Cold Feet

I would like to start this post by saying that I don't ever recall having cold feet ever in my life. Not when I started my first "real" job... it just felt right. Definitely not about having kids... I knew part of my life's calling was to be a mom. And not even a smidge of cold feet when Josh and I got married... we were ready to be married five years before we actually were so there definitely were no cold feet at that big day in our life. Even though all of those events in my life are WAY more important than my triathlon next weekend, for some reason I have cold feet about doing this. I know this triathlon is definitely out of my comfort zone and is somewhat of a risk for me (I am definitely not a risk taker), but that's part of the reason why I wanted to push myself to do it in the first place.

Yesterday Josh and I got the genius idea that we should go open water train for the swim portion of the triathlon. Sounds like a marvelous, well-planned idea until I tell you that by the time we got to the lake it was gusting winds of at least 25 mph and the temp wasn't even up to 60 degrees yet. In all seriousness, thank God for the people that invented wet suits. I don't know how else I could've survived yesterday. Jumping in was horrible. It honestly took the breath right out of me it was so cold. I had to just stand out there and get acclimated for probably a good 5 - 7 minutes before I could even consider moving. Then I attempted to swim. HA! I maybe swam half the distance of the triathlon and then had to turn around and come back... that's when I started swimming into the whitecaps. Every time I turned my head to breathe I would get a mouth full of water. To say the least, it was a horrible experience. Thankfully my seasoned triathlete husband went for a swim after me and told me that it was the worst he's ever seen it so I shouldn't worry, it will definitely be better than that on race day. Right?!!! Oh please!!

I have been training for the triathlon for 9 months and now I have one week left. I am proud to say that I am in the best cardiovascular shape of my life. I am running the fastest and farthest I've ever run, I'm biking farther and faster than I've ever biked and I'm swimming lengths I've never even attempted. I feel confident about the run and the bike and I was feeling confident about the swim up until about 24 hours ago. Give me the nice warm indoor pool at my gym and I'll be set. But NO!!! They're going to throw me in a freezing cold lake with 750 other crazy people who will probably try to swim over the top of me! I guess if worse comes to worse, I'll just side stroke the whole thing :) Agh!! So anyway, here's to a week of having extremely cold feet! Everyone say some prayers for me!!!