Summer in England

Life has been somewhat crazy lately. Work has been manic last week and I managed to average 5 hours sleep every night. The work itself was not too bad and I enjoyed working with couple of people from one of our regional offices. It is amazing how much more relaxed and friendlier are people who do not work in the City (financial centre of London). Amazing!!!!

Last weekend we had rubbish weather. I had to do a 5 hour ride on Saturday and I got rained on so many times. But I discovered some new routes which was lovely. I love discovering new countryside roads.

Unlike the weekend, the weather this week has been amazing. Nice and sunny and warm (but not too warm). I met three ladies yesterday after work, all of whom are girlfriends of the young officers in Shaun's battalion. We try to meet up once a month and last time we met we had a dinner in one of the restaurants in the West End. This time we wanted to enjoy the glorious weather and ended up having a picnic in the Green Park. I LOVE LONDON!!!!

Happy birthday!

My amazing husband is a year older today. I am bummed that we can't spend this day together but that is life I guess. But he has received the cake I sent in the post.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING!

Kansas 70.3

*Ignore that time on the clock - I am faster than that (not by huge amount though :(((


I know that I owe you a race report from Kansas but it now seems like ages ago and I am feeling lazy and work has been crazy since I got back so I am not going to say too much.

My trip went swimmingly. I flew to Kansas City via Chicago. My bike and the bag made it on all of the four flights which got me from London to Kansas City and back. I've missed having Shaun there as this was the first race in the US that I have done on my own. But he called the evening before the race and the evening after the race which was lovely.

I stayed with friends in Kansas City. He is a Brit who has been living in KC for the last year and a half. During that time he got married and had a kid and it was lovely to meet his wife and baby girl. It was funny because we used to go out years and years ago but remained good friends all this time. It was so nice to see him happily married.

I am pretty sure most of you have read on other blogs about the race and how it was hot etc, etc. So I will not talk about that. All I am going to say is that I had a great race with a PR to prove. I felt strong the whole time and perhaps I could have pushed a bit more on the bike but I am not going to dwell on it. I had a small mechanical on the bike where I've lost some time. As I got out of T1 and tried to clip in and get going my rear wheel wouldn't move. AT ALL!!! I thought the brakes were rubbing, got off, looked at it, it wasn't breaks. I was fiddling with it for couple of minutes, released my skewer a bit and that seemed to have done the trick. About 15 miles into the bike, a guy rode past me and said "Your rear skewer is almost undone" or something along those lines. I hopped off the bike and as I got my leg over the bike, the rear wheel just fell out. Clearly the skewer was COMPLETELY released. Wow, I was lucky. If he didn't see it, if he didn't say anything to me, if I didn't stop..... I don't even want to know what would have happened on some of those fast downhills. But I was lucky and that is that.

Overall, I loved my, albeit short, time in Kansas and Missouri and I loved the race. Now it's time to ramp up that IM Louisville training.