Benevolent Bitch

Triathlon is like a benevolent but ruthless goddess - she turns you into more than you ever thought you'd be, but she isn't above regularly kicking your ass to keep you humble. Today, the goddess and I did a little dance.

The Swim

The swim was . . . OK. I feel like I've lost some ground since I got sick and since I've been working on the form adjustments Major Payne (credit to Bolder for the monicker) gave me. However, I also feel like I'm gaining it back. I was able to get in a mile total with a few rest stops intermingled. It was fine. Nothing stellar. The frustrating thing about Saturday morning swims is the limited time available. The gym opens at 7:00 am - and the pool usually doesn't open until 5 or 10 minutes after that - and the lap swimmers have to make way for the water aerobics class at 7:50. So you have about 40, maybe 45 minutes to get a good swim in. But, it is what it is and I'm not too unhappy about the way it went down this morning.

The Bike


Ah, yes . . . the bike. Pyro is the Lady Triathlon's favorite instrument for teaching me humility. At the start of my ride, I decided to experiment with unclipping my right foot to stop rather than my left - for some reason this pedal is much easier to unclip from, though the bike guy said he set both to the lightest resistance - that so didn't work. I'm not sure why, but when I stopped, I immediately tipped over to my left and reskinned my knee. Pretty.

After my spill, I picked myself up, got it together and took off. The very best news about my ride is that I had fun. The trail is flat and there are no cars to worry about except for the places where it crosses streets and those all have traffic lights.

I was able to keep the speed at about 15mph without a lot of effort and still felt like I had control. Once, I opened it up and got up to about 18mph before I decided that it was too scary. Still, though that took more effort, I felt like I had plenty of juice to go faster, just not enough guts. So thats cool.

Then, there was a near wipe out. It went like this: I was getting thirsty. So I reached for my water bottle. I'd done this successfully twice on my ride, so I was starting to believe that I could do it. Wrong. I think that I was thinking too much. I slowed down too much. I couldn't get the bottle back in the cage. I freaked out. I started swirving all over and started to travel in the direction of the ground - rubber side was threatening to go up. Thankfully, my right foot was instantly free of the pedals and on the ground, desparately trying to stop my forward/sideways trajectory. Then, a miracle occurred. I remembered that Pyro came equipped with brakes. Two of them, to be exact. One for the front, and one for the back. Miraculous. I used them. I stopped. I didn't cry. I did however sustain an injury. When my foot went down in a desparate attempt to brake "Flinstone Style", I came down pretty hard on the top tube (I don't even know if that's the right terminology, but you get the idea). If I was a guy, I wouldv'e racked myself. I've never been more thankful to be female. I did however inflict a nasty bruise in the upper thigh area, dangerously close to my tender parts. Ouch. The bike seat managed to put much unwelcome pressure on my new owey. Double Ouch. I made the executive decision to cut my ride to one lap (16miles) rather than the two I had planned (or really hoped for, I know better than to "plan" when it comes to a bike ride. I plan to start. That's the best I can do). I made it back to my car, probably making more of the discomfort than I needed to - but damn that pride hurt. There's that bitch Humility again. Bite me, humility.

The Run

Since my bike was cut short, I decided to go for a bit more of a run than planned. 5k to be exact. And this run was my moment of glory for the day. The run was Lady Triathlon's way of building me back up before I had to go back out into the "real world". The morning had warmed to a glorious sunny 60 degrees. I changed into my running shorts and pulled off my layers down to my short sleeves and took off. I ran a negative split by heart rate and managed to come in at 31:13. And I didn't stop the stopwatch at the traffic lights. So I figure I did it right around 30 min. That's my best 5k time. Ever. After I swam a mile and biked 16. I was officially feeling like a bad ass again.

Thanks, Lady. I needed that.