Softball, Swimming, and Suffering (Oh My!)

I've had a lot of long weekends lately, and this was the first weekend in a while which lasted the normal length. I have to say sitting here on Sunday night that it felt like a lot longer than the normal weekend. We packed a TON into 2 1/2 days!

Friday night, I played softball for the first time in at least 10 years. My family has a long tradition of softball; my grandfather played and ran teams for years, my oldest uncle was a star player for a team that was successful at the national level, and I even subbed for my uncles teams from my late teens up until I moved to Columbus. Some of my fondest memories from my youth were sitting at a softball game next to my grandma, watching the game and helping her do the score keeping. I got the chance to play for the team fielded by my work, and boy was it fun; a close 7-6 win. I had 2 singles, a run batted in, and played first base, which is the busiest position in softball. I made an error, but once I got myself going I made a couple plays and most importantly had a really good time while getting a decent workout. Best of all, I got to do the score keeping for a couple of innings I wasn't playing (we did some alternating so everyone could play) and that really brought back some memories.

I'm not going to play all the time because we have a lot of players, and most importantly because I need to be careful in the weeks leading up to races like this week.

Saturday was a day full of triathlon. I started with a run, and for the first time in a while I felt really good while running, so I extended my run by an extra 5 minutes, and I feel like I have something extra for the run split of the race next Sunday. Then our triathlon team Wheelworks Multisport, had its annual swimming clinic, where our instructors/teammates put us through our paces. I need to work on having high elbows and not just slapping my hand into the water. We probably put in around 1500 yards of total swimming along with treading water and listening.

Saturday night was the teams annual fundraiser for CYCLE Kids and the team. I was in charge of finding a speaker and was able to get Cait Snow to come speak to us and spend some time taking our questions. She did a marvelous job, Belmont Wheelworks was as usual a fantastic host and sponsor, and we were able to donate $1000 to CYCLE Kids. There were some fantastic prizes, including some $500 gift cards to the bike shop and it might shock some of you, but I didn't win a single thing. In fact, this is the second year in a row that I didnt win anything in this raffle. So, it does happen that I don't win.

Rachelle, Cait Snow, Tim Snow, and yours truly

Sunday morning, Rach and I went for a 40 mile bike ride. I don't want to get too into the details, but I banged up my derailleur on the way out of the house, and it cost my legs a lot. On the second half of the ride, the roads turned up, and I got tired fast. I wound up having to walk part of all of about 3 hills and I was slow on some others. I finally made an adjustment to the derailleur and it did seem to make a difference. I'm going to see if I can get it in for a check this week without spending too much on it. We were going to get in an outdoor swim, but we were just spent after the ride, and stayed home.

Notes:

- For the folks that have been kind enough to support my fundraising thus far, I want to give you some confidence that I'm doing the work you've paid for; I'm going to start posting my weekly training snapshot each Sunday. I've been building up my weekly training to the 10-12 hours per week; and this week was right about that period. For those of you who haven't yet donated, other than this coming week while I'm tapering a bit before the race on Sunday, the numbers are just going to go up.

Training Peaks makes some nice pictures!