War Wounds

"Ready for some RAPIDS!"

My fight was with the rapids of the New River in West Virginia, but I'll talk more on that later.

Last week was a rough week to get anything done. I had to rearrange my training schedule since I was going to be out of town over the weekend. Usually, I just do my runs/bikes as normal even if in a different city; a la Cincinnati this past March. This weekend made that impossible. I got all my runs in. This includes even my long run, 9miles, that I did on Friday instead of Saturday. I made a new running friend that day. Just an older (out of shape) guy out for a 4mile walk. We stopped to chat a bit and I if I see him on anymore of my runs I'll definitely wave. I was only able to do one short, 15miles, bike ride on Wednesday. I had planned on a BRICK Sunday but due to circumstances I was unable to do it. It was probably for the best I'm mighty sore today!

The weather was kind of sucky last week and I was unable to do any swims. However, I made up for that on Saturday when I went WHITE WATER RAFTING!!!

I think it may have been him in disguise!

 I had such a great time! Rafting in it's self is a work out! My upper body is a little sore today, especially my triceps. I don't think I would have felt this bad if Steve, our Orlando Bloom look alike guide,  hadn't insisted on "surfing" the rapids as much as he did. "Surfing" requires a lot of work to travel against the rapids to find the sweet spot in them that allows the raft to just sit there. We attempted to do this about 9 times and probably were successful twice.

 There were several places where we could get out of the raft to swim or float down stream. I tried to get some open water swim time in by swimming with and then against the flow. It was an added bonus when Jemma attached herself to my PFD and I swam us both downstream!

I have a bruise and some scrapes that are really not due to my fight with the rapids but my fight with one rock. It's not even a harrowing story. Bit embarrassing, really. I slipped trying to get out of the raft onto a rock. the goal was to get out gracefully, climb to the top of a LARGE boulder and jump off into the river. I accomplished everything but the graceful part. But I would completely do this whole trip again! Wounds and all.




Up this weekend is the Woman's only TRI. I'm going into it as a training run but secretly hoping to place. I have no idea what the competition is like on this one but I'm hopeful to be at the top of my age group.