Mini Triathlon

So I am training for an event that will take place in Coronado on the last weekend I am here, on Sunday, July 27th at 7:30am. It is a "Mini-Triathlon", sometimes called a "Sprint-Triathlon" where you do swimming, running, and biking, just like a real triathlon, but with shorter distances.

The idea of doing this freaks me out but they do like to push us beyond our comfort zones, and they certainly are accomlishing that with me. It will be a 400 meter ocean swim, 4 mile bike ride, and 1 mile run. The ocean swim is what is making me most nervous. If I can survive that, the bike ride and run will be a cake walk! (mmmmmm.... caaaaaake ...)

We train every afternoon here with the swimming/biking/running. I haven't swam -- I mean real swimming like lap swimming with a real stroke) since I was about 8 years old taking swim lessons at little ol' Eatonville High School from the 'big kids' there. When I first got in the pool this week to do that, I had a total panic attack... something about putting my face down in the water wasn't something my mind could get past. Luckily there are phenominal coaches here, and she broke it down to the basics for me... down to the point where I was blowing bubbles in the water -- Alli and I have a lot in common this summer with our swim lesson stories! By the end of the hour I was swimming the crawl stroke as if I had been doing it my whole life, it just took getting over that stupid mental block.

Swimming is still something I don't have much endrance for yet, so I will have to work hard to build that up over the next 2 weeks. Soon we will start doing swim training in the ocean instead of the pool, so we can get used to that too.

Looking online, Lake Del Valle and Shadow Cliffs have several Mini-Tri type of events throughout the year, so it gives me a good goal of something to continue in the future (plus, the lake swimming will be so easy compared with swimming in the ocean (with the seaweed and the sharks!) here).

Pray for me!