DIY Triathlon

So Shawn invited me to join her on her next triathlon. I'm considering it. I went out and blew $200 on gear - swimsuit, bike shorts, swim cap & goggles (plus an ultralight fleece that was on sale). The bike shorts were deemed mandatory when Marc & I did a 10 mile, hellish ride the other night just to get some cardio in. Fifty minutes later I was barely able to walk, embarrassed at my exceedingly slow time and unable to sit down either. No fun, got me a bit concerned about doing this tri.

Friday I bought the suit and friday night I did an 8 pm swim. I did 20 laps of a 25 meter pool. I was able to swim some 1250 meters or what one tri training schedule suggested for a swim. It took a little under 30 minutes and I wasn't impressed, dark sky, cool water, shivers to-from the locker room.

Despite the not so successful start to my triathlon training, I decided to have an informal triathlon today. My desire to test my abilities combined with a why-is-the-scale-going-up? moment has spurred me to burn more calories that I intake, by a factor of 100%.

Here are the results:
7 mile hike - 2:33 - 748 calories - mind you, this was with the dogs and Zoe was taking every opportunity to lay down in the shade to rest, I also had to pull burrs from Tsui's paws several times and prevent Austin from mauling every dog we passed.
10 mile bike - 40:50 - 458 calories - this was on the expresso bike machine. I think I did pretty good. The new bike pants were a saving grace. Now,
1 mile swim - 36:45 - 474 calories - Calorie count based on random website.

Total Time: 3 hrs 50 min with 1680 calories burned.
While the Sprint I'm training for is .5 mi swim, 20 mi bike and 4 mi run - I did try to balance out the exercises, as there was no 20 mile bike option for the stationary bike and I have no bike.

However, the walking in the sun with the breeze and views delighted me. The bike ride challenged me and had me sweating. The swim felt fantastic with sun and water. I'm thinking that I might look at getting a bike soon.