Some random thoughts...

Here is something you guys might have missed. I'm doing a "Racer Diary" for InsideTriathlon.com, and I'm pretty excited about it. Here was the first entry, if you missed it:

http://www.insidetriathlon.com/portal/news/news.asp?item=107117

The cool thing is, you can actually access it from the front page, not having to fish thru blogs to read it. I'm heading to Panama in less than 2 weeks, and will be doing a day-by-day diary, and blog here, on my journey and travels thru the country. I'll have some pictures, as well as other cool stuff to share. Stay tuned for that!

Here's the graph of the 10 times up Soledad workout...

You can see how nuts some of those were, altitude is the lower graph, HR the upper. Mac and I were pushing them pretty good. I had to do the last one on my own, as Mac used a hill on his way home for his last one, and you can tell I really fell off on that one without him there to keep me honest. It also didn't help that it was the last one!

This weekend is the Desert Classic Duathlon, out in Phoenix. I won this race last year, and am a little bummed I am not going back to defend the title. It was a good field last year, with guys like Simon Whitfield, Jasper Blake, Lewis Elliot and Leroy Popowski. One of my athletes, James, is going. I told him he needs to make sure he enters the raffle! Tons of cool stuff! I missed the raffle last year, as I was warming down extra, and was bummed I didn't get any tickets! If you're going, enjoy the event. It's different, and fun. The bike course is a butt-kicker, and the raffle is killer.

In other news, I've really been doing a lot of butterfly in the pool this winter. This week I decided it was time to start getting away from using fins while doing it, and seeing how fast I could swim. My best with fins for a 50 yard fly was 33 secs, but most in 35-33 range. Wednesday I did a full 50 fly in 40 secs, no fins. This morning, finished the workout with a 50 fly, 36 secs, NO FINS! It's coming along, and boy does it work your lats!

I used to hate stroke, but now that I'm learning fly, I'm beginning to like the challenge of it. It's extremely hard, good for the core, and develops a lot of power in the water. We'll see how it goes from here.

Thanks for the emails from those of you reading my blog. More to come...

Vance - 2007 NFA