Summer Is Here

You know it's summer when training starts to get really tough and the weather becomes brutally hot. Case in point, this past weekend when my training partner, Zimm, decided to enter us into this little race out in Wilmington. Despite the fact that it fell at the end of my longest training volume week of the year, happened to be 90 degrees on the roads, stiff winds working against us, humid, and Mother's Day, made this a difficult task to pull off.

I went down the day before and enjoyed the beach with my beautiful wife and 2 boys that morning before heading over to the hotel around 2pm on Saturday. After a short, and failed, attempt at napping with the boys, we decided to head back to the beach where they ran around some more and enjoyed the sand and surprisingly warm water. We had a good meal at Mellow Mushroom (altough not as good of service as Patrick Costello provides at the Durham location) and then headed back to watch a movie with the kids at the hotel.

A sleepless night with Eli in my bed and Braden in Carrie's and then up early on Sunday morning to race did not start off Mother's Day quite as I had planned... Nonetheless, Carrie was an awesome fan and brought the boys to watch me roll around for about 90 mins in the ridiculous heat, wind, and humidity. We wrapped up the day with another trip back to the beach before heading home.

RACE RECAP: The race was a duathlon with a 3.2 mile run, 16 mile bike, and then 2 mile run. I finished 9th overall out of 150 people and was 2nd in my age group. I had the 4th fastest bike overall (1st in age group and top bike with a non-tri or disc wheel bike) and was pleased with how I finished. I knew I could do better (I lost some time in transitions digging for a water bottle out of my backpack due to dehydration after the bike) but happy to have my lungs back and working again. Zimm Sr. and Jr. each had good races as well and seemed excited to back and training again.