The open water swim went well.  I logged a 37:42 for 2k.  While it was almost 9 minutes faster than the same time last year, it still was short of some of the pool splits I had during the winter.  I am glad that the swim training over the winter has developed into visible results however.

The water was quite warm, it had warmed up quite a bit since Dave and I swam the course thursday (race minus 3 days).  However I still skipped the warmup.  I figured I could use all the energy I had for the race.  I started out on Dave's feet for the first 100 or so meters so that I could always know where he was.  I was not planning on letting him ride my draft for the whole race and outkick me at the end.  I then passed him and then just tried to catch on to the next set of feet in front of me.  However they were too far away to catch and so I just settled in.  Around the middle of the first lap I felt someone touch my feet and then I promptly sped up incase it was Dave!  There seemed to be a huge gap in front of me but whenever i moved around a bouy I could see 4-5 about 25m behind me so I spent the race being chased.  Looking at the splits you would think I slowed down on the second lap, but I did pick it up quite a bit the last 500m to be sure I didnt get passed at the end.  I was happy to have won second place in my age group.

Then I had signed up for the 10k canoe race right after.  I have only canoed 6-7 times in my whole life and all of that was with Renee at a very leisurely pace.  I raced with Rob who has done quite a bit of paddling but no racing.  I didnt have many expectations as my arms and back where shot from the swim, but wanted to see how hard it was.  There were 4 boats lining up to the start for the 10k.  I had plans on just doing 5k and feeling how it was going and decide to pack it in or go on from there.  The course was a 1k loop with a 25ish meter portage after each loop. 

The first boat dropped out after the 3rd lap and another dropped out after 4 I think.  At that point we were still neck and neck with the other boat.   It kind of felt like the second half of a half marathon but instead of my legs feeling it, it was my upper body.  Deciding that it would end up being a great workout I decided to say lets go on.  In laps 5 and 6 we had a portage stop to let some water out of the canoe and I had a re entry difficulty putting us maybe 75m behind at this point. We head the leaders as they did the portage talking something about the last lap and so we thought the last lap was going to be this lap (the 8th lap) so we gave it our all to catch up (after another emptying of the canoe at the portage).  We managed to close the 175m gap to about 20m by the end, but they didnt stop, they kept going.  I was cooked at this point and we decided we needed a recovery lap and we let the lead get back up to 150m for the final lap.  Needless to say that probably wasnt the wisest strategy, but it is what we did.  We once again poured it all out but the gap was too big and we ended up being in second by about 100m I think.  So another silver on the day.  Made for a great day - two silvers in two different sports - and two well earned bottles of wine!

There were tons of tips and how to's by the marathon paddlers there and learned a ton about paddling which will make my life so much easier.  They were all efficiency and speed tips which obviously translate well to recreational paddling.  

Monday ended up being a good recovery day and today was just a 45 min spin on the trainer and then a grueling track workout.  1600m, 1200m, 800m, 400m, 4x200m.  They were done on 1:45, 1:41, 1:35, 1:23, 2 I didnt time and a 39 and a 32 I think Dave said. 

I am looking forward to the first group brick workout of the year to see how much I have improved on the bike.

Some interesting things I found in the last week:

Canadian DMCA

Neat business Cards

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Gene Jochen: ...

Terry, you are starting to scare me with your swim. Excellent work. BTW - I think I need new business cards. What do you think of cards that look like race bibs?

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June 01, 2008
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