Copy Cat

After seeing Nicole do a great job with her tri earlier this month, I figured I should do one too. So yesterday I did the Portland Triathlon (sprint distance) and I'd say it went pretty well. Originally I had planned on doing a sprint tri in early May before Lily was born, but when I went to sign up a couple of weeks before the race it was sold out. So I was bummed and figured I wouldn't do one this year. I didn't train much over the past three months, maybe averaged a run and a bike session per week and swam three or four times total since Lily arrived.

When Nicole asked me Saturday why I wanted to do it (from a motivational angle, not a "what the heck are you thinking" angle) I think my response was "I don't know". Thinking more about it, I think I just wanted to show myself that even though my free time has changed in a really radical way, I can still keep doing what I did before. Sure, maybe my results could have been better if I had trained more. But I was pleasantly surprised with how well I did anyway, finishing fourth out of eighteen in my division. And I'm starting to think triathlons may be like golf for me. You can have fun and do pretty well by training on a somewhat leisurely schedule, but to take a real leap in results requires significantly more effort and dedication. I'm not saying that someday I won't take the next step, but for the moment I'm happy with where I'm at.

I mentioned my sparse training regimen earlier, and it actually mapped pretty well into my results. I ended up doing the backstroke for most of the swim because I was hyperventilating a bit and wasn't enjoying it. So my swim was about two and a half minutes longer than the past couple of years. My bike pace was about the same as last year, but this year's bike course was five miles longer, so I'd say my bike improved. And my run pace was almost :30/mile better, probably because this spring I was running a lot and training specifically to get faster 5k times.

So I guess I did end up showing myself that I could still do pretty well even with limited training. Maybe that'll be the way I do this for the next couple of years - run, bike, and swim when I can and then do one event a year. Training my butt off to try and win my division just doesn't sound that interesting to me when it involves a trade off of time with Lily and Nicole. So that's that.

In Lily news this week, she's figured out how to make herself rock in her rocking seat. She bounces her legs in the right rhythm to keep it going. Of course when we realized that she had done it, we thought it was a sure sign of genius. We'll post a video of it later this week.