Finding Balance

As anyone who does more than one thing with their time, which means almost everyone, finding balance is extrremely important and can be extremely difficult at times.  Balancing work and training and family time.  And time to see friends.  And time for volunteering for causes that are important to me.  And time to study for my classes.  It can get a bit overwhelming and then I start to shut down or underperform in everything, which is more frustrating that doing well in what I do and not having time. I think to myself, I'm putting in all this time and the results aren't coming or I don't feel fulfilled.  It's times like those when I need to take a step back, look at what I'm doing from a distance, and think about what is most important to me.  I'll admit that I don't do this nearly as often as I should and I often don't make any major breakthroughs.  But it does help to think about why I'm doing what I'm doing rather than just going through the motions and feeling stressed about it.

Swim improvement!

I grew up swimming so, after avoiding swimming during the first few years of my triathlon experience, when I finally decided to put more emphasis on the swim training, I had a rude awakening to how much speed I had lost. In my first few Ironmans, I swam under 1 hour, which made me feel like everything was under control. But when I would do sprint and Olympic distance racing, well, I'd come out a few minutes behind the leader and where I would have been back in high school. How can my 22 year old self be slower than my 16 year old self?
And though my swim time has worked out decently well, my bike has historically been a weakness, so any if I can make my swim faster, that can only help.
I finally got a good measurement of improvement over the last few months. Back in December, I swam a 500 y time trial in 6:25. Today I swam 2x500 with :30 in 6:19 and 6:21 at a decently lower rate of perceived effort (maybe 70-80% instead of TT pace.) I'll definitely take that confidence booster a month out from the first ironman of 2013!

Let's get this started

I've never written a blog before, so excuse any inappropriate blogging behavior you may find here.

A few weeks ago, I was searching through the Ironman website for some information about my target race of the spring, Ironman Texas, which is officially one month away (can you believe it?  I sure can't.)  Well, before I could get to the race site, I saw an announcement about the Ironman Foundation-Newton Running Ambassador Triathlon Team.  I read the information about they were looking for and thought to myself "Well, this just seems perfect, doesn't it."  Then I saw that the deadline to apply was that evening, so I went from work to class, got home that night and filled out the application as best as I could in that time.  After submitting it, I really thought that I wouldn't have a chance.  Unbelievably, I got an email a couple weeks later telling me that I had been offered a spot.  I was running late to meet a friend, but I think I smiled the whole way that I rode my bike over.

I started racing triathlons in the spring of 2008, my senior year of highschool, when I decided that I didn't want to swim in college and that I would be fun to try something new and put some more focus into running.  Luckily, I lived in Berkeley, home of Cal Triathlon-- arguably the best collegiate triathlon team in the country (they won collegiate nationals that year)-- so I was given a great introduction to training and racing in this new sport.  I was hooked after my first race, though the swim was in a pool, I struggled to put a t-shirt and sock since I was still wet and I had to tell my dad that he couldn't help me during the race after he ran into the transition area as I was stuck inside my shirt and squirming around try to get it over my head.

The next summer, I was lucky to get the opportunity to travel to Israel to compete in the triathlon at the Maccabiah Games, which is an international Jewish sporting event.  I was thrilled to get third in the 17-18 sprint race.  While in Israel, I met a guy from Michigan who was signed up to do Ironman Coeur d'Alene the next summer.  I had been involved in the sport for about 15 months at that point, but I already knew that I wanted to do an Ironman eventually.  I don't know if it was completely rational, but I thought that I might as well sign up for that race too.  It would be as good a motivation as any knowing that I would see a friendly face and, based on the date, it would be the last chance for me to do my first one before I turned 20.  So I signed up and haven't looked back since.  I've been hooked on Ironman racing since I painfully finished Coeur d'Alene in 2010 and have learned a lot since then, both from my mistakes and from my coach, Rachel Sears Casanta of Hypercat Racing.

Triathlon, and especially Ironman, racing has required a lot of time, support (both emotional and financial), and energy directed towards me from my friends and my parents.  It had been a healthy activity (obsession?) that my parents have been willing to support me to do, but I am excited to take this year to start to give back and do something positive for my community and the communities hosting the events that I do through the sport and the Ironman Foundation-Newton Running team.