And so the prep begins again...

On the 18th of March Rose, her sister from the UK, Sarah and I will be doing the Contact Tri-Women event in Palmerston North (click here).  Yesterday Rose took the lead and she registered us all.  So in less than a month I'll be doing my second triathlon event.  Seems unreal!  Rose has already started looking out for other events beyond this one just to make sure we don't become lazy again ;-).  Like this one (click here) where we will plan to do the half marathon walk.  Of course when I told Terence he asked "why don't you just run it?" - well that would be because I can barely manage a 4km run at the moment there is no way I could do a 21km run!!!!!  The other event Rose is looking at is this one (click here).  It would have to be the 5km event, but we'll see.  I'll get through the Tri-Women event first and then I'll think about the next one...

This morning I took advantage of the fact that Caitlyn is now in school and not at home on a Monday anymore.  I went to the Raumati Swimming pool where I did some swimming.  Apart from the senior aqua aerobics group it was really quiet. I have no idea what I did wrong, but the swim session was incredibly hard and I'm sure Val would have lots to say if she was there.  I'll have to work extremely hard if I am to do 6 lengths in a 50m pool in a reasonable time for the next triathlon.  Of course now I wonder just how I actually managed to swim 400m in the sea at the last triathlon...Perhaps the thought that I didn't really want to be a shark's next lunch was pretty good for the motivation to keep going... ;-)

After my disappointing swim session I did a bike ride.  At the next triathlon we'll need to cycle 9.5km and I wanted to get an idea of how long it might take me at this moment to do that distance so I have something to work against.  I ended up doing about 12km in total.  At the 9.5km mark I was sitting at 21.15 minutes and at the 12km mark was sitting at 27.34 minutes.  It was a bit windy so in places I found it a bit hard.

I've learnt today that I really need to keep better record of my times because I was trying to find a recent blog entry or email where I mentioned I did the same 12km route in about 31 minutes, but I can't remember when that was.  I found my schedule I did before and on the 1st of November last year I did an 11.2km bike ride in 32.16 minutes.  So I'm pretty pleased that I managed the 12km today in less than 30 minutes.