Weekend Update: The Slow Lady and the Sea

Oh I love me a long holiday weekend, especially one where the weather is B.E.A.UTIFUL.

Thursday we got home from work and Mike and I took a time trial pace ride over our usual 25 mile course. As usual the Hill Goat served me up a biscuit with gravy although it was a pretty quick pace for this hilly bit of biking. (He is such a show off). We followed it up with a 2+ mile transition run, uphill both ways, or at least it might as well have been.

Friday, we were planning to do the Milton Optimist Club 10K, which we did last year too. When the alarm clock went off, we threw it across the room and went back to bed. For.3.hours. God it felt great. We got up and headed out to Lake Ripley to meet some of the SWATties (Tawnya, Martin, Kitty, and family) for our first real open water swim in the suits. With all the flooding around here, there is no boating on the rivers around here and "no wake" on many of the lakes. Not this one. Which meant that like every boat and jet ski in southern Wisconsin was on this lake, or felt like it. There is a nice beach that is bordered with buoys, probably about a 1/4 mile swim to go from the first buoy around to the last. or more if you have a problem or two sighting and zigzag all over the place. the waves were WICKED and slapped us around pretty bad. I actually was feeling pretty good about the whole deal, since I doubt that in real life racing days that we will battling giant boat waves, so it was good good practice. Then again, the 70.3 in 2 weeks in Racine will have the swim in Lake Michigan, so we may be closer to reality than we bargained for. At any rate, we got in, we did it, and we conquered our open water panic attacks and pushed through it. Yeah, Wimmers!

Lucas took sweetie pie to the fireworks and Mike and I took Nick to see the movie Hancock with Will Smith. It was really great, about a flawed superhero.

Saturday we got up early to head towards Kenosha and Milwaukee for a Mikey mission. Mike wanted to try some 2XU tri shorts and top but didn't want to spend the cash until he could try them on and make sure they would fit. So first we headed to Triathlon World in Kenosha. What a joke. the store was tiny and if you were not a small or XS, you were shit outta luck. AND they had not a lot of any other inventory of other stuff and the salesgirl knew..... like nothing about anything. A very disappointing experience. So then we headed over to Hales Corners to Wheel and Sprocket bike shop over by Milwaukee. If you get the chance to head that direction, that shop is AWESOME!! It's huge, it has a huge tri apparel section and the sales stuff totally knows what they are talking about. The girl we talked to had done all the HIMs we have coming up, could offer advice, and had good insight into what we needed. It was great. I found a couple things on clearance (tri shorts, a sleeveless jersey, etc) and Mike got a new pair of gloves.

Funny story: While driving around looking for these places, we were talking about what cute towns we were driving through, but that they all kind of smelled weird, like hot tires. Weird, hmm? so when we stopped, we realized that the stinky town smell was really our wetsuits warming up in the back seat of the car......... Duh.

On the way home, we stopped again at Lake Ripley. We got in a 30 minute swim and finally gave up since the waves were even higher than the day before and we were plain getting beat up. Plus, I forgot my swim cap so the first lap I swam with my hair over my goggles and couldn't see anything. Then I took Mike's swim cap and i kept panicking that something happened to him because I couldn't see him without the bright blue cap on. we finally gave up and went home, but again it was good experience with tough conditions.

Today, we got up early again for the SWAT Sunday Goober McChicken ride. We did 50 to Beckman Mill and back, a hilly and challenging bike. we have Greyhound to thank for the Goober McChicken name. Mike, and Alison, and I have been riding about 50 for the past few weekends. One of the rides I called some jerk who did something rude (I can't remember exactly what..... honked? drove fast past us? wouldn't yield us a lane? yelled something stupid?). I called him Goober McChicken. the name comes from a series of greyhound's posted about dealing with a rude police officer he named Officer McBreakfastTaco who knew little about cyclist's rights and how to observe them. I don't know Officer McBreakfastTaco personally, but I have met his long-lost cousin Goober McChicken on the road a time or two. So anyway, we started calling our Sunday 50's the Goober McChicken Ride. Thanks Greyhound.

In the evening we took a quick lap swim at Rockport Pool, nothing much just 1000 yds of stroke work and form.