Up Up Up

I think I can call it a successful first weekend on my Ironman plan. I did a 52.5 mile bike ride on Saturday morning under partly sunny, hazy skies. Since I didn't really know how fast I could go I didn't want to pick a ride that had a set amount of miles. Instead I chose to ride the road that goes from here to Auburn. It apparently is a big climb to get there, though when riding it it's kind of hard to tell until my legs were so cooked about 4 miles out of Auburn that I decided it was time to turn around. Once I did that I was like oh look, I've been going up a hill. So coming back to home was fun. The road itself was a decent place to ride. Most of the time there was a wide enough shoulder to not be right next to the cars and the road was pretty smooth. Aside for around town and the town right north of here, it was pretty rural and not too high traffic (for California anyways). And then after the ride I did my first brick run of the year. My legs found themselves faster than I thought, so that was good. Today I did my "long" run. It was dry for the first 40 minutes or so, and then it started to rain. By the end is was almost pouring. Fun... not so much. Then I did a swim for easy recovery. Even though it's hard to get myself to the pool to swim nowadays, especially when it's raining, once I get in the water I'm okay. And I decided the best thing to do when it's raining is swim, since I certainly am not going to bike in it, and only run if necessary.

PLUS I have had a recent swimming breakthrough. I took a couple lessons, and somehow, I am swimming a 1:30 at the same amount of energy expenditure as I was barely making a 1:35 a month ago. Previous to these lessons I had swam one 1:30 100. Now I have swam a few. It's kind of exciting.