~Mid Summer Update~

Getting ready to ride at 10,000 ft. Cooler up there!

It's definitely Summer here in Boulder. The temps have been steadily climbing into the 90s, and I think we hit 100 degrees for the 4th of July on Monday. While I don't like to be cold, I am not a huge fan of this extreme heat either. It makes training a little more challenging, especially when it requires hours upon hours of sweating :) and the only air conditioner is in your car. But come hot race day, I'll be prepared!

On the training front, things have been going well. I did alot of racing in June and have been able to get in a good block of training over the last few weeks, with lots of jars of pickles consumed to replace the copious amounts of salt I tend to lose in the heat. I know that I'm training hard when I go through one pickle jar a week :) (and yes, I drink the juice, haha)

With the new qualifying system for Pros wishing to go to Kona, I have been doing alot of thinking. I had a good enough result at IMSG to push me up in the top 25 for quite awhile. I have since dropped to 30th or so as other girls have been racing Ironmans and have gathered more points. The top 25 women in the KPR at the end of July (Kona Pro Rankings) qualify to go to Kona. At the end of August an additional 5 will be selected, so that in the end 30 women worldwide will get to race at Hawaii this year. Needless to say, this is a tough challenge. In the beginning of the season I wasn't thinking about Kona this year as this new system seemed impossible to me to be one of the 30 women in the whole world. I mean, there are over 300 long distance female pros out there I think? I kept thinking and thinking and realized that if I didn't try to give it another shot at another qualifying IM, I would regret it and wonder what if...

Climbing up to Ward as part of long ride last weekend was a sweat- dripping affair.

I originally had planned on racing Ironman Lake Placid, but realized that getting there would take about as long as getting to Europe (no joke) and I had an impossible time trying to find places to stay. Then it dawned on me: Why not go to Germany to race IM Frankfurt/ European Champs? This race had been on my radar for awhile anyway, and so I thought long and hard and back and forth, and decided to invest part of my hard earned IMSG prize money to buy myself a plane ticket to Frankfurt and give the race a go! Now I am a little over 2 weeks out and I am getting excited and nervous and still can't believe I'll be racing in my home country! (where people will have no trouble pronouncing my name correctly, haha) The goal is to earn some more valuable points to push me back up a bit in the rankings, and to soak in the experience of racing in Europe for the first time.

Three years ago I qualified for my first Ironman and I went to Kona as a complete newbie, having no idea what this monster of a race really was. I would love the opportunity to go back and do it again, wiser and more experienced and appreciate the race for all it has to offer. Maybe this is the year :) No family will be going with me to Germany, so this will be my first solo IM. Luckily I figured out how to get an international phone through Verizon :) And post race I'll be taking the train to visit my family for a few days as well. They've never seen me limp around post IM...

As a tune-up race I'll be doing the Boulder Peak 5150 this weekend. Should be fun, hard and hot! Hope everyone's season and summer is going well. Thanks for reading~

Typical Boulder afternoon sky. The summer t-storms are here.