swim + hills

I'll start with Friday night I did a short 22 mile bike ride - kind of an out and back around part of lake sammmamish and back home. My right foot was still rather tender but otherwise the ride was good and uneventful.
Later in the evening I changed my rear tire - Kyle supported me but I did it. I think I bruised my right hand trying to get the tire off - I was slow but eventually I got it done and know that if I have to I can do it at IMC.

This morning Kyle and I met Col and Bryan at Staph's house to do a swim to bike brick. We started out by swimming from Steph's dock on Lake Sammamamish. The plan was to swim for 60 min total so I swam out for 30 min and turned around. the rest of the crew is faster so they swam further than me but I was bale to keep them in sight so it was no big deal. Te water was not to rough but the ski boats did make some big rolling waves every so often that really tossed me around. Then I had a hard time not swimming into shore the last 10 min - it felt like I was having to swim against a current or something. My right hand hurt a little bit - otherwise it was a good swim. I focus on my little mantra reassuring myself that "I'm a strong swimmer" and it kept me going. In all I swam for 62 min - I was tad slower coming back. Kyle had his garmin gps thing and it said he swam 2 miles (I probably swam maybe 400 yrds less than him) which is very cool. I have to say I'm a bit envious of his garmin and am considering if it would be useful for me to get one... I'll come back to that though.

Next up we did a non-rushed transition to our bikes to do a very hilly 45ish mile ride out to Snoqualmie ridge and back. We headed out via the short way around the lake into Issaquah and made the call to go straight up via SE 56th St which was probably not the best call - it was crazy - about 1 mile climbing and almost 400 ft elevation gain... It was hard and I was mostly out of the saddle. The good thing was that there was little to no traffic so I was able to do some switch backing to help but even so it was plane hard - esp to breath haha - but I made it just fine.
We got on to Issaquah Fall City Rd and headed towards the stair step climb to go down. But first Kyle got a flat in his rear tire so he quickly changed the tube and we were back at it.
I was able to go down the stair step hill with out to much braking - there were a ton of people out riding up the hill (I assume prepping for the Beaver Lake Tri next weekend). We dumped out on to 202 and headed to climb up to the top of Snoqualmie falls. We paused at the top to grab some water and regroup a bit before climbing up to the top of Snoqualmie Ridge - the climb always reminds me of the Hawaii 70.3 ride - I think because of the wide shoulders and how gradual it is.
At the top we refilled the rest of our water bottles at Starbucks and started back down. On the down hills I really tried to let them roll and not brake as much as I could handle. At the bottom of the falls we hit a nasty headwind which was kind of surprising. We headed back to another long climb back up the 2 mile long stair step climb. My right hamstring and IT band felt really tight and made the climb even more difficult so I just spun and did not attack it to much. I was starting to get kind of tired as well - I don't think I ate enough. From there it was just some rolling hills and down back around the lake.
I got separated from the group with all the traffic on East lake Samm road I could not see any of the crew and I did not know which way they went around the lake.. So eventually(after calling Kyle) I just headed the short way back to Steph's. Kyle called me back and they waited for me at Bobby's House and we all got the rest of the way back. It wound up only being about 42 miles but I think that is just fine considering all the hills.

Ok so that was my work out today.. Now on to my thoughts about the Garmin Forerunner® 305. The pros are all the things it can track since it has gps, heart rate, optional bike cadence and it can all be uploaded to my mac (polar does not work with macs) and put into my training peaks stuff so Col can really see what I'm up to. The cons are how big it is - it is huge - much bigger than my wrist. I would have to wear sweat band underneath it so that it would not leave my wrist bone all bruised. I'll probably keep contemplating it and see if the pros out way the annoyingly large size.