When I moved to Las Vegas almost 3-1/2 years ago. I thought....hmmm who will be my next best friend. I met Michelle Karren & we began walking in the mornings. She has turned out to be a true kindred spirit & great friend. We have been walking most mornings when I've been home for these last 3-1/2 years. We discovered we both love bike riding, so we added that once in a while. Then this summer we decided to take advantage of the local community pool because we also love to swim. One morning as we were walking and solving all the worlds problems, we came up with a crazy idea of trying to do our own version of a Sprint Triathlon. We made a goal & this blog is all about our EPIC morning adventure as we completed our goal.
Meet my friend!! Now a Sprint Triathlon is 1/2 mile swim, 12 mile bike ride, 3 mile run. We did not want to compete in an actual Sprint Tri Race, frankly because it wasn't about the race or the time, it was about us just doing it & knowing we could. No fancy T-shirts, tags or chips to clog our minds. The version we came up with for various reasons is this: we kinda did it backwards. We started with our walk instead of running (it just wouldn't of been pretty). We figured instead of a run of 3 miles we would walk at least 6 miles. (Hey that should work don't-cha think?) We live in Las Vegas & we needed to do that before the heat of the day drained us. (It's been 3 digits hot lately). Shortly after our walk we would climb onto our bikes & do a 12 miler. Then we would get to the pool & do a half mile swim. We got up at 5am this morning (Sept 4,2015) & began our journey. Here we are up at the top of Anastasi about a third of the way through our walk.
Meet our walking companion, Michelle's dog Buddy. He comes with us every morning, so of course he was with us on this EPIC morning also. We invite you to come along with us on our walk.
These feet are made for walking!! Those shoes have some miles pounded on them for sure.
We are waiting for the day the pomegranates that are hanging out within our reach on our walk will become ripe. That won't happen for another month probably. But you know whose gonna be there when they do become ripe....
We come upon the land of Egypt. Pygmy Pyramids along the library trail.
Then we slip into Dr Seuss land with the crooked funky trees.
Past the foreboding forest of palm trees.
The whole time we were walking we couldn't find a person to take a picture of us. Finally one of our morning acquaintance popped up behind us so we asked him to snap this for us. It's not rain it glorious sprinklers we can glide through once in a while. We are on the homeward stretch. Our walk ended up being 6.4 miles. Excellent... EXTRA!
On to our bike ride. We had never gone 12 miles before, so we dialed into our Map my Ride & thought we had a good route to take us the whole way.
We started on Rampart, onto the Pueblo Trail up to Buffalo, over to Washington, down to Durango & back home on Vegas. We get to Washington & think we've gone at least half way & discover we've just barely gone 5 miles.
Yikes, change of plan. We did discover we could ride around the giant sports complex & get a couple more mile there, but some unexpected hillage. So a bit more challenging, but hey today we are in for challenges. We had a nice little breeze rewarding us tho. We ended up almost home, but still had to add 2 mile so we rode back to the library, rode around it once & had a glorious down hill ride back home. Hands numb & tush a bit sore but we made it. It ended up being 13.12 miles. Woot!!
We had to wait about an hour for our private pool to open. (aka the community pool that hardly has anyone using it because most everyone has their own pools.)
We are ready to "dive" in.
One lap is across the pool & back. We checked with those that know & found out we needed to swim 16 laps to go a half mile. We had been practicing this all summer & got up to 16 laps several times. We could do this! And guess what? We did!!!!!!
We accomplished our goal & it felt great and we did it all before noon, with no injury, or mishap & lots of laughter . We are 59 & 60 and we had a blast! We still had to live the rest of our day, which was filled with house cleaning, shopping, meal cooking, lesson prep & I'm sure if I would of sat down for a minute to read a book I probably would have konked.
Thank-you my friend!!! We done good!!!
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Both of you totally ROCK!!!!!
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