Can you pull a dump truck?

Hey all!

I apologize in advance, this is going to be a long one. You may need to grab a healthy snack, maybe some water or something before you get started!

Last Thursday I went out to Cochrane a little ahead of the group, I left at 6 and they came later at 6:30 pm. I did an easy spin on the way out, keeping my heart rate where it needed to be. This was my first time biking alone through traffic...yay me...I didn't get hit by a car!

I got out to the hill, zoomed my way down turned around and started the long climb back to the top. I started out pretty easy...trying my best to "spin"...it quickly turned into a grind rather than a spin. I chugged my way up to the top and holly crap my lower back was burning. Greg had given me hill lessons one night and said you should be engaging your core and keeping it steady. Well it was definitely engaged as it wasn't my legs that were hurting!

I got to the top and turned around and back down I went! I was half way up on my second climb when I saw the group charging down the hill. My back still burning...turning into an ache now...chug a lug up the hill.

Ahhhhh, last one, lucky number 3. I now have a new climbing goal, I want to climb hills like Andrea can. Holly crap she looked like she was taking a stroll through the park as her and Chris flew by me. Anyway, my legs were starting to hurt a little this time around. I slowly made my way to the top and headed back to the city. I must have engaged every single upper body muscle during those climbs because I was not comfortable in aero...or just holding on. Ouch ouch ouch. I made it back to my car and I was starving. Note to self...bring a gel or something next week.

When I got home Chad and I went down and got all of our camping gear out of storage. After hauling everything back upstairs we got down to business and organized ourselves for the weekend. Camping takes a lot of work!

Friday I went for a 30 min run in the afternoon. My legs were not too happy with me. The first 15 minutes was okay, after that I was having a hard time running on my jello legs. Hmmm 3 repeats of the cochrane hill took a bit out of me! Bring on number 4!

That night I went for a swim. Lately I have felt good in the water. I felt okay, but I just couldn't get my arms and legs to move fats enough. I ended up doing a lot of the sets as pull...but hey I got it done.

Saturday morning we were up at the ungodly hour of 6:00am. Two weeks in a row...this just hurts. It took me awhile to get moving. I would like to say for the record....I did not sleep in the truck AT ALL...both ways. This is pretty much unheard of...but I did it!

We made it out to Cranbrook in good time. We camped outside of town at Wasa Lake (thanks for the tip Alan!). Once we had everything set up we went into the city, found where the Strongman competition was being held, and found our peeps. We are standing there chatting away and these guys were pulling a dump truck. Not one of the little wussy dump truck but a giant ass dump truck. All I could think of is why would you want to try to pull that thing??? And I am crazy for wanting to do Ironman??? Hmmm.

The Srongman competition was really neat to watch. They went through a series of events of pulling, lifting, holding various heavy objects. My favorite was the truck pull, the one where they had to lift these giant concrete balls onto a barrel, and when they had two cars on the ramp and they had to hold them up as long as they could. If I am not making any sense see Chads blog, he knew a lot more about the events than I do! And we have pics as well...they will come later.

Both Keith and George did well in the competition, it was fun to watch some of the other athletes at the gym compete. It was also frigging HOT! It was 30 + degrees outside and I felt like I was melting. Going from 2 weeks of rain to hot sunshine was quite the change!

After we had dinner we went back out to the campground...I needed to get some training done! Originally I was supposed to bike/run on Sat and run/swim on Sunday. I forgot to ask if I could change them before Greg left...sorry Greg! When I had done this in the past it was okay, so I went ahead and changed it up. Chad was trying to convince me to swim first...there were boats in the water, no roped off area....and I was tired and cranky from being in the sun all day so the last thing I wanted was to battle with my wetsuit!

I opted to do my 60 min run. After a little grumbling I was off. I ran around Wasa lake....I kept to the roads instead of the trail because I wanted to check out the pavement on the highway for our ride the next day! It was still 30 degrees outside, but there was cloud cover now and I was able to keep my heart rate down! Whooo hooooo. I figured I would be having a battle with my ticker for sure due to the heat, but not so much. I was feeling pretty tired and crappy before I ran but surprisingly it turned out to be a good run.

We were staying in the provincial park...where they didn't have any showers....ewww. After being outside in the heat all day and running I went and hopped in the lake! It was surprisingly warm. I tried to get Chad to come, but the whole hating swimming must have kicked in because he was having none of it. And plus this way I could tease him that was stinky!

That night it POURED and POURED and POURED. We were able to get the fire out and get into the tent before it got really bad. The rain was coming down so hard throughout the night it kept waking us up. The plan was to get up at 7:30 so we could bike somewhere and still have enough time to get home. Well, the alarm went off...it was still raining hard...so we both rolled over and went back to sleep without saying a word!

The rain finally stopped around 9:30 and we rolled out of our extremely soggy tent at 10. The sun was out for the time being but there were some pretty dark clouds around. We got packed up and hummed and hawed about where we should bike. Should we chance the rain??? Should we go back and bike in Longview on the way home? What about highway 95 north??? This went on and on. We finally left Cranbrook, and I was looking at the map for roads to bike on and there was highway 95 south going down to the border. After some continued deliberation we decided that we were going to bike in Longview, as we drove by the highway I pointed it out, and we continued on. All of the sudden Chad pulls over....we chatted about what to do...the consensus was to try the highway. We parked along a pullout in Elko??? It was like 1:30 in the afternoon by now, so we got a move on and prepped our bikes!

Good decision by us! The road was beautiful, smooth, no rocks...nice! The only down side is that the wind was a blowin'! It was quite the battle on the way out and we made it to Montana! We had only been riding for 1 hr and 40 min and I needed to do at least 2 hrs before we turned around...but we ran out of road! It occurred to us much later that we both had our ID and we could have crossed the border and kept going! Whoops. Next time.

When we got back to the truck I threw on my running and went back out on the highway. My legs felt...Good!!! Again I was surprised. I don't know why I keep thinking I am going to hurt more than I actually do?? Preparing for the worst perhaps.

Oh, on a side note. On Sat night I was running along and there was a elk about 8 feet away from me. I gingerly carried along my way praying that it would charge me! Then when we were biking on Sunday 5 elk ran along beside us for about 1 km in the ditch. At one point they started turning towards us, good thing Chad had his trusty bike bell!

Back to the end of my run on Sunday, I got back to the truck, had a water bottle shower and we headed home. My bike wasn't as long as it was supposed to be, but hey we had fun!

Today I am fairly tired...sleepy tired. But my friend Lisa is in town and we are going to have dinner and go for a swim tonight. She is an awesome swimmer and swim coach so I think she is going to give me a little push. Chad is supposed to come too, hopefully his hate for swimming doesn't get the best of him!

I will update with biking and such pics later, and Chad will have the strongman info and pics when he updates his later!