June

Has it really been 3 weeks since I've posted? Wow.

It's not that we've been so terribly busy. Just nothing going on, I guess. Nothing bad, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing bloggable.

A status report will have to suffice until something exciting or interesting does happen.

Basta did the Playa Del Run and did alright. He placed 5th out of 10, which is fairly meaningless. It was a 1K swim, 5K run. It was chip-timed but the 'winners' in many age groups posted physically impossible times. Speculation is that they only ran the first loop of the run. Buggers.

But it's not like we win money or prizes for these things. Basta felt very good in the swim and got another open-water experience under his belt. He finished shortly after our friend Michele, who is a very good swimmer. In the past she's beaten him quite handily at events like this.

The next weekend he did the Huntington Beach Pier swim. The surf was much bigger this day, wetsuits aren't allowed, and it's a longer swim. Again Basta said he felt good and had a comfortable swim, but this time Michele beat him out of the water by many minutes. He said that he felt like he was caught in a current as he tried to swim around the end of the pier. It took him forever to finally get around and start swimming back down the other side.

So is his swimming getting faster? I really don't know. His form looks good in the water. He says he's comfortable, swimming easily, and feels good at any distance. When I time him in the pool, though, he's doing around 2:00/100m. That's on the slow side of average, as I understand these things. How does one swim faster? The search continues.

I scheduled some laps of closed-fist swimming this week. First time for that. Those are supposed to make you feel how the shape of your arm on the pull makes a huge difference. We can hope.

He's going to swim a 1-mile (1.6k) harbor swim up in Long Beach next Sunday. That'll be that for his open water training pre-Vineman.

All is well on the bike, too. These swimming events have made it hard for him to do his Saturday 60-mile club ride, but he has been riding. Drills, sprints, hills, all. Doing some spinning at the gym, too. He's still not super-fast but he's a lot better cyclist than he was four short months ago when he did Oceanside. He'll do two more 60-ish mile rides before he starts his taper.

Vineman is near. 3 weeks away.

The thing I am most happy about is that he's injury-free. He's corrected his swimming stroke and the swimmer's shoulder is a thing of the past. He's doing the yoga almost daily and that's keeping his back and legs out of pain. I truly believe that proper form, combined with the right balance of work and recovery, prevents overuse injuries.

Another thing of note is that he likes his workouts and looks forward to them, for the most part. The bitching and whining is gone. He plans his work, his food, and his social schedule around his training. That means he'll still go out with his buddies and watch Netherlands perform miserably and get knocked out of the Euro Cup in a game they should have won, but he'll drink less, skip the bar food, and come home earlier because he has a ride scheduled the next day.