Second round at the pool

Last night, I got some swimming tips from my friend Chee Chen who completed a full triathlon 2 years ago. In order to swim long distances efficiently, you need to leverage your arms more then your legs. Especially since you want to save your legs for the bike and the run. So this evening, I wedged a piece of foam between my legs to prevent them from kicking too much. With this, I was able to complete 10 laps - 500m (not without resting though). I came out of the pool feeling pretty good, not completely exhausted like the last time. I'm starting to feel a lot more confident about this swimmning portion now, but I still have a lot of work ahead of me if I am to swim in open water.

Back to the pool

When I was a kid, I remember being a pretty good swimmer. I had completed my grey level - now equivalent to Red Cross AquaQuest 9. Today, I stepped into a pool to train actively again - something I had not done in 15 years. The coach had encouraged us to get into the pool as soon as possible. After today's swim, I understood why he said that. After 6 laps of the pool I was exhausted - I even had to rest in between laps. Each lap is 50 meters. Looks like I have a lot of work ahead of me.

What did I get myself into?

I have decided that this year I will take my fitness to another level. So I have made the commitment to train with the Pro Sports Club triathlon team for the next six months. We have several hours of training every week. The first part of the training will focus on strength and stamina, nutrition, followed by biking, then open water swimmming. Most people find the swimming portion to be the most difficult part of the triathlon - I just hope I don't drown. Our classes will be held at the ProClub, the Performance Training Center, high school tracks and open water. We will be training for 4 triathlons and end with a full Olympic triathlon in September. Luckily for us newbies we don't need to start with an Olympic triathlon.

Sprint Triathlon: 750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run
Olympic Triathlon: 1.5k swim, 40km bike, 10km run
Half Iron Man: 1.9km swim, 90km bike, 21km run
Full Iron Man: 3.8km swim, 180km bike, 42km run

Welcome to my training site

Hi everyone, welcome to my triathlon training blog. Over the course of the next few months I will be training for several traithlons. I am completely new to this sport - in fact my new road bike has not even seen the pavement yet.

I purchased this bike from Gregg's Cycle. It is 43 cm and a Women's Specific Design (WSD) by Trek. The interesting thing about this small framed bike is it comes with smaller 650c wheels otherwise the standard 700c wheels would hit your foot while turning. The bike is really light (we weighed it at 20 pounds on site) as it has a carbon fork and seat post. People pay a lot of money just to reduce the weight of their bike by a few ounces and the costs increases exponentially. So to go from a 16 pound bike to a 15 pound bike it would cost an additional $1600. The bikes used at the Tour de France weigh about 15 pounds.