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Hello and welcome to my blog! My name is Nancy. I decided to retire early and my last day at the Fire District was December 31, 2020. My dream to do this pigs 'n poultry thing full time started on January 1, 2021. So far so good...

Thursday, September 8, 2011

What's On Your Mind?

Yup, I've got triathlon on my brain...already thinking about next season! I don't think that it can be here soon enough...SIGH.

I have reflecting quite a bit on my two triathlons that I did this summer and I am pretty convinced that I like them A LOT! 

My big goal was to do better on my swim at StumpTown and that has been achieved! I can't believe that I cut 4 minutes out of my time...so EXCITED - there is hope for my swimming skills yet! I gained so much more confidence the second time around. I am already thinking about preparing to do a Sprint Tri next year, which just means that the swim is a half mile instead of a quarter mile.

So I know what I need to do until next spring...more pool time to build up my endurance! When I'm in the pool I usually end up losing track of how many laps I have done. Then one day, not too long ago, I arrived at the pool to see a guy in the first lane with a bunch of pennies at the end of the lane I didn't get it at first. After a couple of minutes it was very clear - he was using those pennies to "count" his laps. Swim a lap, move a penny from the bag to a pile. SO clever! I'm going to borrow that technique and use it to keep track of my laps...we always have lots of pennies! I'm thinking I'm going to start with 10 and time myself and go from there. My goal for this fall and winter is to start adding time and getting myself to 30 minutes of almost continuous swimming. I say almost continuous because my asthma tends to slow me down a little and it's so easy to stop and rest while pool swimming.

While I work on my endurance, I think I will need to start training to do Bilateral breathing. Bilateral breathing is alternating breathing while swimming freestyle on the right and left side instead of continually breathing to one side only. This is a timing thing and I think I'll need lots of time to practice as I am a right side breather. During the StumpTown event I swam more freestyle and was also able to do my breathing every stroke along with every fourth stroke. It worked out pretty well and it was nice to switch things up a little. Always something to work on! 

Doing triathlons will be my big challenge for a long time. I thought I would just stick to duathlons, but I finally realized that I really don't enjoying running TWO times in one event. Yeah, it's a challenge, but it's more unpleasant than doing all three sports! So really, getting back into swimming was probably the best decision I ever made...and I never thought that I would enjoy it so much!

Looking forward to doing a Sprint Triathlon sometime in the Summer of 2012!

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