Greetings from Phoenix, AZ.

My Timex partner-in-crime, my little hottie Rachel Ross, keeps getting on me about posting pictures in my blogs. “You NEED the pics, Sharpie!”, she’ll advise. “It just makes them more interesting.”

Never let it be said I want to be boring.

Unfortunately, I have no pics in this blog, but I am trying to be better about doing it. I just need to remember the stupid camera when I am at functions. I never do.

So… I came to AZ to work the expo for the Phoenix Rock & Roll Marathon on behalf of Trakkers (www.trakkersgps.com) and had a great time! I’ve been working with the company head, Charlie Patten, to help introduce the product to the mainstream, and also select Team Trakkers 2009 who will endorse the product. It has been such an awesome opportunity to get to meet athletes from all over the country. It will be VERY difficult to narrow down the applicants to our small team group. Everyone seems very excited about the Trakkers concept and seem eager for product launch in June at the Rev3tri.com race. It will be quite the show!

While in Phoenix I had the pleasure of doing some workouts with the Racelab team. (www.racelab.com). They are an awesome group, all of them, and I encourage anyone in the Phoenix area looking for a tri club to look into this team. Andy Kreb, the suave and witty dude in charge of sponsors, has been working with me to bring Trakkers on as a sponsor for their team.

Andy invited me to their team swim workout at ASU Wednesday morning at 6am.

I try to swim at the Arizona State pool any chance I get (although U of A is, admittedly, my favorite. There is a radio underwater! Love that!) so happily accepted the invitation to swim with them at this pool. Their head coach, Bettina Warnholtz, led the swim.

I kind of laughed during the workout, truth be told, because – let’s be honest – the workout was definitely off-season and not something I would have normally done. No criticism intended, drills and lots of rest, etc., is VERY appropriate for January and necessary for non-swimmers … but swimmers don’t need that shit. I decided just to enjoy it, and take it as a “vacation day” since JZ never lets us do drills or chat between sets or get sickening amounts of rest. She’s our swim Nazi.

I also didn’t want to be rude and launch into my own swim workout when Racelab so kindly invited me to join. So as a group we did a bunch of drills, some of which I had honestly never even heard of before, so that was cool, and everyone joked and laughed between each 50, exchanging jabs when possible. I fit right in! My kind of people. I don’t think my HR got above 120 for the whole 50:00 swim workout but I really enjoyed myself and met some of the coolest people!

I guess I passed the initiation because they invited me to track workout that evening at 7pm. Andy offered to pick me up at a mutually convenient meeting spot so I didn’t have to drive the whole way. How nice is he?

(Toto — we’re NOT in Boulder anymore. Oh Lord – the DRIVING again! I have gotten so spoiled in Boulder and rarely ever drive more than 5-miles in one shot for anything. This 30:00-40:00 car commute thing took about 1 day to start making me CRAZY.)

Let me assure you that these little Racelab bastards COMPLETELY got even at Track from the swim. I kept reminding myself that I have only done a handful of runs, 30:00-50:00 in duration, in the last year and a half. These people were fit. There was no way I would keep up so I needed to keep perspective — but I did think I would hold my own better than I did. I had my ass and pride handed to me on a paper plate. Not even a silver platter – tonight it was paper. I was dead last for each 400m repeat, behind some old-timers and newbies who should have been eating my dust for lunch. Instead, holy crap, at 9:00/mile pace I was huffing and puffing and just hoping I wouldn’t hurl in front of them. I had a pro triathlete image to uphold. I didn’t need the negative press. (Note the sarcasm.)

At one point Andy came over and put his arm around me to keep my morale going. “You’re doing great!”, he encouraged. I had to laugh at that. My face was beat red, I was bent over, and kept begging everyone to end the track session early and go out for Pizza instead. (Now EATING is the arena in which I will defeat EVERYONE!)

Andy knew it was pretty much among my first sessions back, and he was so kind to try to keep me going. I know I didn’t look too happy. I laughed because normally I am the one in group settings to keep morale high. But man, bring my fat ass to a running track and the men get separated from the boys … and I am a CHERUB! I appreciated that on this night, the positive encouragement came back to me.

Karma is very illuminating. Things really do shine back as you put out.

On Saturday I am doing a ride with Kevin’s group out of Tribe Multisport in Scottsdale. He’s promised me fun – and promised a camera on hand… so I will make every effort to post pics.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 1:57 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.