Friday, June 20, 2014

Summer's ALMOST Here!

Posted by CheapRunnerMike

Well one more day until my first triathlon of the year!  Tomorrow is the Guelph Lake triathlon and I'll be doing the Olympic distance race, which is a 1500m swim followed by a 40K bike and a 10K run.  Earlier this week I found out that our local triathlon store here in London, Multisport Zone, are closing their doors at the end of the month.  What a bummer…it really made me sad to see this as it is a great shop and Jeff, Alex and Donnie are all good guys.  They were the only Tri shop in town too, so now I need to either make a 2-hour drive to Toronto or buy stuff online.  Online is a pain because of the sizing of so many triathlon items.  I ended up picking up a new swimsuit for Michelle as well as a new one-piece triathlon suit for myself.  I also was able to get their advice on where to take my bike for any service needs as their shop is where I would have gone.  Sad day for London small business.

On Wednesday night I was able to give my new tri suit a trial run before this weekend's race at the Splash n Dash.  There were storms in the forecast but they held off long enough for us to start the swim.

I'm the guy in the yellow swim cap Smile.  We were set up to do two 850m loops on the swim, but the rain started coming down and it wasn't too long before Coach Sheri made the call to bring us in.  I was met by a canoe just before the final buoy on my second loop and told to head back into shore.  Fine with me, I still got a good 1500m swim in, and my swim felt like crap.  Onto the rainy run.  I set out at a decent pace despite having already put in 5 miles earlier in the day on my lunch break.  The legs felt good and I was moving quick.  As I came through to finish my first loop Sheri was there sitting on a covered tailgate trying to keep dry…she yelled at me to keep my shoulders down and to stop shrugging.  Funny enough I was already telling myself the same thing!  Her words helped though and I think I managed to implement her advice.  I ended up finishing the 5K in 20:14, which was the fastest run of the night.  Still not quite fast enough to catch the stronger swimmers, but the gap closed up a bit.  I finished in 50:30, 2 minutes faster than last week and almost 5 minutes quicker than our first week.  Yay for progress!

photo 1

As I mentioned earlier this week, Jackson learned to ride his bike on the weekend and as part of the deal he got a new bike for at the house.  Needless to say, he's been riding non-stop from the moment I get home from work!  He mastered riding in a straight line on Sunday and his turning was okay.  Stopping has since been overcome and he conquered his final challenge last night, the ability to start all on his own.  Now the entire street (well, the sidewalk) is his domain.  He is riding all the way to the end of the block and back all on his own and he is loving it!  It's great seeing him being excited about going outside to ride his bike instead of wanting to sit around playing PlayStation or iPad'ing.

With tomorrow being the first official day of summer, the kids and I decided to get the top down on the Jeep on our way to swimming lessons…Kennedy decided to capture the moment by taking a sweet wind-blown selfie, although Jackson did a pretty good job of his own to photobomb her!

photo 2

So excited that summer is finally here…it seemed like it would never arrive!  And what better way to welcome it than by doing a race…lucky me!

How will you welcome summer?

4 comments:

  1. Thanks Chelsea, have a great weekend girl!

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  2. He makes me laugh all the time...what a kid.

    And thanks, I hope you're right :) No real expectations for the race, just to get my triathlon feet wet (haha, terrible pun) after a long layoff from the sport.

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  3. Good luck on the tri - sounds like your training has been going well so it should be a great race.
    Huge bummer about the store closing - sad that small businesses often have to close due to lack of support.

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  4. Thanks Kim, I hope so! It does stink seeing local businesses close their doors, especially when they were so good to deal with.

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