bike rides are necessary. I wore my bike shorts as they have a bit more crotch cushion than tri shorts. So our route consisted of a loop around BWI airports, the B&A trail to almost Annapolis (down and back) and then the BWI loop again. We stopped at the turn around on the B&A for some granola bar snacks and water. We stopped again for some shot blocks before we started our last loop around BWI. It was a great day for a ride, lots of clouds, no rain, and low to mid 80s. So what did I find out on a 50 mile ride? It really hurts my crotch! (insert your own obscene comment here, I know you are thinking it) How do people do 112 mile rides? And in tri shorts no less with less padding. Some even do the whole event in bathing suits! Owww do they have crotches made of steel? So I am not sure what I am going to do for this event in a couple weeks since I usually wear tri shorts. We fueled pretty well but could have used more water and not sure how I am going to run a half marathon after that bike ride. I believe there will be quite a bit of walking involved. I am happy I got to do this ride with the hubby! So after the long ride we headed to Los Portales, a local joint with good mexican food. It's a meatless Monday for us so I had guacamole salad (shredded lettuce, one tomato slice, and guacamole), rice, and a cheese quesadilla. They hubby had cheese enchiladas and the guacamole salad too. All was delicious and washed down with lots of water and iced tea! Not sure if I made up the calories I burned or not but that's ok since I still have a few cruise pounds to lose.
So anyway that's the update from here. The swimmer likes swimming in beautiful facilities but still needs to go to practice and still needs to figure out the whole biking thing. Things should be interesting in the next few weeks....

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