exercise blah blah blah

I've been all kinds of sporty since last updating.  I thought I'd been running around and biking a fair bit before joining the triathlon team, but I sure didn't reach this level of tired.  I woke up on Tuesday thinking it was Friday and happy that the week was almost over -- unfortunately, that obviously wasn't true.

Our training group had it's kickoff meeting on June 13 and after looking at the different "tracks" of training and seeing how much faster Track 2 ramps up the running than Track 1, I decided I was pretty much a Track 1 kind of exerciser.

There are 4 tracks for each of 3 training programs.  You can train for "Under 70.3" (Sprint and Olympic distance races), 70.3 (half-ironman distance) and 140.6 (ironman distance), and then Track 1 is for beginners/much-improvement possible people, Track 2 would be people who have done a race like that before, or can go some significant fraction of the required distance, and then Track 3 and 4 are for people who are too strong, aerobic and speedy for Tracks 1 and 2.  At least that's how I understand it.

The Track 1 workouts aren't necessarily individually challenging so far -- they aren't really supposed to be -- but all the exercising and going to the newbie clinics where they are telling us lots of useful information is tiring.

Last Saturday, there was an open water swim about 30 minutes south and a group run afterwards.  It was super-extra humid, but when it finally started raining, it felt so good to be standing around getting rinsed off by the warm rain. The Sunday there was a group ride.  I went out with the 30 mile group and felt awesome after 10 miles, pretty good after 20, and tired and ready to go home after 25. Unfortunately, there were still 8 miles to go since the 30 mile route was actually 33.  It was a new longest ride ever for me, and my average speed was 13mph.  That isn't a fast speed compared to more in-practice people, but it was a great speed for me.

The coach set up his grill after both of the weekend group run/ride events, which was awesome.  Both days last weekend I ended up stomach-growling hungry during parts of the exercise, so I need to carry some snacks on the bike and/or eat more breakfast.

I'm probably going to buy some of those "clipless" pedals for my bike this week.  "Clipless" in quotes because these are the pedals that you like click your bike shoes to and then you are attached to the bike, and it seems that that would be a clipping system if anything was, but the old kind of shoe attachment mechanism was "toe clips" where you stick the front of your shoe into a cage of sorts on the pedal, and since the new pedals don't have toe clips, they are called clipless.  I'd been hesitating on switching to these pedals on the bike because then I would have to wear bike shoes to ride it and would end up clomping around the grocery store and stuff, but I've been doing some research, and it looks like there exist bike shoes that aren't velcro (making it look like you can't tie shoelaces) and have the attachment bit recessed (so you don't clomp as much).  The sandals above are about as un-dopey as bike shoes get.

Besides exercising, I've been enjoying my farm vegetables, but have already had to throw some out as they withered from neglect in my fridge.  I couldn't get excited about most of the spinach, and had some lettuce give up on me also.  This week, I got some sturdy collard greens, so I'm going to make the cheesy collard and onion dish that I did last year.

I made a batch of strawberry jam too -- third year in a row of jam-making :)  I hadn't tried any in all this time, I'd just been giving it away, but the other night I was hungry for dessert and didn't want to eat marshmallows (the only sweet thing besides semi-sweet chocolate chips I could find in my kitchen) so I had bread and jam and, wow! it was good! I'm looking forward to finishing the jar and then trying some of my blackberry jam from last summer.

Finally, the cat with his stupid-expensive teeth seems to be doing well. He was doing a weird thing with his food the other day -- taking a bite and then walking away from the bowl to eat it, then walking back to the bowl to get another mouthful of food, etc -- but he is eating and active and his shaved forearm looks mostly normal now.