Open Water Swim

I sucked it up and went for a quick open water swim this afternoon. The swim went pretty well and it was good to bust out the wet suit again. However, I did learn a few important lessons:
1. Swimming with your lab closely mimics the chaos of a crowded race start, except with much more hair and it's hard to draft off someone swimming the doggy paddle.
2. Check your Garmin 305 (or equivalent) for cracks lest you want water to leak into the screen despite the fact you have NEVER swam with it before, causing the screen display to disappear even though you can still hear it turning on and off, and bringing you poorly timed stress 9 days before your first half ironman.
3. Check the time and day of the week such that the tsunami alarm test that occurs every Wednesday at 2:00 doesn't go off in the middle of our swim scaring the ever loving crap out of you in the middle of a lake.
4. Bring a better camera than the one in your husband's mobile phone.
5. Have fun and don't forget to breath.


Happy 4th of July everyone!!!
Making it happen,
Bree (and Jitney)

Stocking the freezer...or trying to

Saturday we spent the early part of the day fishing with the gill net in an attempt to stock our freezer with salmon. While the day was fun, we only ended up with 6 salmon on the day. Some of us worked hard; Mark picked the net and I drove the skiff.

Apparently Jitney didn't feel it was necessary to lend a hand and opted to nap all afternoon in the sun.
Sunday was my brick day and for the first time in a long time I was able to complete it in the sun. Strangely, I remember thinking that this workout was going to be "short" at 3 hours (2 1/4 hour bike and 45 min. run). It felt great. It was so nice to ride and run under blue sky and to see so many other folks out enjoying the weather. I'm feeling good going into this week and am looking forward to the gradual decline in training volume that is ahead.
My biggest challenge for this week is going to be talking myself into an open water swim or two. My blood is freezing just thinking about it.
Making it happen,
Bree

My "job"

When I'm not training or racing, I am a whale biologist and am working towards my PhD in Conservation Biology. Someone actually pays me to spend sunny days on the water taking photographs and biopsy samples of whales.
This video is from one day last week showing us approaching a humpback whale and collecting a biopsy sample. The whale will generally react to the shot, but it is minimally invasive and the whales are rarely, if ever, bothered by the whole ordeal. Oh yeah, and in case it wasn't obvious, I have a federal permit that allows me to do this.