Evicted!

So I get back from Ironman only to get an eviction notice from my landlord. Not that I had done anything, but either they are going to live here or a close family member. I have 2 months to find a place. No rest for the weary!!! I had been thinking that it was time to move out of here - yes, keep my address in pencil still - so at least this forces me to take action. I just laughed for several minutes when I got this. Couldn't I at least get a couple of days rest??? So I guess that's my new project for now.

In The News

After I got back to where I was staying for the race, my friends came back and we were just chatting while I was getting some food into me. One of the gals, Lisa, had been talking with a reporter from the Okanagan Sun during the run portion and she was noticing all the support I was getting from friends. The reporter thought this might be a good slant for part of her race coverage. Lisa told me that she would be calling me the next day for a phone interview!!! Holy cow!! How funny, but very cool. So I had an interview with her yesterday and the paper comes out on Thurs. She said it could also be viewed online at www.oksun.ca so you can check it out here. If I can, I'll try to post the article here on my blog.

My friend, Lisa, has been an Iron"woman" finisher many times, is a coach for women and put on many women's races especially in the states. She also put on the first ever adventure race for women and was writeen up in Sports Illustrated for Women for that. She is a free-lance journalist who has written many articles for triathlon magazines and websites. As I write this, she flew off from Penticton to Germany to cover the World Rowing Championships. With this background, she was asked to write a book for women in the sport of triathlon which is called "Triathlon for Women". Even as an experienced triathlete myself, I picked up a few pointers and it's always good to refresh the basics. She will also be written up as a book review in the above paper so check it out. Thanks for being such a great networker and friend!!

Ironman Canada Finished!

I finally finished Ironman Canada a couple of days ago!!! Yippe, yahoo, it's done and now I can relax and rest!!! My legs are still a little stiff, but loosening up nicely. I'm tired, but not completed wiped out like last time. I have a few blisters which are healing, but not letting me get into running shoes too soon which is fine by me right now.

I was nervous leading up to the race since I had been burnt out and was also having a hamstring that was bothering me. All I could do was just try to stay steady and stick to my race plan and see what happened. Before the race, you get so busy just preparing, registering and visiting with friends, not to mention menstrual cramps (at least it wasn't on race day!) that I didn't have time to get too nervous once I got up there.

The day of the race was a little cooler than normal. I'm not sure what the temperature got up to, but it wasn't too hot. It did get quite windy especially on the bike and part of the run. There was a little rain on the bike, but nothing much to worry about. The female winner said it was her windiest race there ever in her few times doing it! I was afraid of starting the swim with almost 2800 people. Lucikly I swim off to the right a little in open water and was on the edge of the masses of people so didn't get beat up much and just kept it steady for the entire swim as I had a long day ahead of me. I came in just a few minutes longer than I had hoped, but no big deal. Had a fairly quick transition and off on the bike I went.

I had a ton of people pass me on the bike especially lots of men. At leat they had great legs to look at :). I just focused on my own race and constantly kept monitoring my heartrate. This was new for me as I usually just raced like a bat out of hell and just would hang on to the end. It was great having the heartrate to focus on also. My friends, Carol and Helen, had spray painted (water-based) messages along the course so it was great to try to look for them which also kept my mind occupied on something other than the long day ahead of me and some of their messages were quite funny. Thanks to them sooooooo much for putting in that effort! I did feel stiff on the legs and back on the bike which just kept getting better and then not so good, but were quite stiff by the end of the bike so I just took it easy than to try to get them ready to run the marathon.

I had to walk through the next transition since my legs wouldn't run yet. There is a big change tent for each the men and women and you get your own volunteer to help you with your transition clothes, etc. By the way, the volunteers at this event were so absolutely amazing through the whole thing. Always smiling and encouraging from the time of registration onward. I had a great surprise that my volunteer was a client of mine so we had a big hug and it was fun to chat for a couple of minutes while I changed.

Starting the run was tough as my legs were so incredibly stiff. Again, I just went back to monitoring my heartrate, looking for signs on the road and looking for all the people I knew during the race. It was an out-and-back run course so you could see everyone!!! It was great to cheer my friends on no matter where they were in the field. Of course, my diligent supporters were amazing in cheering. My bowels were also doing funky things and had to stop a couple of times. This happened last time also. It's tough getting the exactly right electrolyte/fluid balance which I obviously haven't figured out for myself yet. My legs did loosen up a bit, but I would feel my hamstring when I tried to pick it up. Since I wasn't going to win anything at that point I didn't need to have an injury on top of it all so I just kept it steady. I didn't run nearly as fast as I had hoped, but I did the best I could on the day, stuck with my race plan and finished quite strongly at the end since I wanted to break 12 hours at that point and did with a time of :



I was finishing as a guy was asking his girlfriend to marry him just before he was crossing the finish line!!! It was great to see all the varied shapes, sizes and ages of people finishing the race. One lady was the first to finish in the over 75 year old category under the time cut off!!! So amazing. A funny thing at the awards banquet was a bike company figured out who they voted had the worst bike in the race and gave them a free Cervelo bike!!! How cool is that!

My original plan was to try to qualify for the Hawaii World Championships in my age group. In the previous few years there had been 5 spots allocated for my age group and the last person to get a spot was around 11:10-25 which I thought was doable for myself. The number of spots in each age group is determined by the number of participants in the age group as a percentage of the total participants and then you get that percentage of the availabe spots for Hawaii. So this year there was only 3 spots in my age group and the gals were so smoking fast in my age group that the last spot was 10:30 which was so much faster than my time goal - even faster than my man-if-I-feel-so-incredibly-amazing time goal. So I didn't qualify, but was happy that I just didn't missout either. I still haven't scratched Hawaii off my list of things to do, but I'll figure that out later after I recover and rest. By the way, I didn't sign up for next year. I told my supporters not to let me while I was out running, but I didn't get the urge to either. You can check out the official results at the IMC website (click here).

I want to thank everyone for their support as it was incredibly great knowing that I have such awesome friends and family that care. Thanks to those who were free and made the effort to come up in person to cheer. Thanks again to Pamela for being the hostess with the mostess. Not sure what my next step is from here. I'd like to do some trail running races and try to keep some of this fitness up for now and see what's instore next time.

Burned out!

The weekend after the camp I slept soooooooo much and didn't exercise for 4 days, which at this point in my training isn't ideal, but I was officially burned out. Since then, it has been an effort to get out the door some days and some days I just turn around since I have been overtired. My energy is starting to come back and I just hope it will in the next couple of weeks. Would be too bad to do all this work and not have a good race. I was feeling really good at the start of July so I'm just trusting that I'll be on fire for the race. Slept a lot yesterday also. There is also a city workers strike here in Vancouver so the pools are shut down. There are a couple of private pools open and I have just been going there and to other municipality pools. Not exactly good timing, but what can you do?? Anyways, that's my updates for now and you have an idea of why I hadn't written in a while. Hope everyone reading this is having a great summer.

Lots of Penticton!!

After our holiday, we had a couple of weeks with visitors in town amongst the training a getting my work schedule sorted out. Only a little busy. From my last post, we hadn't planned to be in Penticton on our week off and I had signed up for an Ironman training camp 3 weeks later. I, also, thought that part of the camp included a short course race which I sogned up for, but I got my weekends mixed up. So I was in Penticon 3 out of 4 weekends and for those who don't now BC, it's 4 1/2 hours away. It's so beautiful up there, but this was getting ridiculous.

So I did the Peach Classic Triathlon which is an Olympic distance race. I was tired from having upped my training distance and intensity. Just missed out on the podium for my age group, oh well. Then we had a 3 day camp the following weekend with the Leading Edge Triathlon Club whom I've been doing some training with. Some people stayed up after the race for the whole week, but I had already had that previous week off so couldn't do it. The days were long and tough, but got us quite prepared for the race. It was great to go over the course again, but more importantly get to know other fellow Ironmates which will make my experience that much more enjoyable. Our coach, Andrew was awesome and the group works hard and knows how to have fun. I'm glad to be a part of that group. I was very tired after that camp, but that was my longest distances over with. Yippee!!!

June Holiday

Ok folks. I know that I haven't written in a while and been bloody busy but here I am again. The last week of June I had a week off so Mark and I went up to the Sunshine Coast. For those of you that don't know it, it's still the mainland north of here, but there are some big, big inlets so you have to take a ferry to get up there. We actually went right to the end which is 2 ferries. We had a 3 day kayaking trip in Desolation Sound. It only rained a little bit, but lucked out on the weather since having some overcast skies are nice for kayaking in. We had our own little island to camp on by ourselves and did day trips from there.





We, then, decided to hike part of the Sunshine Crest Trail. It's 180km route from the end of the peninsula past Lund and goes all the way to the ferry terminal at Saltery Bay. The last 100km hadn't been cleared from the winter fall downs, overgrowth and snow so we were just going to so the first part. It was great that we found out about this as you can't find too many backpack trips to do at that time of year that aren't still covered in snow. The first part of the trail has a lot of road access points so it's easy to organize or just do day hikes on it. We took a water taxi from Lund to the very tip of the peninsula to where the start of the trail can be found. Had a great hike to a lake - again all by ourselves and didn't see any one else on the trail that day. The next day was getting really, really rainy and our feet were soaked. We ran into some trail maintenance people and they mentioned that it supposed to rain for the next couple of days also. After a few choice words between us, we decided just to bail out and look for somewhere that was going to be sunny.



So, off to Penticton we went. It looked like the best place to go for weather and for the activites that we'd both be happy doing. We went and rode most of the Ironman bike course the next day. Mark was such a trooper as he'd prefer to be mountain biking and had never been on a road bike for that long. It was good for me to ride the course again and get used to what I'm in store for. The next day we went rock climbing at the Skaha Bluffs which I had never been to, but has such amazing climbing there. We got to this place that Mark thought would be good for both of us to climb at as he's a much better climber than myself. We were getting ready to climb and some guys came up and mentioned that someone had died on that wall the day before and sure enough there was some blood stained rocks that we hadn't seen. We did find out that it was a rappelling error and had nothing to do with the rock or the bolts along the route. Scary what a little miscommunication can do. We kind of took it easy climbing after seeing that though. It turned out that Mark, as well as another friend, had known that gal who had passed away. I love that Mark is such a stickler for safety. Anyways, the weather turned out great and was a good time away. Although we were busy, we still had our time to relax. We also survived a week together :).