Tonight

If the stars align and the ground dries out from yesterday’s rains, my dogs will begin attending agility classes on the same night, for the first time ever.  It’s like a Christmas miracle, come 8 months early.  No more driving up the mountain twice a week.  No more dragging my tired self to class on Mondays that began far too early with the wakeup call for masters swim at 4:45 am.  All Tuesdays, all the time.  Oh boy!

No! No! No!!!

OMG I am so NOT pregnant. DO I LOOK PREGNANT???? I am remembering each and every one of you who raised the prospect of such a nightmare.

The due dates for next week do not involve me, sorry to disappoint :-)

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun

Or just really really busy!

• I was back to work this week and busy as ever.  I had my official annual performance review and, suffice it to say, I was still blushing hours later at all the nice comments from the 360 feedback of my colleagues.  Even with training for an Ironman last year, apparently I kicked ass.
• It was a good solid training week.  Lots of hard workouts and I’m really pleased with how they went.  Excellent news since my first triathlon of the year is 6 days away – yikes!
• This also means Rev3, my Olympic tri for the year, is 4 weeks away.  How did that sneak up on me so fast???  I’m excited and nervous all at once…this is only my 2nd Olympic ever and it’s my opportunity to say No, Wildflower will NOT define my Olympic distance potential! Damn you, stupid nasty Wildflower!  Or something like that…
• The beardie boys and I went to an agility trial in Dixon on Saturday.  Max had some beautiful runs and picked up more speed points.  Stanley topped off those 2 Standard legs from last weekend with his final Novice Standard leg this weekend (and I think 1st place!) to finish his NA title.  Wow, just like that I am done with Novice agility until the next dog…now it’s on to the Open level for the baby boy!  We will probably spend a longer time in Open while we work on our weaknesses in handling but that’s OK! I remember doing the same thing with Max.

Besides next weekend’s race, I think there are some other very exciting things due to occur around the same time.  But we all know how due dates are just a guess (I was born 2 weeks late, for example), so I’ll update when I know something!

Race week – woohoo! I may or may not be most excited about the very light workload this week :-)

Training totals for April 5-11:
Swim: 7250 yards
Bike: 59.5 miles
Run: 17.2 miles
Strength: 30 mins of TRX
Total time: 10.75 hours

Happy happy dance

I’ve been anxiously waiting for weeks since I shipped my old race t-shirts off to Arkansas.  Today they came back to me in a different form!

I had a t-shirt quilt made by Campus Quilts!  It’s even bigger than I thought it would be – we could definitely use this on our queen-sized bed and it’s bigger than the comforter we currently use.  I haven’t worn most of these shirts in years so it’s nice to finally put them to use in a better way.

IM AZ featured prominently

Ahhhhh, memories…

Belated Weekend Wrapup

Sorry, there was no way I was going to blog when I got home to California last night, after midnight!

I redeemed myself for Saturday’s sufferfest on the bike with a wonderful hard interval run Sunday morning.  Not knowing what off-Strip areas in Vegas are safe, I went ahead and ran to The Strip and up and down that past the hotels/casinos.  At 5:30 am, that makes for quality entertainment as a runner!  (Very drunk) people were in awe that someone was out running, possibly as much as I was that they had stayed up all night drinking! 

After that, it was another day at the dog show/agility trial.  In all, my boys did spectacular!  Max double-Qed (meaning he was perfect in both courses on the same day) and racked up more points towards his MACH2.  And Stanley decided 2nd place in Novice Standard on Saturday was not good enough – he went 1st place on Sunday!  I so wish I had video to show how much he’s improved.

From there, it was time for Leaving Las Vegas as we started the drive home to California.

Amusingly enough, leaving Nevada (right at the CA border) looks similar.

9 long hours in the car later (damn you LA drivers on I-15 and your terrible bad interstate behavior!), we rolled into San Jose in the pouring rain and dark and went to bed.  Jeff and Cujo had beat us there by about 8 hours on their return from Arizona.

Training totals for March 29-April 4 (1 bike missed due to illness):
Swim: 8400 yards
Bike: 42.4 miles
Run: 14.8 miles
Strength: 60 mins of TRX
Total time: ~10 hours

I was back at masters bright and early this morning.  Another big training week ahead, getting ready for the races!

In case anyone was wondering

I did not fall off the face of the earth.  But I did get sick and spend a whole day in misery and another still recovering.  It was a baaaaaad baaaaaad round of Mexican food, my friends. 

And then I bathed dogs and packed the car.

And then we left Arizona.  Here’s your clue where the boys and I are now.

Yeah, the sight of Hoover Dam wouldn’t have meant much to me either, had I not spent 90 minutes winding 3 miles up and down the mountain to cross it on that road.

Anyway, we are in Las Vegas, attending a dog show and agility trial.  So far, things are mostly good – some nice agility runs from my boys and Stan behaved well in the show ring, no matter what choice the judge made.  After we finished up today, I had a swim-bike workout to be done.  Here is me suffering big-time in my hotel room on the trainer.

Another day at the shows tomorrow and then we head home.  It will be nice to get settled back in normal life.

March Totals: Swim 30,000 yds/Bike 167.6 mi/Run 60.2 mi

Wildflower*

*No, not the nasty icky evil race Wildflower whichIwillneverdoagain, the outdoors growing kind.

It’s wildflower season in Arizona!

After a pre-dawn swim and some conference call action, Jeff and I headed to McDowell Sonoran Preserve for some trail running in the desert.

Less than half a mile into our run, we came around a curve, moved to the side to let a mountain biker flying down the hill go by, and came to a grinding halt.  The mountain biker had come on so fast, he’d surprised the heck out of this scaly critter.  Oh yes, that IS a rattlesnake and he rattled quite loudly his displeasure at us.  We took a little breather while he settled down and slithered off into the bushes.

Everything was up-up-up and – you guessed it – UP!

Partway up the trail looking back at the way we came

At the top of the ridge finally!  From there we continued on some steep downhills (I am paying the price for one particularly steep rocky section with knee pain – hello, ice pack!) and of course more uphill before we turned back.

Hooray for downhills! Gee, is there enough cactus in that picture?

Thankfully we had some cloud cover today while running so it stayed slightly cooler than yesterday’s transition run.  I’m surviving a tough training week so far, woohoo for that!

In other news today I finally bought tri shoes for my bike to replace my old roadie shoes.  My goal for the year is to figure out how to get my feet out in motion and be able to run into transition without the clop-clop-clop of shoes on.  Anyone have tips on this?