3 Weeks Out

Only Three Weeks Left!!!!!!!! HOLY CRAP!!!! Training is winding down so fast and I am starting to get so anxious about all the other pieces left for race day. The biggest piece left: my bike! I planned on renting a tri bike but when I finally got around to looking last week, they are all rented out already!! I have a few calls into some bike shops in Houston but things do not look good. At this point I have reached out to 4 or 5 local shops, and Ironman coach in Texas, the two companies Ironman recommends, my friend who does logistics for a few Ironman Races, and two of my local friends (If I can borrow theirs I will just ship it down) and so far I have come up EMPTY. I have one place to call tomorrow and I’ll wait a little longer to hear back from all those people but it looks like race day will be done on a road bike. It is probably for the better anyways since that is what I trained on but it sure would have been cool to do it on a $5,000 triathlon bike.


Other than that, my head is spinning trying to think through transitions and little things like what sunglasses should I wear? Should I use spray or lotion sunscreen? What do I put in my special needs bags? Where should I tell my friends to spectate? What do I eat the day before?! GAHH my head is spinning but I am starting to get so excited. With tapering finally here, I am slowly getting my life back from training. And not a moment too soon. I think one more week of this level of training and I would have burned out. In fact, I did burn out with the current training plan a little. Here is a screen grab of the workouts I missed. Other than one week off for ski trip, I was batting 1.000 until week 15. Then there are a few misses. Then a few more. Overall I was pretty consistent but I think I was pretty close to the longest I could stretch this out before I reached my wits end with training.
When all is said and done, I will have completed 106,000 yards of swimming (60 miles), 2,700 miles of cycling (90% of that indoors), and 471 miles of running totaling approximately 300 hours of training over the last 24 weeks. I lost 15 ish pounds to boot!

Here is a screen grab of my training. The yellow marks a workout I missed:

Oh I should also mention - in Belize I tried to so some open water swimming. The water was super shallow and there was seaweed everywhere, but I put on my wetsuit and tried to make it work. My girlfriend was following me in a two person kayak anyways so if something went wrong - I was safe either way. So I set off on my swim and even 150 yards off shore, the water is only waist deep at best. A few times I even just stood up it was so shallow (at times ankle deep). Even if it wasn't the best swim workout, I knew I had to keep going since any time in open water is time well spent for someone as scared of water as me. That is until 800 ish yards into my swim-walk thingy. I looked down in the three feet deep water and just under my face was one of these guys hiding in the seaweed:

Now, this spotted eagle ray was maybe a foot wide and probably couldn't have hurt me, but maybe it could have stung me? Maybe it wasn't an eagle ray and was something more nefarious? Either way i was SPOOKED - I didn't even see the thing till I was on top of it. So I swam another 10 yards to make sure I didn't step on it and then immediately called my girlfriend over and popped right into that kayak. It wasn't the open water swimming I was hoping for that is for sure, but I did get some practice with sighting and some time in the old wetsuit. Oh and made it out safe and sound. Mischief Managed!