Tablecloth, triathlon, new windows, dog haircut

I finally got around to getting a proper tablecloth. Yay for sale fabric and plastic at JoAnn. The flowers are from our neighbors for watching their house while they were gone.

Less than a month until the triathlon! That means one more week of building mileage, then two weeks of taper. Is that the way it should be done? No idea. It just seemed about right. In April I swam 14400m (8.95 mi!), rode (on the road, either on my mountain bike or road bike) 184 miles, mountain biked (on trails) 13 miles, and ran 50.3 miles. To put it in perspective, that’s 78% of planned swimming, 79% of planned road riding, 85% of planned running and 45% of planned mountain biking… Oops. I overestimated how much ground I would be able to cover with Ken on our one evening a week on the trails. Hopefully I’ll be able to squeeze in a few more rides on trails in May, but if not I’ll just have to hope the road miles are good enough to get me through the 16.5 mile bike course.

I think we’re going to get most of our windows replaced. It’s going to be expensive, and I imagine it’ll take us 30 years to make up the cost in energy savings, but more importantly, we’ll be much more comfortable. I guess if we actually kept the house at a comfortable temperature instead of 55 or 80, depending on the season, we would recoup the cost quicker. (Because we would have been spending more money originally.) Anyway, I’m looking forward to being able to open windows in the evening to cool things off. I think we’re also going to get a high “E” glass for the west windows, which should help keep the house considerably cooler since the house doesn’t really heat up until late afternoon when the sun hits all those windows.

Speaking of heat, we (Ken mostly) gave Klaus the worst hair cut any dog has ever received. The dog pen is shaded for the hot part of the day, but this is a dog whose favorite thing is to lay in the snow. He looks a bit comical (and much smaller) but he seems a lot more comfortable.

Coyote Carrera triathlon 2012

This was a backwards triathlon, which I’ve decided suits me just fine!

We started with the run. Remember how I said last time I posted that I broke a 9 minute mile for ONE mile? Well I got a time of 23:32 on the run, which seemed totally impossible for a 5k. And it would have been impossible for a 5k. Somehow the 5k shrunk to a 2.7 mile course, which still meant 8:39 miles! Color me extremely pleased. I was the 40th women out of 83 on the run – over halfway!

The bike course felt SOO fast! I had a blast, passing people all over the place. I probably should have pushed a little bit harder, because my legs didn’t start to feel really tired until about mile 9 of 12.5. I had an average speed of 18.18 mph, which includes the time the slow lady blocked me off for a minute and the time the traffic light turned red and I had to stop. I was the 26th fastest women on the bike. Top third!

Can you tell which one is me? Yeah, me neither. That was the most brutal triathlon swim I’ve done, because it was close contact the whole way! You had to go up and down each lane once, and people were trying to pass and going back and forth. Crazy! Usually starts are like that, but then things thin out and you can swim without somebody’s feet in your face. Anyway, I did not feel fast in the water, what with all the waves and the kicking and trying to pass and the exhaustion from the rest of the race. However, apparently I was 12th fastest woman (top 15%!), with a time of 8:19 for a 400m. I ended up 6th in my age group out of 11 and 26th of women overall.

I think with the events arranged in this way it’s much easier to actually sprint during a sprint triathlon. I didn’t try to save anything during the run – it’s the hardest event for me, so getting it over and done with means I can use the rest of my energy for the easy parts of the race. Also, you don’t start the bike dripping wet, and you don’t have to go from biking (lots of movement with minimal effort) to running (all effort no movement). Ken pointed out that people would probably drown in an open water swim if the swim was last, but I wouldn’t drown… So that would just mean less competition for me.

Next triathlon is June 2. 1 mile open water swim, 16.5 mile mountain bike course, “scenic” 5 mile run course. I’m pretty sure that “scenic” is code for steep. I will definitely not be sprinting. This will be one of those races where my goal is to finish. And since this race has time cutoffs, my goal is to finish before I get kicked out.

Miscellanea

First triathlon in a year and a half is on Saturday! I’m so excited! It’s also my first USAT sanctioned one.

I just bought a plane ticket to go to WA for a few days for my baby sister’s graduation from high school. Sniff. I remember when she was just a baby. Literally. Changed many of her diapers. Don’t think I’ve changed one since. Can’t say I miss it.

I noticed there was a tackweed in my tire just as I was leaving work (on my bike). It stayed in the whole way home, which is good, because I didn’t feel like I wanted to change a tire and Ken was at the dentist. I should probably pull it out and replace the tube if it needs it in light of the whole triathlon on Saturday thing.

Tomorrow is my day off! There’s a dude coming to give us a quote on replacing the windows in the house. We have like a million and they’re all big and not conventionally sized. I don’t really want to know how much it’s going to cost, but it sure would be nice to have a few windows that actually open. And windows that are double pane. And a sliding glass door that works. Also, somebody is coming to replace the windshield in my car. I guess it’s a glass-type of day.

Klaus clambered over the 6′ fence and tore down a wire that’s above that then dug under the next fence on Tuesday. We went searching for him to no avail. He showed up later though. I don’t know why he likes to leave so much… Time for an electric fence.

I ran a mile today in under 9 minutes. That this is good news gives you a depressing picture of how terribly slow I am.

Mom informed me that I am now participating in the pea race. Apparently Lauren has 4″ pea plants already and Bethany has sprouts, so I’m not really sure how it’s much of a race. I guess Mom, Sara, and I are racing to not be last? The good news is that it’s been in the 70s here for the most part and colder in WA, so maybe my peas will catch up. Or maybe they’ll get scorched or eaten by bunnies or caterpillars or deer. That seems more likely. Something’s been eating the tops off of my tulips just as they start to bloom. Grrr.

Triathlons and suchlike

I have a backwards triathlon in a couple of weeks (April 21) that I’m doing thanks to my pastor who’s doing it too. I think it’s his first! It’s a nice short one, so it should be lots of fun and great training for the scariest triathlon I’ve ever done, which is June 2. It’s an Xterra, which means we mountain bike and run on trails. Sounds fun! Too bad I am not such a good mountain biker. The bike portion is 16.5 miles. I have never mountain biked more than 11 miles in a day. Certainly never more than a few miles without stopping. I am currently freaking out about the biking portion.

Also, “water temperatures are expected to be anywhere from the mid 50’s to the low 70’s”. Brrrr. Wetsuits may be required. So… just bought myself a wetsuit tonight. (Yay REI coupon!) Hopefully it fits. Apparently triathletes don’t come in my size – I am larger than the XL. This is the problem I always have with triathlon gear. This is probably also why I don’t tend to win triathlons.

Anyway, for anyone who may be interested (nobody), here’s my training for the year so far.

January:
Swam 12500 m
Biked 96.18 mi. (On a trainer though, it hardly counts.)
Ran 24.7 mi.

February:
Swam 12450 m
Biked 63 mi. (Mostly trainer, some road.)
Mountain biked 15 mi. (Hey, almost as much as the race in a whole month!!!)
Ran 19.2 mi.
February may not have been the best month for me.

March:
Swam 11500 m
Biked 45 mi. (mostly road)
Mountain biked 32.5 mi. (thanks Sara!)
Ran 27.6 mi.

April goals:
Swim 18600 m
Ride 194 mi. (on road, to and from work on my mountain bike 3x a week.)
Mountain bike 29 mi. (on trails)
Run 59 mi.

I’m hoping that all the miles on my mountain bike to and from work will suffice. I do have ~650 feet of climbing total round trip, so it’s not like it’s a super easy ride. I just don’t have time to get out to trails to ride. I’m hoping to do one Saturday ride in May where I do more than 16 miles and hopefully that will be good enough. Other than that, Ken and I are planning to meet at the trails after work once a week, bring a picnic, and do some riding.

2010 Lorain International Triathlon

This is going to be a long post about a triathlon. If that does not interest you it won’t hurt my feelings. You have my permission to stop reading right now. I fully expect you to read every other word I write though!

Let’s review my triathlon history, shall we?

Summer 2008: Findley Lake – My first sprint triathlon. I got a flat, but loved it anyway.

Summer 2009: Findley Lake – I won my age group! I trained all spring and summer for an international length triathlon, and hurt my foot the week before the race so I couldn’t race.

2010: I started training for an international triathlon in the second week of April. I did very well training up until I fell off of my bike and destroyed my knee, meaning I couldn’t do Findley Lake. With the knee thing, VBS, and the ASM Materials camp, I essentially missed three of the four crucial weeks of training right before the triathlon.

That brings us up to race day last Sunday. I had been watching the weather all week, and sure enough there were big thunderstorms forecast for Saturday night. Thunderstorms make big waves on the lake. On Saturday night the NOAA was forecasting 4-5 ft waves on Lake Erie in the morning. Since race directors don’t like it when people drown, they usually change the swim to a run if water conditions are sub-optimal. As swimming is my (only) strong event, this is VERY BAD for me.

Sure enough, there were sizable waves outside of the breakwater at the beach and they ended up modifying the swim course to be inside the breakwaters. No problem, except that it was too shallow to swim for much of the course, meaning we had to run in the water. Us international competitors had to “swim” the sprint course, get out on the beach and run back up to where we had gotten in, then “swim” it again. It was really hard for me! Swimming would have been much better – although not in those huge waves. Running in water is ridiculously tiring. Anyway, I came out in about the middle of the pack, which is not where I like to be when coming out of the swim.

Transition went well, except that when I went to put my shirt on I had pinned the number through both the front and back, so I had to re-pin it. Live and learn. Also, I realized as I hopped on the bike that I hadn’t tried riding with my new running shoes, and the seat could have been just a smidgen higher.

The ride went really well. I passed one woman in the International race, two women from the sprint waves who were 4 minutes + 1 extra lap of the “swim” ahead of me, then I passed the other woman in my age group as I was about to take the 2nd lap of the bike course. I got passed by 2 men about 5 miles in, then another when I was about 4 miles from the end of the 22.8 mile course. The wind was weird the whole time. It was a roughly square course, and there was definitely a light headwind most of the time. Figure that out. There was one hill that wasn’t too long or too steep, but it was definitely a hill and I definitely had to shift down pretty low. I think I was in granny the 2nd time up it. There were other small rises and falls, but nothing that required anything beyond shifting to the small ring in front.

I was concentrating on riding pretty much as fast as I could without killing myself the whole time. I know that I’m a slow runner and that saving myself on the bike won’t make me run any faster. Average speed: 18.6 mph. That’s fast for me!

At the second transition I drank some water, ate a few M&M’s, and grabbed a handful Chex mix to take with em. I probably should have eaten the Chex mix first instead of the M&M’s, because it’s hard to come up with enough saliva to get Chex mix down while running without inhaling all of it. It sure tasted good to me though!

The run course was 2X on the out and back 5k course. I wasn’t a huge fan because that’s 4X through the same scenery, but it was kind of fun to see everybody 4 times. The last mile and a half was really hard – I think I ran out of calories to burn. Guess I should have taken some M&M’s along on the run course to eat halfway through. Run pace: 9:41.

My overall time ended up being 2:33, and since one of the two other women in my age group one got second overall, I won my age group. Yay!

I’m so glad and proud of myself for finally finishing after training for two seasons. Especially since the month before this race my training was sort of non-existant. Imagine what I could do if I had actually trained properly!

I’m not sure if I’ll do this distance again next summer. It’s hard for me to train in the summer because I get so busy, and there aren’t any longer triathlons like this significantly earlier in the year around here. I definitely want to keep doing sprints though!

A list of newsworthy and not so newsworthy things

My knee is smaller and the bruises are fading, but it’s still painful. A triathlon this Saturday seems unlikely. It would probably heal faster I hadn’t spent the entire weekend on my feet preparing for VBS.

There are five children at VBS. There are seven adults running the thing. I have spent countless hours preparing for it. I’m going to spend at least four hours a day on it for the next week. Somehow I’m not sure it’s worth it. What parents wouldn’t want three hours of free babysitting every night for a week? My guess is that the advertising was not properly executed. I am somewhat disgruntled.

I ordered a Sony Reader. It might ship today. I am very excited.

I haven’t written much about our former roommate and how we asked him to leave and why we asked him to leave and how nice and clean the place is without him because it’s possible he could read this. There was some angst and drama. However, he’s gone now and our new roommate moved in this weekend and so far it has been a delightful experience. I feel like a butthead because I’ve been gone constantly and will continue to be gone for the next two weeks so I can’t help her fit her stuff into the kitchen and bathroom. Oh well, I’m sure we’ll manage.

Work proceeds slowly. Data processing is not my favorite thing in the world. It’s not my least favorite either though, so that’s good.

It turns out that there are things worse than moldy cat poop. Cat poop that’s full of maggots is MUCH more disgusting. Shudder.

Cleveland finally gave us a break from the terrible summer weather last week. There were several days when the temperature didn’t get much above 83, the humidity was actually a reasonable level, and the temperature actually dropped at night! I hope we’ve seen the last of to 90+ and humid. Ken says that this summer is good for me because if I get a job offer in the area next year I will remember it and turn down the offer in a nanosecond.

I listened to Are you there God? It’s me Margret on Friday while doing some data processing and I hated it. Ugh. I got a nice graph of my 64 data sets out of it though.

Before I fell off my bike and all my dreams of winning triathlons were ripped to shreds, I had a revelation about why I don’t do enough biking. I love riding my bike, but the whole time I am subconsciously afraid I’m going to get run down. Every 2nd time I drive somewhere in the CAR I almost get run into by somebody who isn’t paying attention. If they can’t see a BMW, how are they going to be able to see a cyclist?

Stuff

Things:

• My paper that I wrote this spring won second place in the graduate student paper contest in one of the two big professional societies I’m involved with! This means I get a little prize money AND, more excitingly, I get to go to San Diego at the end of February! Here’s hoping that my talk ends up being waaay at the end of the conference so I am forced to stay all week…
• Things were moving along beautifully towards having a cool and delightful car interior by tomorrow afternoon until last night, when everything went wrong and there is now no hope. It was a highly depressing night. Both blower motor/fan assemblies for the outside air intake and for the recirculating one are destroyed. They each cost $250 to replace. It’s likely that a new solution involving computer fans and custom fan housings will make the climate control system better than ever, but it will take more than one day to implement. So, any tips on surviving two five plus hour car ride and two nights of camping in 90+ heat and high humidity?
• On May 13 I swam 1000 yds in 17:40, a pace of 1:46 per 100 yds. On June 8 I swam it in 17:36, pace of pretty much the same. On July 12, I swam it in 16:51, a pace of 1:41 per 100 yds! Amazing improvement! I was listening to a podcast about stroke timing and decided to try to change mine. Apparently it was a change for the better! Good thing, because changing your stroke after swimming the same way since before you can remember is HARD. I have to think about it all the time.
• It’s halfway through the month, and I’m almost exactly halfway through my planned swimming yardage. That’s where the good news ends though. Backpacking in my sandals made my left foot all sad and plantar fasciitis-y, so I’m at 12.7 miles out of 66 planned. I hope to be back in running shape by Monday. I’d rather not even mention the riding total… 86/410. Ugh. I don’t even have any injury excuses for that one. I just cannot get motivated to get on the darn bike and spend time riding. To illustrate why this is a problem: In order for me to catch up on the 30% I’m behind on my running, I’d need to spend 3 hours running. Not actually that difficult. To catch up on the biking (also around 30% behind) I’d have to ride for 9.6 hours. Freaking impossible! I will never be a cyclist.
• I sold my first road bike to Ken’s friend. Sniff. I was sad to see the Raleigh go, but I want something faster. He needed a bike, and now I have cash to buy a new bike. I just have to find one that I want.

My name is Lisa and I have a problem

That problem is that I can’t bring myself to write about life out of chronological order. This means that when I have a big post planned with millions of pictures that takes longer than 10 minutes to write I get all messed up when I don’t have time to finish it and can’t write about anything else until it’s done.

But today I’m breaking out of that mold because there are things that are just too exciting to wait for the three or four posts chock full of pictures that I have planned. For today you get one of the things which bloggers always apologize for: a random list.

I’m not entirely sure why this is such a shameful type of post. I usually enjoy reading them more than I enjoy somebody spouting vitriolic nonsense about their pet topic, whether it be why dairy products were invented by the devil or why you should never buy a steel bike because carbon is THE BEST, or how their husband has a hottt behind.

In no particular order:

• After much harassment from Ken (“How will I know if you’ve been kidnapped by burly bad guys when your phone randomly turns off from a combination of water exposure and sheer old age?” My argument – I’m pretty sure the burly bad guys wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave me a phone in that situation, and I hate the phone anyway, so why don’t we just use smoke signals or maybe signal flags?) I finally got a new phone. After all my complaining and resistance, it turns out that it was cheap, painless, the sound quality is way better than my old phone, somehow even though it’s longer than my old phone it fits in my pockets better, and I kinda love it. Then I had to apologize to Ken for my pigheadedness in refusing to get it sooner. Sigh.
• Tomorrow I am going backpacking for the first time in years! Also, the first time outside of WA. I’m super excited, although it is a little weird that the place we’re going (in Allegheny National Forest) is only about a 3×8 mile patch of wilderness between a road and a reservoir. I guess that means it’ll be hard to get seriously lost.
• I just bought a half-price coupon for an overnight rafting trip in West Virginia. Rafting in WV is something I’ve been talking about doing before I leave Ohio, but hadn’t because of the expense and hassle of researching which company, prices, etc. So this coupon = perfect. As the summer, August in particular, is ridiculously busy between VBS, Materials Camp, two triathlons, and classes starting up again, I’ll probably be going sometime in the next three weeks.
• This morning just as it was getting light I was rudely awakened by the sound of a cat fight. This is not unusual, given that my neighbor leaves cat food out for all the cats in the world, but the fights usually don’t sound like they’re occurring in my living room. I cautiously ventured down to find Cosmo crouched under the coffee table yowling, the screen on the open window bent nearly in half, and one of the 18 month old cats that live outside trying desperately to get out of the house by running at full tilt between the two opposing windows in the little jutted out part of the house and running into the glass on one side and the collapsed screen on the other. I removed the screen and the cat jumped right over the windowsill and out. That’s the last time I let Ken talk me into letting the cats stay upstairs overnight. “But they’re going to be locked in the basement all weekend!” Snort. Then maybe HE should wake up and sort out the cat fights in the living room.
• Lastly, and most boringly, numbers for June: Swim 18700 m, Ride 207.85 mi, Run 34.7 mi. These numbers are all kinda pathetic compared with what was planned, but a week of vacation threw me off. Also, I’m lazy and don’t like to go on long bike rides (I was scheduled to ride 400 miles). I did ride out to the DNR range last Saturday (45 miles over a questionable route including detours, some serious hills, and dirt/gravel roads in the 80+ degree heat and high humidity). I know August is going to be a disaster because it’s so busy, so I need to complete as many workouts as I can in July. The cat incident already made me miss my morning ride today. Grrr.

May distance stats

In May:
I swam 15300 yds (That’s 8.69 miles, folks)
I rode my bike for 317.6 miles
I ran for 33.6 miles

That is officially the most I have ever biked in a month by nearly a factor of 2. Also, somehow magically more than the planned 275 miles. Go me!

June may not be so successful in terms of meeting goals, as the schedule calls for an even 400 miles on my bicycle. Achieving that distance seems unlikely, especially since I’ll be at home for a week where I will likely not be riding at all.

Perhaps my speed will finally increase and I’ll be riding at 22 mph, so those daunting 40 mile bike rides that I’ve never actually completed will only take 2 hours. Seems unlikely. I struggle to keep my average speed above 12 mph.

Ah well, it matters not. What does matter is that if I can keep this momentum up I am going to be super prepared for my races in August. If my cycling gets somewhat faster and my running gets significantly faster, maybe I can even think about placing overall in the sprint. That’s a wild dream, but perhaps not totally unachievable.

I may never ever get used to rain

Well, it looks like the good ol’ Cleveland weather system is getting back into the swing of having absolutely beautiful days during the week, then pouring rain every weekend. Guess it means I don’t have to commute in the rain, right?

As a child of a desert, I’m perpetually surprised by rain. Yesterday afternoon there was a thunderstorm, and it rained a quarter of an inch in about half an hour. Ken was down at school and apparently the shop where he was working flooded. Our basement stayed impressively dry, except where the water flowed under the back door from the stair well, which means the water was at least three inches deep back there. I didn’t think to go check while it was actually raining. Luckily the water had a direct path to a drain from the back door, so there’s really minimal mess to clean up.

I did sneak in an 18 mile ride on Saturday while it wasn’t raining. It was supposed to be 20, but I got to the top of one long hill and decided I couldn’t handle going down to the bottom of the valley then having to turn around and ride right back up. It was a good thing I cut it short, because it started raining as soon as I rolled into the parking lot at school, and didn’t let up until Sunday morning, and then only briefly.

In other news, I completed every workout last week except for one swim (a whole 1000 yds!), which I intend to make up tomorrow at lunch. One week down, 17 to go!