Preparations for NZ

Post #23

Bellingham, Washington - First and foremost, congrats to Zoila Gomez, a fellow ITA athlete, who raced in the Chicago Marathon today. Her time was 2 hours, 32 minutes, and 51 seconds which, if I have this correctly, is a new PR. Awesome! I just finished reading "Born to Run" and was thinking about it as Zoila and some of my friends from college raced in Chicago this morning.

My team (well, mini team of four!) has been back in Bellingham for a week now and we're right back into training and getting ready for New Zealand. We leave in less than two weeks. Since this is a long year (Worlds are usually in August), I feel like I have been waiting for Worlds for so long. It's slowly hitting me that it's right around the corner now. We're getting everything ready for when we leave, including the all-important oar painting so that our blades are official USA colors:

Today we had a hard workout on the rowing machine and afterwards I dragged my teammates to go swimming in the lake with me. We're lucky that the dock is right across the street! Not only did swimming help our muscles recover, it felt really good to swim (even if the water was pretty chilly).