June - Month in Review

This was a whirlwind month. Started with moving from State College PA to West Roxbury MA on my birthday. Finishing my dissertation and getting a final draft off to my mentor for a final look. Settling into the new house. Prepping for my big yearly research conference. Finally getting my dissertation committee to agree to a defense date (July 20). With defense date confirmed I was finally finally able to register for my long anticipated first triathlon -  Mass State Triathlon Olympic Distance in Winchendon MA July 18 (2 days before the defense!)... Flying out to Monterey CA for said conference. Very successful presentation at the conference and good dry run for my dissertation defense. Last days of freedom before starting my new job on July 1.

Throughout this I also worked on the transition from riding exclusively indoors on the spinner to all outdoors on my dad's old hybrid. A few tweeks of the handle bars, brakes, and seat and its pretty solidly rideable. Slow but rideable. I'm enjoying the riding way more than I expected. I even went for a 50 mile ride which turned into 60 miles when I forgot my house key and had to get to an appointment 10 miles away right as my ride was supposed to end.

My swimming has been so-so. Yardage wasn't terrible, a little less than May but with 5 days of travel thats not surprising. My swimming has definitely been slower than in past months. I've been having some shoulder pain and obsessing a bit about the bike and run legs so have just been doing easy yardage I guess. I start playing mind games with myself though when I only swim slow and start to think that its not that I"m swimming easy but that I couldn't swim faster if I wanted to. My first open water swim (at Walden Pond) allayed any concerns about speed that I had. I flew through that water. I was scared sh*tless. Sea monsters and whatnot. My second swim there, with a new coworker on June 30 was much less scary and was also at a much more reasonable/easy pace (30min mile).

My running has felt pretty crappy this month. All of my brick workouts sucked. I kept crashing and burning on the run after an awesome and hard bike. Hard for me to reign it in on the bike to have stuff left for the run (this wasn't a problem on the spinner). Something to work on. I was able to run all of the days I was in CA which was a great lesson because I had firmly believed up til that point that I could not run on consecutive days without posterior tibialis issues immediately popping up. These runs were all slow (like 8:50-9:30 paces) and I have been feeling slow, which is frustrating. What happened to the days when I ran all my 8 or less mile runs at an 8min pace? Ah well.

So that's my June. 15 days til my first Tri!!!

Swim 27,400 yards
Bike 384 miles
Run 93miles
Total time: 52hours 45minutes.