I hate facebook lists.

I dont usually play the facebook games. But the google "rachel likes" game was pretty fun. Here's what I got:

Rachel likes explosions.

Rachel likes to just try on underwear in the middle of the store.

Rachel likes Frosty because it's not scary, and it's got pretty colors.

Rachel likes to play around.

Rachel likes a bit of old.

No wonder Rachel likes him.

Rachel likes unicorns.

Rachel likes Bar on the Green

Rachel likes Bungalow Bar and Grill.

Rachel likes to travel and play in the great outdoors.

Rachel likes a bit of belly on a man.

That last one is totally not true. But unicorns are cool, I'm pretty sure I would like Bar on the Green and Bungalow Bar, and sometimes I do try on stuff in the middle of costco.

It seems everyone gets a diverse list of what they like when typing their name into google. Except for my friend Katja. What my friend Katja likes had us crying on the floor in the office just now. Katja says this game sucks.

Speed goggles.

This morning I had downtown breakfast with my friend Todd. Todd is fast. Like 5 kilometers in the 14 minute range fast. While I'm learning all kinds of cool running stuff from Todd, like how real runners run, and how to maintain 75 mile weeks that I would love to be able to run someday, today I learned a whole new phenomenon.  Todd was telling me about dating. Since he's a decade younger than me, I feel I can pry in a motherly way. He introduced me to the idea of speed goggles. They're like beer goggles, but apparently can be developed without alcohol and out of respect for one's running talent. Who knew?

There was an almost audible click in the pool tonight. Masters was a serious at Oahu Club. During the main ladder set of 1200, I started swimming again. It was probably my tenth swim of the year. I actually went around 6'7" gorilla-arm Brad during one of the fast 150s. And now we'll know if Brad reads the blog, because if he does, he'll never let that kind of talk fly. I'm swimming again at 5:30 am, ten hours after getting out of the water.. time to get moving again.

All the climbing East Oahu has to offer.

Katherine and I missed the boca hell-hill ride yesterday, so today was make-up day.  We started with 20 flat miles and a killer sunrise over Maui and Molokai, where it appeared to be raining:

And then we headed up Kamehame Ridge. The gate at the top of the neighborhood was locked, so we climbed over it. Because we're not all that smart. This was the view from the concrete pad at the very top... 

The road back down was sketchy.

At the top of Laukahi, after the pavement, then the ridged concrete, and then the brick/cobblestone all ran out, there was a gate at the trailhead and then.. some more pavement. Since we had started a habit of hopping gates, we continued up the trail until the pavement ended. And then, at the top of our third ridge and about 3.5 hours into the ride, this happened.

I have got to figure out something I can eat during training, because 60 mi water-only rides are getting old! I am too unprepared to bake potatoes like Miranda suggested (thank you!) - maybe next week.

After Laukahi, Sierra Drive felt like a hill. I was able to ride most of it aero, while Katherine changed her second flat of the day at the bottom. I called in the bailout, and bribed the family to pick me up at Kahala with the promise of Whole Foods snacks & Starbucks.. and then an afternoon at the beach.

Clementine loves coffee.

Hope

I don't think there's anything I can say to convey my excitement about the new suits that showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dawn and Ira at Splish. I almost wore one to work with my new yellow knee-high boots.

I've taken to riding the 5 min down the hill to 6 am masters, swimming about 2500, then riding into town.. and I can still be at my desk by 8 am, working away (see? see how good I'm working right now? I'm going to be employee of the year!) There are moments, brief ones, where some form of glide and rhythm come back in the water. They've yet to last for entire workouts.. but they're showing up more frequently. I'm going to have to find a way to swim everyday now just to wear my new suits!

HK Monitor

I realized this morning while riding a few meters off of Ben's wheel in the hairpin turn on the Pali that I really did appear to be stalking Ben Collins. Oops. The H group of the boca clinic climbed all the hills we could find, including this pretty one near Kaui's house where Wil and I debated bailing out and knocking at her door and begging for pancakes or something. 

I have replaced the heart rate monitor that made me feel like a failure for my inability to get it up on about 60% of last year's rides. Today my hellokitty rate was right where it should be. And my watch was the sparkliest one.

If there were a polka dot jersey for the day, Troy would likely have taken it. Instead, he wins the hairdo of the day award. He swears this just happens, but I think he has a crochet hook at home and he spends hours getting ready for group rides.

The rest of the long weekend involves baseball, baseball, a run, and more baseball. We're in a three day tournament. Which mostly means three days of potlucks at which I will eat too much junk food. Wyatt has been to too many triathlons - each time he scored a run, he threw his arms in the air like he's just won Kona. It was awesome.

I hit the Great Aloha Run expo this evening and found myself cringing at this. After Strongman in Japan in 2007, I did nothing but eat chocolate for two weeks in celebration. Then Jaco wanted to do a photo shoot. What's better than muffin top? Muffin top in larger than actual size. Like twice as large.

Monday morning I'll run the GAR before work. 8.2 miles from Aloha Tower to Aloha Stadium. I think it's Bree's year! My ankle held up ok for my little test run, here's hoping I will get a little race-day magic to numb it.

Jaco Fit

I have a new job. Because I don't have enough jobs. This month I worked my usual job, I wrote another piece for a mag, and now, I'm adding another.

Jaco Fit.

Ut-oh.

I cut my hair again. I realize that this is about as newsworthy as the fact that the garbage men came today, again, on a wednesday, imagine that! But what I wanted to show are my newfound frugal ways. Me, need pins for my obnoxious bangs or rubberbands for my shaggy mop? No way. It's office supplies all the way - pink binder clip for the bangs and a pencil for the rest.

I rode my tri bike home tonight. Which wouldn't be weird, except that my office is starting to look like a bike shop, as you can see to the left above. I rode Blue-Barry in, but wanted the ttx for the trainer ride tonight. On the ride home I found myself with the wrong shoes, and the wrong cleats, well, there was a whole lot of wrong going on, including the fact that my dress was tied in a knot at my waist and tucked into my bike shorts, because I had packed wrong. The speedplay cleats actually kind of hooked into the looks well enough that I would forget, push up a little hill and send my legs flying off the pedals, which kind of hurt. The stupid things I do because my husband won't buy/steal me a cute little black VW rabbit like I NEED. (ahem, isn't there a holiday this weekend?)

Up to this point, the training has been about doing what I want to do, when I can fit it in. It's looked like about 25 miles per week of running and 150 or so miles per week of riding, with 2 structured workouts per week with the Boca cycling clinic. Last week was an infinite leap from 0k/week to 6k/week of swimming. I think I just weasled my way into a half-ironman - even though last spring I said I would never, ever do it again because I almost froze to death on the swim. It's in seven weeks. I did Kona on a little under 8 weeks of bike/run training due to injury.. but it didn't go so well. Here's hoping I'm more prepared to cram for this one! Starting this week the training emails will be coming from Raul, who took me back into the Boca family without batting an eye, because Boca really is a family. I'm a lucky girl. And now I've got seven weeks to work my butt off and get in race shape, prior to 6:30 am and after 8 pm, of course.

Last time I didn't look so happy at the finish. And don't be confused by the palm trees, it was one of the coldest experiences of my warm little life. That's not sweat, it's frost.

56 stoplights.. and one ankle that won't unclip.

Duda and his supporters - only Eduardo, the Mr. of Mr. & Mrs. Brazil there on the left, raced the crit. But the rest of us yelled GO UNCLE DUDA! every time he went around.

Ui, Duda, Jack, Ryan, Kimberly, Glenn, and me on the runway.

Me: I'm bored (and kind of smirky), let's go.
Ryan: Shut up or I'll slap you.

My foot looks like Rainbow Fish, that whiner from the kids' books - it's black underneath my ankle, kind of green above and in front of it, and red from all the icing. SO pretty. My left ankle does not have the strength/flexibility to unclip from the speedplays on my road bike. My tri bike has look pedals that are a little less squirrely, but it's having a sleepover with the dirt bikes at Erik's house, and I don't feel like going to Kailua to get it.

Similar to my inability to breathe to my left side is my inability to unclip with my right foot at a stoplight. I tried, I just fell over to the left with my right leg out. It's an uncontrollable sequence.. unclip, lean left. So unclipping to the right is out.

I'm bike commuting anyway. Today's goal was to get from my front door to the Y without unclipping. I almost fell over at Punchbowl and Beretenia, the very last light. I can't do that dead-stop balance thing that Pretty Billy does. I counted along the way - there are 56 stoplights on my lovely little urban commute. I didn't run any reds, and I made it, but just barely.

Also, I have a silver lining to share about getting really, really out of swim shape. If you swim 6k in a week after three months of 0k/week, your 100 m splits will fall about 5 seconds in a span of 7 days. They're still 5 seconds too slow.. but they're inching back down.

blonder by the minute..

Saturday morning I rolled my ankle doing strides in the grass. Curse you, skinny ankles. It's an annual event for my left ankle, occurring whenever I venture off the pavement. I hit a hole at the end of a stride and felt the outside of my ankle bone hit the grass. The stupidity left me with some time to kill, so I packed it in and went and begged Pro-Bowlers to sign my body parts. OK, not really, but I've always thought that was the epitome of dumb things to do. I swam 2k instead and called it icing. It's cold in our ocean right now.

I iced and taped it up and off we went to Punahou Carnival. High school, but without the booze in a Big Gulp cup! The view from the top of the ferris wheel:

We shared a deep-fried twinkie five ways, and it oozed all over my hand. It was good.. but the funnel cake was better.

The Ross boys enjoy their cotton candy. I did not request that any of them pose with cotton candy on their faces.. yet this is what I got. Henry:

Ramsey:

And Wyatt. It's in his hair:

Sunday I was swollen, but I could walk, and more importantly, once taped up, I could pedal. The boca ride was mellow today, as the fasties were racing the crit out at Kaneohe Marine Corps Base. It was on a runway. Ryan charmed the guards into letting us on base without ID, so we rode all around the gorgeous base, and stopped a while to watch the crit. The officer's houses out there almost make me want to enlist. I was asked by many if I was jumping in to the crit.. ha! Me + bike race = concussion. It's not the bike handling skills of my peers I'm concerned with, it's my own. You can see the runways on the right. Not a bad place to be a marine.

Just another trainer ride..

on the water! 

(I know what you frozen-tundra mainland people are thinking. Stop calling me that, it's mean.)

I'm the one on the left (dork commuter backpack hooked to the front wheel) in all black and then there's Katie, Brent, Ryan, Felipe, Joy & Leann, and the line went down at least ten people further. Alika snapped this with his camera for me just as the sun disappeared tonight at Kakaako Waterfront Park, during a break between intervals. It was an hour of intervals, a 15 minute run, another 15 of intervals, and then another run. But one really can't bitch about the trainer with this view. The Thompsons and Sharpie are having basement trainer parties, after all. People were riding shoulder high waves right in front of us, a pod of dolphins rolled through, and barges were streaming into Pearl Harbor as the sunset.

Tomorrow is run commute day. Last Friday I took a couple of minutes off of my time and got the pace down into the 7:20/mile range, bouncy backpack and all. Tomorrow, faster! I bike commuted every day this week and even had some company. And I finally got in the pool again. I'm not that uncoordinated, I'm not that sore.. I'm just slow. Grandma-who-doesn't-want-to-get-her-hair-wet sloooow. It's fugly.

On Saturday I'm helping lead the Lululemon run group, Ala Moana Park at 8:30 am, if anyone wants to come out and play.. Or as Beth says at her local lulu, come out and chase chicks!

blah blah blah I like to talk blah blah blah I like to make noise.

That is ramsey's impersonation of me for the day. When asked why he doesn't answer me, he responded, Oh, I thought you were just doing your usual: blah blah blah I like to make noise blah blah blah. I didn't realize you were looking for an answer.

Good thing I'm not oversensitive. Or feeling over-dramatic, like I was on the commute home when 25 mph winds had me riding at 235 watts and going 4 mph downhill. The whole world is turning against me, the earth hates me, this wind is trying to murder me and I'm just going to walk this bike home. At least I was wearing this:

(Yep, bad hair day.. I'd just shed the helmet and my hair turned orange when I got bangs.) There is much work to be done. Just look at the jersey. It's about three sizes too big and flaps like a parachute. But it's starbucks.

At dinner I realized just how much misinformation we're feeding our children. It occurred to me after Wyatt asked who invented rice. And Ramsey said Jerry Rice. I mentioned that maybe we should stop filling their heads with crap, and he pointed out what I had just said to Sky in response to her complaint that her milk tasted rotten:  It's juice squeezed out of a cow, did you expect it to taste good?  While totally true, probably a little too opinionated for my five year old's brain.

I meant to go swimming today.. but I forgot. There's always tomorrow, I guess. I'm not going to get too down about my swim slackerdom. It was a hard enough day with all that work and wind and stuff. I don't want to wind up suicidal, like my poor daughter, who I found asleep with her head in the oven.

This picture pretty much sums up January:

January in review:

Bike: 624 miles

Run: 119 miles

Swim: 1500 meters.

I am the queen of balanced tri training, aren't I?

That bike commuting stuff adds up. I'm doing a couple of workouts per week, and the rest is just getting around the island. The run is less than my usual, but I'm thinking quality, not quantity. I can only fit 2-3 runs/week in, so there's a speed, a tempo, and the Friday morning run commute for distance.

Regarding that swimming thing.. well, some folks get out there and throw themselves into their weakness. But oh no, not me. I say ignore it. It might go away.

Katherine in Kailua today - it was another gorgeous morning. This is after we ditched the Boca boys at the bottom of the Pali. OK, it might have been the other way around. I've always wanted to get a photo of this sign that epitomizes the dumb crap cyclists do when in a group. Here we are..

Lemmings, every one of us.