What's next?

Its been 3 weeks since IMCDA and I've been a bum... sort-of.  No scheduled workouts for 2 weeks.  I did go to masters twice.  First time was ok but that second practice... big mistake.  I've swam a few more times and have been on my bike twice - all very easy.  My broken toe is feeling better, although it feels like I will have a bone spur / bump on the inside of my toe, which I am not thrilled about.  I did my first run on a treadmill yesterday and it felt fine during, a little sore after.  Tonight I'm excited because I get to run with my friends at a store's fun run.  Amazing - friends and fun and running.


We've been camping.  Got rained on every night.  Ate well (or like crap, depending on how you look at things).  We fished, Will caught a nice rainbow, I caught nothing.  But it was beautiful and we got out of the city and 100 degree temps.

This was a fresh bear track.... 100 yards from our tent.

Colorado is so ugly sometimes, you know?

We went to a beer fest and drank a lot of beer. In fact, there's been a lot of beer drinking these past few weeks.

And I've been basking in the glory of my awesome 14:03 race.

But now its time to get slightly serious and figure out the rest of my year.  And next year.  I sat down with my coach and mapped things out.  August is a bit, um, busy.

• Aug 3 - the Color Run, just for grins.  And I managed to get Will to sign up!  Yay!
• Aug 10 - Georgetown to Idaho Springs half marathon.  Michelle: you know this will hurt, right?  Me: yeah, but I'll do it for fun.  And I need the altitude training for Ragnar.  We can decide the week of the race if I want to scrub it.
• Aug 18-19: Rattlesnake Oly and Sprint Back to Back.  Michelle: we'll be working on speed for this.  Me: *gulp*
• and maybe Aug 24th, a summer biathlon (Powdr), where you run 5 loops of a 1k course and shoot a rifle in between loops.

Then Sept 6-7 is Ragnar, which is a running relay from Copper Mountain to Aspen.  You have 12 people and each person runs 3 legs.  I have legs 4, 16, and 28 (I think).  Leg 4 is nearly 10 miles on the far (non I-70) side of Dillion Reservoir and has 2 miles of uphill.  At 9,000+ feet.  This is why I need altitude training.  The other legs aren't that bad.  6 miles around Eagle (by Vail) at 6,000 ft, but I will be running around 10 PM at night (Michelle: I will have you running twice a day.  Me: gulp).  And my final run is a whopping 2 miles at 6,000 ft in Carbondale at 6:30 AM.  And I'll be trapped in a van with 5 other strangers (I joined a group of ladies from Colorado - I don't know any of them personally).  Hopefully this experience will be fun.  If anything, it serves as an excuse to get me up the the mountains under the guise of "training run".  And maybe I'll bring my fly rod and get some fishing done too.

October is blissfully race-free.  But I do have Great American Beer Festival, which is an endurance event in itself.

And then November 3 I've signed up for Oilman 70.3 in Conroe, TX.  I have friends doing the race, and well, I haven't actually raced a HIM since 2010.  I want to race one and see how much faster I am now.

For now, my training schedule is pretty casual.  Nothing long, nothing fast.  This week my coach has me swimming in the AM and doing an easy bike ride after work.  That seems like a lot!  Funny, because my total training hours for the week is only 10.  But it feels more like 15.

Oh, and I did sign up for this:

August 3, 2014

I'm not sure if that makes me awesome or an idiot.  We'll find out in 53 weeks.