Race Week!

Hooray for race week!

I just re-upped my membership to USAT for 2010.  I guess that means I better be in at least 4 events this year.  Rev3 sent out their race packet info yesterday, and I have already poured through it.  I am planning on getting there early enough to do the group swim at 10am on Saturday morning (hopefully I will see Sarah!), then going to meet up with Mike and his fiance around 12pm.  Do one of the afternoon athlete meetings, pick up my race packet, drive the course, rack my bike, then screw around for the rest of the evening and enjoy being out of Atlanta for a change.  Hopefully I will get to see a bit of Wes as well outside of racing, but if not, I will be at the finish line waiting for him and Sarah!  Wes and Sarah are doing the half, while Mike and I are doing the Olympic distance.

The nerves and excitement of the first race of the year always get to me.  Not that I am nervous, I just have all this energy I need to direct somewhere.  I cannot believe it is already May.  I will sign up for the VA Highlands SummerFest 5K with Patsy next weekend when I get paid, and then it will be crunch time to sign up for some of the rest of my races for the remainder of the year.  Some of them now are selling out due to popularity, and it gets kinda frustrating for people trying to make ends meet, and pay for race fees without putting them on credit cards and the like.  Ironman was an exception, and I will never regret that, but some of these local races..... :)  Maybe I just need to find some new ones that are under the radar! 

As for the 5K  I am happy that I get to coach Patsy through her first 5K that she is going to run in.  She has done some before, but they were more just for participaing in, and she walked the entire course.  I told her that I would be running her pace throughout the entire event.  This is her race, not mine :)

Weekend workouts went great!  My favorite was the OWS at Lake Allatoona on Saturday morning.  Wes turned me onto it (it is orgainzed by the Concourse Tri Club in Atlanta).  I think there were around 20+ people that showed up and there was support (people in kayaks) and they were very focused on the buddy system, which I thought was pretty cool.  I did just under a mile (probably around 1500M) in just under 29 minutes... I am sure my wetsuit had something to do with that... now if I can just get it off in less than 7 minutes I will beat my only other olympic tri swim time when I did not wear a wetsuit.  Oh and did I mention that 3/4 of the swim in Knoxville is downstream?  Sweet.

I think I have may put down West Pointe on the schedule, but I might X that and then juggle my schedule around for the rest of the season.  I just have a lot of stuff going on right now outside of triathlon, and it is making things diffucult (don't people realize that triathlon is a priority, jusk kidding :).  Either that or I will just scale back and find a sprint that weekend rather than doing another olympic before Chattanooga Waterfront Triathlon.

Got the speed laces on my Asics GT-2140's and I have run in my shoes barefoot, a little bit... I am going to get a few more barefoot runs in my shoes before the weekend so my feet are ready for the no socks on bike+no socks on run = janked up feet!!!!!  Probably practice taking off my wetsuit a few times, or make sure there is some COPIOUS amounts of lube on my ankles before the race.

Have any of you guys suffered from pre-race jitters on  your first race of the season?  Let me know!