A Van Awesome Journey

Hi thanks for finding my blog! I am a wife of an awesome husband and proud mother to two amazing boys. I just quit my job to stay at home with our children and now have all the time in the world to play play play!!! Play with my children and play some games of my own...hence this blog. I entered a contest to be part of an Adventure Race something I have never done before. So I am required to blog weekly on my journey...so here goes..thanks for sharing it with me :).................So what has started out as a blog for reasons mentioned above has now continued into an on going journey that I have been asked to continue to share...and you with me! So thanks for coming along for the ride :)

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Du-ing a personal best!

No I didn't make a spelling mistake in the title of this post read on and you will understand! So the summer of 2012 Triathlon training with Mommy's/Babe's in Motion as their Assistant Coach is over!!! WOW! 14 weeks just goes so fast and of course this year brought new people, new experiences and awesomeness into my life. I was SO hounored that these ladies embraced me as one of their coaches this year and trusted me to help lead them in their journey. I don't think we didn't have a night where tears were not shed by someone, including me :) Tears of frustration turning into tears of 'I did it!!', tears of fear turned into tears of "I'm doing this!' and of course tears of laughter :-D I looked forward to every Tues night and being able to watch in awww as these woman went out of their comfort zones and lived 'out of the box' with us all for 2hrs. I loved seeing each week seeing their confidence and abilities grow. Some ladies who were scared shitless of even riding their bike on the road never mind up the hills and 15k out and back at the start of training changed into woman who rode their bikes out to meet us to train and then rode their bikes home!! :-O So wicked!!! Some ladies at the start struggled with even running around the whole race track and at the end of the season they were telling me, " I just have one more lap to do" and this was after they had already run 2-3 laps already!!!! I also added in another day to train because I wanted to make sure I got out on one day of the weekend. So we meet Sun mornings to do a bike (hill repeats) and run. I really enjoyed the Sun mornings as well as it was always a smaller group and I got a chance to get to know some of the ladies better and the roads were nice and quite then too. They always thanked me for being out there with them and I always let them know that it was my pleasure! I really felt like the lucky one as I was no longer just having my journey but I got to share in 97 other woman's journeys too. Sooooo 3 days before the race Kelso had to close their water because it was too low and therefore high in bacteria....what does that mean for the race you ask? Well that means that instead of doing a Triathlon (Swim/bike/run) we all now had to do a Duathlon!! (run/bike/run)....oooooooooo...kkkkkkkkkk. 12hrs before the race I had to let the ladies know this news. There was mixed emotions about it but I think the biggest one was defiantly disappointment :/ including myself and mostly I was sad. Not for me and how my goals for the race were out the window but for all the ladies who had their goals and got ready all summer for this. The swimmers were sad cause that was their strong sport, the runners were sad cause they weren't going to over come the challenge of the swim and the none runners were not looking forward to running so much. As their Coach I wanted to stay positive for them but something I think the would like more was honest....so I said that I was disappointed too HOWEVER this was NOT going to take us down and that we would Du this and be awesome!
The ladies pulled it together that morning and there were SO many purple shirts in the crowed it was awesome and everyone cheered on everyone else at the start, during the race, on the side lines, as people headed out on the bike, came in on the bike, on the run, heading up the 'big ass hill', and heading up the 'big ass hill' AGAIN!!! So as Coach Nancy said, " No one had ever done a Duathlion before so we all got a personal best that day!!!"