June went by in a Blur!

The brick workout that I talked about earlier went quite well.  I rode stronger than I ever have and put in a solid 5 min per km run over the 4km course.  I do not expect to be able to hold that over the half marathon distance, but it was nice to feel that strong after a solid bike ride.

Also in June I got a personal best in a 5k track time trial.  I think it was 23:06, about 40 seconds better than my time at about the same point in the season as last year.

Mid month I travelled to Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Canmore for some work and holidays / family visiting.

The highlights were:

• training in Vancouver a week after the worlds - and running in Stanley Green park
• swimming in the ocean without a wetsuit and with a seal - I got a little nervous when it got within 10 feet of me I will admit
• got in some laps in a 50m pool - 100m in one of those pools feels a lot more than 4x25 in a normal pool.  I will be getting in some time at the 50m pool next year over the winter
• learning all about icebreaker clothing and how great it is
• took a mountain bike lesson at the canmore nordic center and not creating any injuries - blood loss was kept to under a quarter of a litre and only 2 complete body over the handle bar falls
• an afternoon of real mountain biking - the low part was realizing that I just don't have room for another sport.  However I will not be worried about biking in the fall with the 'boys' now!
• 5 mountains hiked in 5 days.
• about 3500m of hiking ascent in those 5 days
• swimming in a very cold rocky mountain lake with no wetsuit - just to be sure I didnt lose any swim fitness prior  to the ptbo half ironman

There is a gallery here that you can peruse.  Sorry the font size on the descriptions are so small, I will work on making them larger when I get some time.

So with that exercise, I am pretty sure I didnt lose any fitness, however the Peterborough Half Ironman is looming this coming weekend. 

So here are the usual lists of goals for that race:

Swim in 37 minutes (a bit faster than the last race since now I will have some feet to follow). Bike in 2:59 (about 5 minutes faster than last year) or 30km/hr for 90 kms however I do not want to be going all out as the main goal of the race is to do the run in 2:07 which is a 6 minute kilometer. This will be a huge improvement over the 2:36 that I logged last year (with quite a bit of walking).  

The plan is to then have a good HIM under my belt and be ready to go hard on the bike in Muskoka and post a better run time in September.

Today I raced the Kawartha mile, which is normally a race I do relatively better than most races I do (I seem to be able to suck it up better over a short distance).  However I had some race day confusion and got to the track and only had 7 minutes to warm up.  I logged a 6:28 which is the worst I have ever done it in (well of 2 prior years).  I wasnt timing my splits, but I logged the first one in 1:27 which is a few seconds faster than I expected, but just didnt feel the desire to push.  A little bit of it was not getting injured with that little of a warmup, the other was I havent ran hard in 3 weeks now and only ran 3x when I was out west in total.  I am supposed to take it easy this week, but really feel the need to get a few runs in to get the cobwebs out before the run on sunday. 

Best of luck everyone this coming weekend 

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