A One Handed Blog

This weekend Kerry and I took part in our first competition, an open water swim at the Lake Del Valle Aquatic Challenge. It’s a fairly low key and fun competition to introduce budding triatheletes to open water, competition swimming.

Here’s an action shot as I’m completing my half mile swim, it took me 23 minutes and 17 seconds.

What you can’t see is I’m pretty much the only one left in the water apart from Kerry, an 83 year old man (who completed the swim in 40 minutes or so) and our TNT coaches.

Hey, I came in 3rd in my age class for wetsuit swimmers (admittedly there were only 4 and the 4th person was my coach).

All-in-all it was a great experience which both Kerry and I enjoyed. The best part was after we completed the swim we got to go for a 3.5 mile run around the lake and then the next day we rode about 30 miles…all in a weekends training with TNT!

Kerry and I are now half way through our training with Team in Training for the Pacific Grove triathalon this September. We have both recommitted ourselves to the event through TNT, which means we are committed to raising our fund raising minimums or otherwise paying the difference ourselves…so please make a donation via my fund raising page (no amount too small, or too large).

On the training front, fortunately things have gotten progressively easier as the training has progressed and this weekend we did our first open water swim at Aquatic Park in San Francisco. It was our first chance to try out our wetsuits and brave the cold Pacific ocean on a chilly San Francisco summer morning!

The water certainly takes your breath away at first and it feels quite different swimming in cold salt water with a wetsuit and at first I just couldn’t keep going, I found I was constantly out of breath…it took me a while to slow my pace down so I felt comfortable swimming. Another challenge was having to keep sighting to make sure I wasn’t swimming in circles.

I managed to swim maybe half a mile before everyone headed in to get changed and then go for a 45 min run (about 3 miles). So a pretty hard training session, after which Kerry and I got home and crashed for 3 hours, we were just exhausted!

After our swim/run on Saturday, on Sunday we were back to biking, this time our longest ride so far. I managed about 25 miles in a little over 1.5 hours on my new carbon fiber bike that I picked up a couple of weeks back. This bike has been specially customized by Jose, the owner of Danville Bike. He added a set of aero bars (the middle ones) and switched the normal bars to bull bars. I have a single break lever for the front and rear brakes and both gear levers are on the right hand side. This configuration works really well for me and is so much easier to ride than my old mountain bike.

All in all not a bad weekend’s training!