Wanderings.

This is my first weekend living in Austin!

I woke up this morning in my own bed in my new place, and went to the kitchen to get something to eat. I missed a lot of my workouts this week, so I really felt like a workout this morning. Also I have some triathlons coming up. One of them is kinda triath-long for me because it’s going to be my first olympic distance. I need to pick up the pace!

Anyways, I remembered Stephen, one of my roommates and the owner of the house I’m renting a room in wanted to get back into rollerblading, so he said he’d go with me to the Veloway when he got up this morning.

After a short fiasco with the car, first emptying it (Thanks for the help Steve, it was kind of packed!), and then finding out that the battery was dead, we took Steve’s truck. Kieth or Pat (other roommates) noticed that the interior light was on. And thanks Pat for helping me push my hunk of metal out of the driveway and closer to the curb.

The Veloway (Bottom of the page) isn’t too far from the house. It’s 3.17 miles of paved trail winding around typical central texas terrain, with some hills of differing grades.

Only bikes and rollerblades are allowed, no runners. There are lots of tight turns and variety. And not at all crowed. You usually don’t see anyone, though there were more peole out saturday. And with the trail being 23 feet wide, there’s always plenty of room to pass.

I had a great workout. I was doign intervals today, but I didn’t have a timer, so I used the map at the head of the trail and the landmarks on the first time around to figure out where I would start and stop the intervals.

Steve got to go around twice (6.3 miles about), which I thought was good since he hadn’t been working out lately. Still, there has been a lot of rain lately, so a couple of light showers caused some of the natural streams that run through the veloway to wet the trails.

The streams actually cross the trail a few times as both the trails and the streams wind around a bit. It was hot and humid about halfway through, but not quite like like Houston. Working out in the heat is good practice anyways. It feels good to be conditioned for hot and humid conditions, and it makes just about any weather feel good when you are accustomed to heat.

If you come to Austin to visit, and you want to bring your bike, we can go there. It’ll be fun.

I just completed the Couples Triathlon in Austin, TX! My first tri was 3 years ago, so this is my second. I’m off to a good start this season, and now I’m excited to train for the next one.

Couples is a 800 meter swim / 11.2 mile bike / 3.1 mile run, which makes it a sprint distance tri. It was at Walter E. Long park at Decker Lake here in Austin, TX this year.

I was 478/706 overall, and completed the race in 1:42:07. I’m happy with that. My goal was just to complete. We had a deployment at work, so I was there the night before. So 5 hours of sleep before the tri wasn’t ideal, bit really it worked out OK.

Triathlons are fun! You get to go do something physical, see other triathletes – over time you meet more people and it’s a pretty close community of people, families and businesses. Accelerade, and Clif Bar were there, and a Doctor and his people doing a type of therapy related to massage. I don’t remember what it was called now, but it was like active stretching or something like that.

It’s so worth it for the sense of accomplishment, and the high you get after you recover a bit. You meet some motivated friendly people who are good at lots of other things in life too.

Everything went well and was pretty comfortable. The run was brutal. Must have been 100% humidity/ 90 degrees. The course was fun though. The water was warm at 80 degrees or so, which I really liked. It was just really comfortable. The roads were shut down for the bike, so it was just us out there going up and down hills in typical Texas hill country terrain. And the run was on grass, so it was easy on the body. I had to stop a few times on the run as I was starting to overheat.

Now I’ve got to get with Matt and plan our trip to Chicago for the next one! Matt inspired me to sign up when we were crossing the finish line at the MS 150 this year. How’s the training Matt?