Hi all!

I hope you have had a great summer so far. While my training has been going pretty well, I have found that it has fallen into a steady state of "blah" at this point. So after my final triathlon this weekend, my first Olympic distance-ahh!, I'm going to try to settle in and make the most of my last few weeks of summer before I head to school.

While I followed the Tour de France religiously for the last month, I am now putting in some time at work to wrap up my internship and also to teach the woman in China, who will continue with my work, how to do everything. Maybe she can give me some inside scoop on the Olympics...

I have been busy otherwise balancing my family's attempt at short summer vacation trips, getting in my training hours, and also have kept my schedule full of races. While I am only 'tapering' for 1-2 races this summer, I sadly have come to rely on the race setting to really get my heart rate up. But also love the socializing that comes after, it has been great to see so many SLU skiers and students at these races!

We took a family vacation to Cape Cod for a long weekend where I ran, rollerskied and biked on the bike path and roads along the coast. The workouts were fun, although I got SO many comments when rollerskiing consisting of a sickening number of "you go girls" and including my personal favorite, which comes with strong New Yorker accent, "You're gonna have shoulders like a gorilla after doing that!" Regardless the beaches were heavenly, the food was great and Provincetown never fails to entertain.

It was great to meet some of the new Vermonters at the BBQ, and I will be meeting the rest of you entirely too soon...no offense. Enjoy the rest of your summer, have fun, and feel free to shoot me questions!

Kristen

East Road Time Trail

The plan was to get up early and get it over with. My alarm went off at 7 but I was still tired and lacking motivation. This lack of motivation seems to happen to me when I’m coming off a few big weeks (29.5 hrs in the previous two weeks) and beginning a recovery week. I usually don’t have a lack of motivation during a big week which is good. So I shut my alarm off and reset it to eight. When it went off again, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to work up the motivation to get up and do it right then, so I went back to bed. When I finally got up I decided that I had to do something in the morning. By this point though, it was too late (too hot) to do the TT. I ended up getting a decent strength session in with a friend, which I was planning on doing that night. I went to “work” for most of the day and when I came home I still didn’t have much motivation to do the TT. Part of the reason may be because no one else was doing it with me. I dragged myself up to East Road with the plan to just see how I felt and go from there. A note on East Road, I’ve roller skied it too many times to count. It’s just an out and back for a total of 4.2 miles. I’m pretty sure I know ever bump and crack in the pavement, you get the idea. However, I have times on this TT for the last 3 years and earlier this summer so I thought it would be a good idea to do it. Anyway, I felt good doing an easy ski so I did some warm up intervals and felt good again. So I decided to do it. Thirty seconds into it I knew that my time was going to be pretty good. My legs felt great, full of pop. I looked down at my watch at the first mile, which is mostly gradual uphill- 3:58, I knew I was skiing well. When I’m skiing well I don’t dread the hills, I don’t cringe in the pain, the pain even feels different, it’s a pain that I can deal with and push through, I just think about skiing faster. I hate it when I’m not skiing well; I just want to be finished with the race, the pain hurts more, I dread the hill etc. Anyway I was flying up the hills V2ing all of them. This was pretty cool, not only because I had never done this before in this particular TT, but because I have been working on my V2 a lot this year and it felt great. I ended up doing the last mile in 3:47 and ended with a time of 17:19. Four weeks ago I did this same TT in 18:35; I was 1:16 faster! This time was also 11 seconds faster than any other time on this course. Hopefully this is a good sign that my training is working and paying off well, I don’t really know what else it would be. The rest of this week I’m going to do some easy training and take it easy before starting another big training period.