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Sept 21st: Pumped for Big Lick

A short three weeks ago, I signed up for the Big Lick Triathlon, for which there is only one distance: olympic. I was scared about the 1 mile swim, but felt I could crush the 25mi bike and would somehow survive the 6 mile run. Having signed up, I immediately started training hard, starting with three workouts the day I signed up! Now, having swam consistently over the past two weeks I actually feel very confident about the swim, having had my best workout yet tonight. I went from barely being able to swim a 50, and I couldn’t even finish 2 50’s…to today doing a 300 warm up, 6×75 with almost no rest, 4×200 with 15 sec rest, and 4×50 with 10sec rest (on the 60), and still felt strong but was out of time and did a comfortable 100 cool-down. Pretty amazing how far I’ve come, but we’ll see how it happens in the open water. On the weekends, I’ve been beating myself up on the mountain bike, and have been doing wednesday worlds as my only other bike ride really for training on the bike…which I have somewhat neglected and am just counting on base fitness really.  I haven’t been running too much either, but did 7 miles yesterday morning followed by a long 2.5hr bike ride.  That, on top of a hard weekend of racing and the 10+ miles I commute every day on my fixie…my legs didn’t want to move this morning.  But they did, and again I felt great swimming.  I’m going to take it easy the next few days, with possibly an suuper easy bike then run tomorrow, and then an open water swim in the wetsuit on Friday hopefully.

All things considered, I couldn’t be more excited for this weekend.  I’ve got all the gear, including a wet suit from Alex Brown, a race belt and timing chip strap (that I can’t find at the moment though).  I put the aero bars on the bike, and yesterday wore the aero helmet during the ride…I really could’ve used more time in that position though, but from what I hear Big Lick is hilly.  Today’s picture is all of that gear laid out, pretty much everything I’ll be taking this weekend. (Plus the MTB for racing Sunday at App State and some other things I couldn’t find haha).