7 weeks and icky weather

7 weeks from today it will be over. I will have completed 70.3 miles. I gotta admit, I'm a little terrified. I've kicked up my training over the past two weeks and am pretty proud of that (it's about time.) But the next few weeks are super busy and it's gonna be a challenge to keep at it - this week's training plan calls for a 3-4 hour (50-60 mile) bike ride! Yikes!

Speaking of bike rides....today's was a doozy. The rain the weathermen have been promising arrived and was pretty relentless. But I'm crazy and couldn't deal with setting up the trainer. Weather.com kept promising a dry spell in the afternoon and I foolishly believed them. They lied.

But I did it anyway. The good news is that it wasn't cold. The bad news is that it was wet. Really wet. But it wasn't crowded at least. In fact I only saw 2 other cyclists as foolish as me. And one of them was smart enough to have a bike with a back fender. Because when you ride in the rain, everything you ride through spits up off your back tire and onto you and your bike. I don't even want to think about what all of the gunk was that ended up on Charlie and me. I just know that it took me twenty minutes to clean everything when I got home and I had to strip in the tub to avoid the dirt and gunk ending up all over the floor. Gross.

The best part about biking in the rain? Watching all of the runners. Tons of runners. All different types of runners. There was barefoot runner with his Vibrams in his hands. There was "I will not move my hands up from my sides" man who ran keeping his arms down at his sides the whole time. There was windmill girl - hands and feet akimbo with every step. There was "come with me" man who's right arm waved in such a way that he looked like he was beckoning you to follow him. There was shuffle man who did not fully lift either foot and sounded like he was doing a soft shoe as he moved along. And there were the folks running in sweats. Cotton sweats. In the rain. Ow.

The amazing part is that we were all out there getting it done. As my marathon coaches always said, "You never know what the weather is going to be on race day." I'm pretty certain it rains in triathlon world sometimes too. I'll be ready for it if it does.