Friday was supposed to be a mellow day for me. All I had to do was a 1:15 run. The idea was to chill back at the condo. But unpredictability was the order of the day. My computer power cord decided to call it a day. That stunk. I called around to see if I could find one and ended up a Radio Shack where I met with the friendliest sales-person. Not! I walked out of there with no power cord and all kinds of stress. I ended up ordering a power cord from the mainland and having it delivered over-night. It is supposed to get here Monday. I hope it works. In the meantime I am using another computer but I do not have all my stuff in there. Not a great start to my day. In the afternoon I picked up my friend Rick at the airport and he later dropped me off 8 miles out of town and I ran the last miles of the Ironman marathon. I felt like crap the first mile but finished rather well. No real soreness anywhere. I forgot that this highway has a substantial camber to it. I will try to run a little on the actual highway instead of the shoulder on race day. I ended up real tired at day's end but more from stress rather than exercise. I have to remind myself to relax. I still have to work this week with all my athletes here and online so I hope they take it easy on me. I still have to work the expo and meet sponsors etc. Oh boy.
Saturday was a much more fun day. I got up early and drove over to Kukio where they had a 1.2 mile swim race. At first I could not find the freaking place. The web site had 'zero' directions but I eventually got there. Once there, the organization was great. The water was perfect and it was crystal blue. No wonder the race is called the blue ocean swim. What a blast. The gun went off I went out extremely hard. I had to chill it and settled with a small group. It was good to be sandwiched in a small group as practice for next Saturday. I finished strong and in 20th place out of 210. I did it in 29:16 but everyone was saying that the course was either long or slow with some currents. I felt fine and got to practice on my race day outfit. Mission accomplished. Oh yeah my average heart rate was 129. That sounds really low, so I wonder if something was going on. I talked to Karen Smyers after the swim. She and I finished together at a race back in 1989 so I reminded her of the good old days. She is really nice.
Later that afternoon I rode a bit over two hours and got a video for you. I rode easy most of the time except for some harder efforts here and there. There were a lot more people riding on the highway this time. The triathletes are getting here and it is going to get worst before it gets any better. The weather during the ride was hot and sunny. Kona is finally back to normal.