Chain Condom???

No, it's not something kinky. It's something bikey! Helps keep bike chain grease from getting all over the place: in your car, in rental cars, in suitcases, in hotel rooms, in your house and even in your bed! (Dave steps on it barefoot, it goes where he goes). Warning: If you ship it to work, you might get questions from nosey co-workers who see the package.

Yippee! I got my invite, based on my finish at the RnR Man Half Iron. But I won't be doing it, unfortunately. I'm doing another half iron the weekend after and that one will be an important test of how I handle the heat at The Great Floridian. Still, nice to have made the cut!

The stock market the last couple days? No, it's my HR during my Tues run. 5 miles, no problemo -- HA! It was evil at 6pm in temps that still felt like 90+ degs and totally obvious I haven't done much hard effort running recently ... UGH.

Mile 1 warm-up (9:09, AHR 146) - Plenty warm after just 10 steps.
Mile 2 hard (6:56, AHR 165, max 182) - ouch, Ouch, OUCH!!
Mile 3 easy (11:43, AHR 149) - Gasp, I'm dying :-(
Mile 4 hard (7:07, AHR 169, max 183) - Oh no, not again!!!
Mile 5 cool-down (9:28, AHR 157) - I'm too old for this stuff.
Lesson learned: Mornings or 7pm would be better for speed work.

My Garmin FR 305 arrives tomorrow! Been using Dave's old Garmin Edge 305 for biking & running but it has no wristband so I've been carrying it in a Fuel Belt pocket, not ideal when needing to monitor pace and HR often (running by feel is unreliable for me in the heat, as you can see from the splits above). Why not the new Garmin 310XT? Too expensive, plus it seems to have bugs that need working out. (Update 7/25: Kevin has figured out how to get the 310 working!)

Drats! And no spare swim cap with me, of course. But I could still wear it so I decided to go ahead with my swim today and fiddle with it as needed (I have a LOT of hair and can't swim without a cap). 6x500, 1 min rest in between, easy-med-fast-med-easy-fast. Swam a new fastest 500yd time of 9:21 (1:52/100yd) -- Whoohoo!!!

Blame My Mac

Poma, which means apple in Hawaiian, is on the left. My old laptop on the right is the one with the broadband card, the one I use to connect to the Internet when I'm on travel.

Being the new baby, Poma wanted me to play with its cool movie and music making tools. WOOSH, nearly a week gone since my last post and I've hardly read anyone else's blogs -- Sorry!!!

Well, Poma is quietly sleeping now so I'm back on my old laptop catching up. Since my last post I went out for a longer 1.5 hour bike ride, a 2 hour run and today I went for a 3.5 hour run, which was about 20 miles, the longest run I'll do for my next marathon end of this month. All were done at low intensity and went quite well, even the bike ride. I've avoided swimming the past few days since it hurt my ribs the most and I wanted to be as pain-free as possible for my long run today. Tomorrow I'll swim and bike.

Off now to visit others!

Aloha from Kona!

Well, thanks to advances in technology, I have high speed internet access here in paradise. For a while now I've had a Sprint mobile broadband card for my laptop but no high speed internet network to connect to in Kona. Now the bubble has been broken and I can blog, read other's blogs, and root for Brent, Rural Girl, IM Able and others doing Ironman Wisconsin this weekend, and also Duane who's doing a sprint tri.

Can you hear my cowbell now?

Of course, the reason I'm back in Kona is not to play on my laptop. I'm here for a 4-day swim camp and also so that some warranty work can be done at our condo. Today was the second day of the camp and my swimming was videotaped both above water and below. It was incredibly useful to see what I was doing, especially under the water where my elbows thought they'd be safe to drop and cost me power, among other things. And with only two people attending this camp and two instructors, there was plenty of attention on moi and plenty of swimming, 2 hours worth. I usually swim for only about an hour and am pooped!

Which is why I probably will do very few other workouts until the swim camp is over on Friday. Yesterday I went out for a run that was supposed to be an easy 6-miler. But shortly after I got started, this guy came up alongside me, started chatting and before I knew it, we were cruising along at about a 7:30-7:40/mile pace, which is like a tempo run pace for me. To avoid overdoing things, I took a bathroom break at a beach park at the halfway point and just threw water on my face so he'd go on ahead and I could run back on my own slower.

Luckily, the first day of swim camp later in the afternoon involved only about an hour of actual swimming while other time was spent on overview and going over the 4 basic strokes. I need to be a lot more careful about expending extra energy outside the camp. That little bit of faster-than-usual running was FUN!