Becoming too tough to kill

Just as we suspected, last weekend was a tad brutal and a little crazy. Scratch that-a lot crazy. I got very excited as my run on Saturday was "only" 45 minutes! "Whatever will I do with myself?", I thought, until I looked ahead to Sunday. Sunday was "race prep day" and after I got out my trusty calculator to add up all the hours, realized we would be doing an "almost" half Ironman. For training. WTH? Our training plan called for a 1 hour open water swim, 4 hour bike ride, and 2 hour run. For those of you who have trouble with math like me, that's 7 hours of movement. In one day. Kill me now.

5 miles into our walk. I need an ice bath just looking at this! Gorgeous scenery but dear Lord it was hot!!

My friend Ann, also training for her first Ironman in Boulder, called me earlier in the week to make a plan for this race prep day. We decided that Aurora Reservoir would be the perfect place to partake in this madness. The water is clear and cool, we can park our cars in the lot to stage our transitions areas, there is already an existing bike route from the reservoir, and there is an 8 mile bike path around the reservoir. Perfect!

Freddy got called out on a very busy one day trip on Saturday which had him leaving our house at 5am and not getting home (if he was lucky) until around 10:30 pm. After my group run with Runners Edge, I had a wedding to attend downtown beginning at 6:30pm, so knew between the two of us, Sunday would be tough.

Sunday morning, Ann, Dan, Freddy and I left our homes before the birds were awake to travel to Kansas, er. Aurora.  We arrived at the reservoir and were giddy when we saw we were the only people around. We put on our wetsuits, jumped into the reservoir and started our day. On about lap 3, we noticed a very large school of fish started hanging out with us! They were huge and had horns on the tops of their heads and were not bothered by us in the least! After swimming in our rec center pool, Boulder Reservoir and Grant Ranch, they were a very welcome sight!

After an hour, we got out of the water and made our transition to the bike ride. We were all feeling pretty good as the temps were still cool and we were still fresh. We decided to ride the Harvest Moon bike course. I've never done this course but Freddy and Dan had and they warned me it was tougher than I envisioned. Hogwash, I thought. It's Aurora. Aurora doesn't have any hills. Good thing I'm a fan of roller coasters, because that's exactly what this course was. You were either going up or going down.  No flats in this part of Colorado! Crazy! The road was so beat-up that I was literally out of my saddle and squatting for most of the ride to try and save my bike from all the pounding in the pot holes!  There was no shoulder on most of the route which made me too nervous to eat while riding, so I had to pull over to eat. Then the wind came. And it stayed. Then it's friend, oppressive heat came with a vengeance. And it just got worse. The only saving grace about this ride was that we were in farmland and that made me smile all over. I only saw two other cyclists the entire ride and other than that, it was me, the cows, the farmers, some ducks and lots of tractors. I felt like I was home. I went through the entire John Denver collection in my head until I got to "Annie's Song" which made me tear up, so then had to quickly switch my soundtrack. Three hours and 45 minutes later I arrived back at the reservoir, tired, HOT, and hungry. Not good when you have a 2 hour run still to come.

Freddy and I drank an ice cold coke, dunked our heads in some ice water (which evaporated before we even left the truck) and headed on our way. Coach Marco had sent us an e-mail the day before after looking at the weather forecast (the high for Sunday was to be in the upper-90's) saying there was no shame in backing our bike down to 3 hours and our run down to 1 hour. He did not want us being hero's out there. Not today. So, with this in mind, Freddy and I decided we would break up the run in small segments to re-evaluate. We took off on a slow run but quickly realized the heat was zapping us of our energy fast. Our plan was to go out 1 mile, turn around, go back to the truck to get more water, and continue this trend until we couldn't go anymore. Our mantra was "No hero today. We save it for August 3." We got in 6.5 miles and called it good. We arrived back to the truck and promptly jumped back in the reservoir to cool off. When we got home and looked at our data, Freddy's Garmin said the temps had reached 100 degrees. I wouldn't argue that-I think that's probably about right!

During our 6.5 mile march, I shared with Freddy one of my favorite marathon sayings:

In my re-cap about the day to Coach, I told him he needed to try a little bit harder to kill us. He wasn't successful on Sunday and I promised to pull out all the stops on Aug. 3. There were no heros in Aurora on Sunday. But Boulder better watch out. We are comin'!