Another week, another post

Look at me! Two posts in as many weeks, I’m on a roll! A few exciting things to share this week.

First of all, on Friday I was out in my car at lunch and listening to CBC radio. Yes, I said CBC. I’m one of them now ;) At lunch time they have a program on called “The Ontario Noon Phone-in” where each day they have a different expert on where they talk about different topics. On Friday’s show they were talking about your “growing-old” hero. I thought immediately of Sister Madonna Buder (link). Sister Madonna Buder is a nun from the Northern USA. She has been competing in Ironmans for many years. She doesn’t go hard core with her training she just runs and bikes on all of her errands. For the last several years she has consistently been breaking records for her IM finish times. Oops, I neglected to mention the fact that she is eighty this year! She is the oldest woman to complete and Ironman and every year she breaks her own record! What an amazing woman!

On Saturday mornings I go to a spinning class at my coaches store (linky). They have computrainers (link) in the store as well. It basically simulates riding outside, automatically changes the tension and measure your power in watts, you also have to enter your weight, so it includes your weight in it’s speed calculations so it knows that the speed when I produce 200 watts of power is slower than when someone Blythes size produces 200 watts of power. Pretty cool stuff. Well, this Saturday, 11 time ironman champion Lisa Bentley (link) cam into the shop. (She also has cystic fibrosis – how amazing is that?) They had a fundraiser for CF where you could donate a minimum of $25 to ride the computrainers with Lisa Bentley. They had us on the 10K time trial course so it was a bit of a competition. I was getting a cold, so I didn’t do very well (over a minute slower than my time from 2 weeks ago!) But at one point in time (very briefly – the course starts with a downhill) I was in first and Lisa Bentley cheered “Go Laura J!” How cool is that? Yes, this makes me a dork, but I don’t care!

On Sunday I got to go see Christine and Jen. It has been a LONG time since we have all got together (beginning of December?). It was good to see them both again. We were originally going to go to the Zoo, but we had to change plans because of the crappy weather forecast. Too bad, I was looking forward to seeing Julie again. Oh well, next time :).

I think last week I mentioned that I had my first 2x1500 m swim on taps for Wednesday? Didn’t go so hot. I’ve been feeling like I’m on the verge of getting sick any day now so that is probably what it was. I did the first 1500 m right on pace but the last couple of hundred metres were really hurting. I think I could only keep the pace (should be easy for 500 m for me) for only 300 m on the second one. Ugh. I did however see a really cool thing on the internet that talked about swim form and drills to do and I realized something that I’m not doing right in my stroke, the last two times I’ve been swimming I’ve worked on this point and already my times are coming down big time. Pretty cool. Warm up pace is now what it was for my 1000 m repeats. Weird. I also picked up some drills that will help me with my form issues :).