Monday, July 23, 2012

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.

1 comment:

Judy said...

Awesome times - I love activity workouts that feel more like fun. I wish I could work more in