Try-athlon

After spending all day cooped up in the house because schools were closed so I assumed all of the roads were still under water, around 4pm I finally decided that if our driveway is almost clear of water, then maybe the rest of the roads are too. And they pretty much were. I drove to the main gym that I'm a member of (I usually go to one of the smaller branches) to see if they were open. And they were.

On Tuesday I had intended to go to the main gym to use the pool to try swimming the .25 mile distance that you have to swim in the sprint triathlon. It's funny, .25 miles just doesn't seem like it would be that far and I'm a fairly good swimmer so even though I didn't expect it to be easy, I didn't expect it to be nearly as hard as it was! And I was in a pool where I could stop periodically! I had done 30 minutes on the elliptical before attempting the swim, but I don't think that really affected me that much. The hardest part of the whole thing was breathing. Aside from the swimming lessons that you get as a kid, I've never had real swimming lessons to teach me proper form for racing so I now know that I need to do a little research on that. I'm sure I was breathing wrong, and was probably not keeping my body straight enough, or kicking effectively, but maybe in the next 6 weeks I can get it figured out.

The 3 things holding me back from saying a definitely "yes" to trying the sprint triathlon are/were:

1. Not knowing if I could swim .25 miles.
2. Not having a bike to ride in the race or for practice (since I have a cruiser bike which is meant for cruising, NOT for racing... but I sure do love it for cruising!).
3. Not knowing if my knee can handle running for 3.9 miles on a road.

Now that I know what .25 miles feels like, I'm sure that I can do it.  I just need to get in the pool a lot more often (and buy myself some goggles... my eyes were burning by the end!) and keep practicing.  I like that I can get in a good workout without sweating when I swim. :)

Carla is supposed to let me borrow her bike, so I should be able to mark that off of my excuses list too, but my knee is still a real concern. I tried running on the treadmill on Monday and it did hurt a little bit afterward, but my calf was knotted up so the pain of that was overshadowing my knee. Generally my knee doesn't hurt until after I stop running, but if it hurts enough it could keep me from working out at all... which I definitely don't want! So, I'm trying to taking the running thing slowly which isn't a good since the race is only 6 weeks away, but we'll see. It's still not out of the question. I'm trying to push myself on the elliptical as much as possible to hopefully build up my lung endurance. So... we'll see where the next few weeks takes me exercise-wise and I'll make my decision from there.

P.S. By the way, it kills me that I can't run more. I love running as my primary source of burning calories. Even though the elliptical supposedly burns as many calories/minute, I seriously have my doubts about that because running is SO much harder and I feel like I'm so much more exhausted when I do the same amount of "calories" on the treadmill vs. the elliptical.