Seattle, Hot Wheels, and an Unexpected Offseason

So a lot has happened since our last triathlon related post. I'll give you a quick rundown.






Injuries plenty
Sickness Everywhere
Canceled Races

Basically I learned being new to this whole triathlon thing my body needs a rest after a the long summer racing season. The marathon that Kristi and I had scheduled for November proved to be too ambitious. As a result, after the summer races ended and we started to pack on the training miles in preparation our bodies started to give us some signals that we needed a rest. I got a fairly serious calf injury that has taken almost 7 weeks to fully heal. Kristi injured her hip and knee and to top it all off while trying to keep the training volume up and with our nutrition being less then perfect germs took advantage of our weak immune systems. I missed a week of work, have had a slow recovery and Kristi has fallen sick as well. The past 2 months have not been good and neither of us got to the starting line of the Seattle Marathon.

So what is the lesson learned? The body NEEDS a rest, so give it what it wants.

With that aside and our plane tickets already booked to go to Seattle we figured that we would take it easy and have a nice relaxing weekend. We checked out the very cool Experience Music Project, got nice massages is a Russian bath house, Kristi shopped till I dropped, we ate WAY too many vegan donuts and I picked up some slightly used racing wheels at an amazing price!

Really the only important thing in the above paragraph are the wheels that I have obtained that will hopefully propel me to lightning fast speeds at races this year. They are beauties :). Zipp 606 clinchers, which are essentially carbon fiber wheels which have a deep rim profile that will make me a lot more aerodynamic in my races. The front tire has a 58mm deep rim and the rear 81mm. I should get an extra 1.5 - 2 KPH or speed on the bike out of them which means that hopefully I'll be able to push around 33 - 34 KPH (21 - 22 MPH) in some of the shorter races.

Kristi picked up lots of new clothes and was very excited to be let loose in a city with real shopping. In around 10 hours of shopping we didn't even cover more then 2 square blocks! Her shopping stamina is quite remarkable. I have never seen her so focused an motivated :). We also got a chance to check out the Whole Foods in Seattle. So much vegan and organic goodness packing into such a small place. We ended up eating breakfast there 2 of morning that we were there and ate 8 donuts! Well I ate about 6 of them but I figured what other occasions do I get to eat donuts!

Lets see what else happened. Oh yes, we got massages at a Russian bath house called Banya 5. This was my first professional massage ever and I must say that I will be getting more. Although my masseuse put me into excruciating pain as he dug into my back on several times, it was actually quite enjoyable. I'm not sure how to describe it. But it was a good pain.

Well there is a fragmented description of the past weekend as well as the past few months of training. Hopefully all the resting and relaxing we have done will lead to happy training in the new year. I suspect that our coach will have us taking it easy over the next few weeks and start into some serious training come January.