What I did on my summer vacation

Well I've had about an eight month summer vacation as I opted to take the second semester off from school and honestly I wish it would never end! This post is about the latter half of my summer vacation which includes travelling to faraway places (ie Quebec), biking up a mountain and making pie. Here are some highlights of summer 2012!

June:

-       Getting antsy to start racing.  Test my racing fitness at Vikes relays on a 4 x 100 relay with some grade 3s.  Find myself in a heated battle with a speedy grade 3 boy (grade 3s can run a LOT faster than you think).  Tweak my hamstring and lose the race.  Hammy hurts for a while.  Ego hurts more.

July:

-       First World Cup in home province in Edmonton!  The course was basically hill repeats on the bike and run which made for a super intense and hard race.  The heat didn’t make the race any easier either.  Pretty much red-lined the whole run and actually welcomed my 10 second penalty as a nice little breather in the middle of the race.  My penalty also got me some air time on the CBC coverage because of the “costly mistake by Pennock”.  Super pleased with a 4^th place finish! A little delirious after the race as you can tell by my loopy signature that I don’t remember signing:

Canadian Podium

-       Magog Continental Cup was the next race on deck at the end of July! Magog is a super fun resort town complete with a cute chocolatier shop owned by Rafael, who my family got to know when we came to race two years ago.  The race went well and I placed 2^nd behind my friend Joanna Brown aka Jo Bro after she blasted off on the run.

August:

-     Became a full-time Olympic super fan.  For both the Women’s and Men’s Triathlon, I got up at ungodly hours to watch the races unfold live with other hard core fans. 

-       Russy P. came out to Victoria for a week long Pennock training camp! I took him on his first ride on waterfront and he got his first flat tire which would have been okay if we knew how to change tires and if the 100m final in the Olympics wasn’t on in 30 minutes.  Said some things I didn’t mean (you come to Victoria and all you do is get flats!) but it was okay because I hammered home to get the car to pick him up and got to watch Bolt just in the knick of time.  We may or may not have watched an instructional video on how to change flats afterwards…

Russell at a hipster breakfast place in Victoria

-       The last stop on the series of Canadian races was in sunny Kelowna. Our group went out a week before and had a bit of a fun training camp leading up to the race which even included tubing and hot dogs (whoa triathletes can have fun!).  Race went well, fed off the excitement of the music and the cheers and had my first win on an Olympic distance course.  SO proud of little Russy P. for having an awesome swim and making lead pack in the Junior Elite race!  Shout outs to all the speedy ‘berta kids for fast racing, including KOS champs Laurin Thorne and Stefan Daniel!

I’ve really savoured the athlete life but it’s now time to buckle down and do some school.  I know I will be sitting at my U of Vic lectures wanting to fast-forward to more summer adventures.  Luckily my triathlon season is still alive and kicking with a race in Buffalo, USA up next!

xoxo, ellen