Super Sizing

Looking toward the Point West of our Dock

My strategy in this last week of training has been single sport workouts with extended distances - super sizing my workouts so to speak. I hope that will make the triathlon distances seem easy and short when I do them on Sunday. Yes, the event is just a few days away!

I swam for about twice as long as I have been. I didn't cover twice the distance because I needed some rest periods. But it felt great to almost get to the next point over on the lake shore. That point has been where I aim during my swims to the west. I got close enough with the longer distance that I could almost stand and walk to the shore. The only reason I didn't do that were the weeds.

Weeds are a concern for me during the swim. They keep growing! There are more patches and larger patches since I started my training. It also seems that their texture has gotten stiffer and more wiry. Or it may be that there's a different plant growing now. My problem with weeds is that my feet get tangled in them when I breast stroke. Watching the Olympic swimmers I realize that my breast stroke has little resemblance to theirs. But, hey, there aren't very many people on the planet who can do what they do. When I do the stroke my legs hang down quite a ways in the water. Hence the problem with weed entanglement.

Because of weeds Joe is considering going back to the other swim route heading east from our dock past 3 neighboring docks. He swam that way recently and said the weeds were less of a problem than when he swam to the west. I think it makes a big difference what line you take away from the dock in either direction so the trick will be placing the boats to define lines that avoid the weeds. Good luck with that! Position on the water is rather hard to perceive accurately. Another factor that may affect which direct we swim will be the presence of fishing boats in the water. West of our dock is a favorite fishing area and sometimes on early weekend mornings fisherfolk are parked there in their boats.

Riding across the Finish Line in our Driveway

For my longer bike workout I went back to a previous loop that I used and then added part of another. My loop starts out the same as for the triathlon but returns a different way. Then I went into a subdivision on the other side of 33rd Street that I call the wine streets. You can imagine the street names. In the wine streets you can do a loop that's about 1.3 miles and there's hardly any traffic. There are several subloops that allow for a number of variations. I ended up doing a total of 7.43 miles almost 50% bigger for the same price!

It felt like I was doing a significantly slower pace. In fact, I tried to slow it down a bit since I knew I was going a longer distance. My handy dandy bike computer tells me that I actually maintained about the same pace as for my triathlon distances. Amazing!

Joe Returning on 33rd Street Run Route

For my final day of training I did a super-sized walk. Sister Randy came with me and that always ups my speed. She simply operates at a faster pace in everything than I do! We also increased the distance. I haven't measured how far it was but we went quite a ways further on 33rd Street. It wasn't double but was at least 50% more. I was too busy chatting to remember to time myself. Since I stopped at Randy's house (next door) both coming and going the timing wouldn't have a direct relationship to the triathlon route anyway. We walked for something like 45 minutes. We got out fairly early and it was a beautiful cool morning with lots of blue sky, deep summer green (thank goodness for some recent rain!) and bird song. After our walk I stopped in the family co-op garden at Randy's house and did some picking and weeding. Heading back to my house with a full basket of produce and a sense of readiness for the triathlon, life seemed really good.