Done for the season?

I think I'm done for the season....passing on Day at the Beach this year (I'll go into the reasons later).

Up for next year....Wildflower Oly, Breath of Life, Malibu (all the usual suspects)....and we're thinking of trying a half.

Non-tri events: I may do the Manhattan Beach 10k next weekend; may do the Long Beach bike tour the weekend after; we're going to start training for the Carlsbad half (race is in January); hopefully everything will work out with the house buying/selling/moving that we can still do our Solvang metric century the second weekend in November.

Oh, and the reason I'm not doing Hermosa? This:



My first tattoo! I got it this past weekend. No swimming for 2-3 weeks. It's on my upper right arm.

Well, our house was in escrow, then it wasn't (buyers backed out), now it will be again Monday (new buyers). That's my excuse for being negligent re: blogging.

That said, I cut almost 20 min off my time from Malibu last year -- awesome! I'm still very slow, but I'm very pleased with my improvement. I improved on everything, including transitions (which I felt I did very leisurely). I still start at the bottom of the finishing times to find my name, rather than the top, but it takes a bit longer to find it than it used to (i.e. it's not as close to the bottom!).

I promise, promise, promise I'll post some real race reports, training notes etc. Soon. Sometime.

We're in escrow in our (new) house and go into escrow tomorrow morning on our (old) house.

Between overbooking for the summer and then selling our house, triathlon training has suffered. I do also think not scheduling anything between Breath of Life the end of June and Malibu September 17th was not a wise move -- I need the excitement of races to give my training a kick.

One good thing I've noticed about this past year and a half or so of training is the big improvement in my cardiac fitness. I know, duh, but it used to be that any pace faster than a walk zoomed my heartrate to its max. Now I actually have a 'light activity' pace, that I can maintain for awhile (couple miles at least without the walk breaks that used to be required). Not to say I don't have runs during which breaks are required, but still, definite, measurable, objective improvement has occurred.