No pizza during taper!

Since I removed my cassette on my race bike (in hopes of swapping in a 12 – 17 cassette) only to find that the 12 – 27 cassette that I borrowed was a 9 speed. I needed to take my bike out for another shake down test just to make sure everything was clicking just right. I met Keith and Lance at Jackson Station at 6AM. I was only doing a short (super short) ride and I was there for camaraderie as much as anything. Lance and Keith wished me much luck and I got about 8 miles in a little less than ½ an hour.

At lunch I jumped in the pool to just mess around. Sam was in there and we chatted while waiting on Chris to show up. Sam told me all about the age group national champs – Sam finished 9th in the brutally tough 35 – 39 age group. He told me all about the tough swim (Sam’s time was 28 minutes). The city had opened up the flood gates and the race was against the current for much of the course. I had heard that you really needed to hold on to the dock or else you would end up downstream. For example, Chris is a stronger swimmer than I am – he can easily cover 1500 meters in about 20 minutes and his last ½ ironman swim time was in the low 30’s. He swam the 1500 meters in 37 minutes. The swim would have killed me – I can imagine if you ever stopped to take a breath or look around for just a few seconds then you would be losing ground – maybe even 10’s of meters. Many of these athletes took more than an hour to complete the swim.

We did some bilateral breathing exercises in the pool – this is still very awkward for me. This is something that I will need to work on this year. I ended up with a challenging 1300 yards in the pool.

After work I met up with the pinebeltpacers for the Trek on Trace. During August we do predicted time 2 mile runs. This week you had to team up with a partner and finish together. I teamed up with Ben with a predicted time of 15:45 – a comfortable pace for me. Jim and many of the other pacers were present and we had a truly fun run. Ben and I ended up a little over our predicted time (damn) and were not in contention for any prizes. Jim and I decided to run a couple more miles for fun and Laura joined us. She has her first ½ marathon coming up on Labor Day. She is super excited!

The best part of this fun run was that I did not partake in any of the goodies after the run! The pizza, brownies and other treats were tempting but I refrained. This is hard for me but I know that I am not exercising much this week and I do not need the extra calories. I do not want to go into this race carrying extra pounds. I have been eating tons of fruit and vegetables this week – lots of carrots and I am proud of myself for being proactive.

My bib number for this Sunday is 1354. Jim’s number is 1232.
You can track us at: http://ironman.com/events/ironman/louisville?show=tracker