Think of me Saturday....

That'll be me out there Saturday....provided I can get over some of my internal issues with open water swimming and stay with the pack.

The game plan is to start slow, acclimate, breathe, find a happy place, then start picking people off. This has worked for me once before (at Devil's Lake) so I'm hoping I can find that swim zen again.

Then its off to hammer the 18 flat miles of biking, and 3.1 flat miles of running. I finally looked at the route map today and HOLY FLAT-NESS. I'm pumped. I haven't biked something flat since, well....since I can't even remember. And seeing how I busted out 3 miles of hill repeats last night with relative ease (dare I even say "speed"....as long as we're speaking 'relatively' here) I'm hoping to make a nice showing in the run.

Overall this training thing I've been trying (you know, actually training) seems to be working. Like, I feel faster and stronger and like, OMG, like, I might actually be prepared for this race?! WHAT?! I know. I'm as shocked as you are.

But there is still the lake. The great triathlon equalizer and consistent root of my race-day demise. So we will see, friends. We will see what Lake Michigan will say about any kind of personal-victories I might be thinking of having on Saturday.

In the meantime, I will go on musing about how I continue to ruin perfectly good vacations with races. Stupid racing. I hate racing. How does this keep happening?