Ironman, princess style

“And a good day to you too, Mr. Sun.”

When I woke up this morning, a good hour and a half later than I usually would on a Sunday, the sun was beaming in through my bedroom window, and it was just far too beautiful a sight for me to wallow in the fact that I wasn’t running 26 km this morning with my girls. How could I possibly be miserable when on the first day of spring, the weather gods were shining ever so favourably upon me?

Yes folks, I’ve decided to make lemonade out of the lemons handed to me. I got up, had breakfast, put on my bathing suit and with a horrified germaphobe look on my face, headed over to the Canada Games Pool.

I’ve never gone swimming at this pool, so when I came out of the change room I had a bit of a dumbstruck look on my face. I had no idea what pool I needed to go into, it’s kind of a big facility. From my count, there were like two kiddy pools, which were definitely NOT my pools, a hot tub, again NOT mine, and two lane pools, one of which was closed. After what seemed like a good five minutes of me channeling my best chickadee, craning my head from side to side, I finally figured out my destination. I snapped on a floaty belt, hopped into the proper pool, which actually had a designated walk-run lane, and started aqua jogging. I thought everything was going good, my form was great, I wasn’t freaking out, things were good. A little too good. As I neared the opposite end of the pool, with my feet still connecting with the pool’s bottom, it suddenly dawned on me that oh crud this pool water wasn’t going to get any higher than my chin. Yep, I was in a shallow pool – with a freaking floaty belt on! Awesome.

Dear Favourite Iron Chickie,
You got your wish. I went an almost full 60 minutes of aqua jogging without the belt!
Sincerely, Princess

And because my feet kept connecting with the concrete, I wasn’t using my abs as much as I did the other night when I actually had a deep end to contend with, and I definitely wasn’t huffing and puffing like I was the other night. And for awhile there, I actually thought I wasn’t working much at all, but when I got out after 60 minutes, my legs felt a little wobbly, which is good right. One thing’s for sure, my form was perfect the full 60 minutes 😀

My blood sugars, however, not so much. Because I wasn’t expending as much energy as I thought I would, I totally miscalculated my breakfast bolus and temporary basal rate, leaving me with a serious post aqua jog high.

TODAY’S AQUA JOG:

  • 8:45 a.m. BG before: 7.6
  • Temp. basal: -50 per cent
  • Time: 1 hour
  • 10:30 a.m. BG after: 9.3, which later went up to 14.2 despite a BG correction!

But I didn’t let that high take me down, oh no. After aqua jogging and after Mario’s road hockey, we kitted up our bikes and rode to Richmond. My first outdoor ride since that epic ride in Belgium five months ago.

The first half was tough as hell. We were battling a fierce headwind through the flight path, and I was battling the blood sugars, which so conveniently decided to take a nosedive 8 km in. And I was slow, my gawd was I slow, averaging just 19 km. I made up for it in the second half though. With that wind at my back, I was tailing Mario and catching his slipstream the whole ride home, averaging a good 28 to 30 km! I just wish it would have translated into the overall average pace.

TODAY’S RIDE:

  • 2 p.m. BG before: 12.1
  • Temp. basal: -50 per cent
  • Distance: 39.86 km
  • Average pace: 21.2 kph
  • Time: 1:48:00
  • @8 km: 3.5 (3 DEX tabs) @16km 3.9 (1/2 zbar)
  • 4:30 p.m. BG after: 4.5

And you know what this means, don’t you:

Aqua jogging (swimming and running combined) + cycling + blood orange tartelette eating = Ironman, princess style!

2 thoughts on “Ironman, princess style”

  1. Hehehe glad you did a whole 60 minutes without the belt! Sheeeeesh, I don’t think I could do that!

  2. This may be an odd question but, where do you get your zbar’s? We live up in Comox on Vancouver Island and have a sporty girl with diabetes and they seem like they would be perfect for holding her from dropping too low. We show her your stats at the bottom of each post to help her normalize her ups and downs. Thanks

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