Training in Tulsa

Xmas has been great. Good food, good company. My sister made me help her prepare all traditional Slovak Xmas food (read: I started preparing something, then let my sister finish it while I went out biking/running/swimming, came back 3 hours later when everything was already done. Sweet life. I imagine married life like this).

Turns out that Tulsa is not too bad for training. My sister lives right on a bike/walk trail that goes for miles and miles along the river and there is bunch of pretty neat pools in the city. So no complains.

I was able to do a couple good bike rides on the trail including hill repeats and some faster intervals although I am sure that it was possible only because it is December and therefore "Sunday stroll" families are not out and the trail is not crowded and I can go fast(ish/er). The people on the trail seem to be "real" bikers on road and tri bikes. But bike path is wide and smooth, just the way I like it.
There is also something called Turkey Mountain and I have seen a lot of mountain bikers there so next time I come for a visit I am bringing my mtb with me.
I had some good runs too, one 20min tempo at 4:24 pace and one 2x3km intervals at 4:05ish pace. Nothing spectacular but it is just something to keep me from getting completely sluggish during this base building phase.
People at local YMCAs are also very nice and I do not know why but I went there swimming 3 times and they always let me in for free. And the pool is 25m, which meant that I did my longest pool workout ever this morning: 4100 meter. Not bad.

The only complain I have is weather. It was super nice and warm last weekend, and I went running in shorts and short-sleeved shirt on both Dec 24 and 25. One day later on 26th it was -10C. Crazy!
I brought my home trainer with me but I figured that as long as the vaseline in pedals and the free hub is not frozen I am good to go:)  Which meant that I was once riding on ice. I knew that it was ice but as long as I do not do any fast movements I should be ok. But after a while I became chicken so I carefully stopped on a side in grass, turned and carefully rode back to try to find a path without ice. I also realized that I need to buy some winter riding gear, especially good gloves and shoes/shoes covers. If I were at home I would have ridden in my winter boots and ski gloves but I did not take them with me so I rode in my biking shoes (plus two pairs of socks and some plastic bags) and regular gloves (two pairs of course) and my toes and fingers got so frozen each time that I was then crying and jumping up and down in my sister's apartment once they started to defrost because when they start to defrost it hurts like hell. Ouch. But the vaseline is not frozen so I need to ride outside.  But believe it or not, I was not alone riding outside. I have met one person (the same person) on each of these cold days.

And I have signed up for a 5k race on Dec 31. It is called Race to the new year or something similar and it starts at 11:45pm. Pretty cool, isn't? My sister made me sign up because they should have champagne and she knows that I do not drink and thus I will share with her. She also hopes that I win something and then give it to her...

I have also decided to 13 in 2013 Challenge. Ok, I usually consider these types of challenges silly (you might have already realized that I consider 90% of things happening in the world stupid and silly and unnecessary) and I do not really need a challenge to challenge me into doing races. But maybe I should try to change my attitude and not kill the fun only because I consider something stupid. So I am in! The only problem here is that although I would love to do 13 races my ITB might have different plans. But it is also about the others, the universe does not revolve about me, now does it? Maybe I will "inspire" someone to do something good for themselves (believe it or not but I have inspired two people to try to bike to work when I biked to work in Michigan last year. I do not know whether they actually did it but they were talking about doing it).