That is the my preferred order of the sports. In a triathlon the order is swim – bike – run.  Hardest to easiest in my opinion.  But, I am a runner so running should be the easiest.  Now that I’ve been bike commuting almost every day and doing some longer rides on the weekend running is getting easier.  While swimming on a somewhat regular basis has made it more enjoyable, it isn’t really getting easier and actually requires the most prep work and is the least social.

I’ve been swimming with a group of triathletes, and my friend who organizes the swims made it fairly clear she wants me to give triathlons a tri, so I’ve been thinking about it more.  A recent Runners World cover story on switching from running to triathlon also got me thinking.  Swimming is the hardest ( have I mentioned that?) and this week I only got out once for 600 yards.

The biggest problem is that I can’t run – at least not any distance or with any speed.  I mean seriously, I only ran 4 miles last week! And that was my highest mileage since March!!  I was thinking about doing the Minneapolis Duathlon when I remembered that the second discipline in a duathlon is running, oops.

As I’ve been increasing my bike mileage both commuting and “training” I’ve also been contemplating a nicer bike for the training parts of life.  It seems crazy to drop a couple of thousand on a super nice bike that would only get ridden a few times a week, but it is very tempting. I’ve started looking at craigslist and need to start trying to figure out how much I’m willing/able to spend on a new toy. This week I did 50 miles of just commuting and errands – way more than I drove!

So I maybe looking at a late summer/early fall triathlon.  On Thursday I actually ran in the morning, did my normal bike commuting, and swam in the evening.  I was quite tired, but it was the first time I’d done all 3 at once.  We’ll see how the running goes, especially after Ragnar.

The most notable thing though is that when I was recently getting some bike shorts, I made sure to buy a pair of tri shorts.

What do you think? Should I tri it?

This week’s One Post is a guest post from Coach Mike aka Rocco about Tune Up Races.

in 2 runs.  Isn’t that exciting? It is scary how exciting running a mile can feel, but it is great!  My knee still hurts a little but it seems to go away after a bit and hurts less when running on soft ground.  Both of the runs were piddly little ones from my house and were pretty much unexciting.  Except, the one morning I saw what could have been a kettle bell class on the grass along the Midtown Greenway.

It has been easy to get these short runs in during the morning, but has been harder to keep up the other workouts.  Though I did do almost 83 miles on the bike.  25 of that was a fairly hard ride on the Greenway to the West ending up at Bryant Lake Regional Park and hitting some quality miles.  I averaged over 16 mph for the ride which did include some stop and go in the Hopkins area, plus getting a little lost and riding on some chipped limestone that was only a little above mountain bike trails (Lone Lake Park).

I wasn’t able to make the group swim this week so I did 650 yards on my own at the YWCA on Friday.  I did them nice and slow.  I noticed that my form wasn’t as good during the slow parts, but I did a fast 50 towards the end and felt like my form improved considerably.  I guess that is similar to running, sometimes your best form is when you are running faster.

We also went camping which was a relaxing way to end the week, though we only hiked a few flat miles on Sunday and survived some crazy Saturday night storms.

Things are coming together nicely for the Ragnar Relay in a few weeks.  I guess I need to figure out how I want to promote my fundraising, if I’m still going to do it.  I know that the kids in Africa would appreciate clean water to drink, so I guess I better work on that!

This week I’m teaching Bike Maintenance and Exploration!

This week’s One Post is about the Midtown Greenway.

Bike: 82.7 Mi

Run: 3.2 Mi

Swim: 0.4 Mi

At least according to Foursquare, where I finally earned the Gym Rat badge.  It actually takes a bit of work to hit the gym 10 times over 30 days (or 3 days a week) in the middle of the summer.   I didn’t reward myself with anything too exciting as recommended by Foursquare!

It was a good week, busy but good.  I worked out 4 of the 7 days, sadly I had to drive my car for work every day. I was teaching a carpentry for kids class and needed to be able to transport lumber and tools.  If you want to purchase a trailer for me that’d be awesome! Especially since this winter we’ll be dropping to 1 car, about the same time as the kid pops out!  My bike numbers were down, but my running was up (to 2)!

Bike: 21.1 Miles

Run: 2 Miles plus 30 minutes of aqua jogging

Swim: 0.7 Miles

The one day I ran on the track in the YWCA for a mile with a little knee pain.  Unfortunately, it was the wrong direction (turning into my bad knee) but I survived the 6 laps and the pain slowly went away.  The pain appears to be on the outside in the area where they stuck the needle in to drain the fluid.  This was followed by 30 minutes of aqua jogging.

My other run was at Pike Island and was pretty much a brick workout, I rode 7 miles on my bike to get there.  I walked from the parking lot to the island and then ran a mile, walked back to my bike and proceeded to ride 14 miles home.  I obviously took a different route and found a great place to hammer it on the bike.  The roads around the airport are quite flat, wide, and not heavily traveled.  I’d recommend it for a 3 or 4 mile stretch of hard riding.

The only other notable event was that it stormed as we arrived at Nokomis and cleared up into a perfect evening for swimming.

I’m optimistic about my knee and hope to be able to slowly build up my miles so that Ragnar won’t be too much of a shock to my system. I’m planning on picking one of the shortest legs and surviving! I go next week to the Infectious Disease Specialist!

This week’s One Post is an older post about Running Logs. I continue to use Running Ahead and am quite happy with it.  You can always click on the blue “R” at the top of my site to check out my running log or they get posted to my Facebook Wall.

I hope you have a great week!

Yesterday!  I hope you had a good and safe time celebrating the independence of our country.  We live in an extremely diverse neighborhood and it was interesting to think about the different reasons we all have to be thankful that the US is a free country.

It was a pretty good week, busy as usual. I’m enjoying my summer job working with kids.  Last week was water week which included a water balloon fight and a trip to a local water park! The heat isn’t fun since the school isn’t air conditioned but we manage!

The best news of my week was that I ran! Only about a mile and while my knee hurt there was no swelling during or after the run! So that is a good sign.  I might take it out for a spin again this week and see how it goes!  I’ve been biking and swimming so hopefully I’m getting into/staying in some level of fitness.   I also aqua jogged again this week. I did 30 minutes with my shoes on (which is a nice added challenge).

My weekly activity summary looks like this:

Bike: 53.8 Miles

Run: 1.5 Miles

Swim: 0.5 Miles

This week’s ONE POST is last year’s post about Minneapolis being one of the best biking cities in the World!

Did you have a good week?