Courtenay Brown

I began the week with a big to-do list and a lot of energy. Somehow, Saturday arrived with most of the list intact, but without much of the energy! Obviously that must mean I need an iron supplement (got one this morning, took a pill, proceeded to clean house for like two hours?!!? Yay iron!).

Anyhow on Tuesday I did climbing intervals with Uli. At some point we realized it was 99 degrees outside (literally), the cruel part was we were riding along the most delicious looking creek! We saw Mara Abbott a couple of times and called out congratulations on her history-making Giro Donne win.

Other athlete-celebrity sightings have been numerous, it is Boulder after all. My favorite celebrity by far is Simon Lessing. He coaches two swim workouts per week at Flatirons, I really like the workouts because they are triathlete-specific (so, no dreaded IM sets, which let’s face it, when you are slow at swimming, IM sets are the most inefficient use of masters swim practice time) and because Simon is a really attentive coach, regardless of your ability level. He is famous AND he actually seems to want to help me improve, which in turn makes me actually want to try my absolute hardest to improve (instead of my default sort-of-hardish-hardest).

Oh, SPEAKING of celebrities, the cover model has another cover!

Yesterday morning, he and Will and I went to the Boulder Reservoir to do an open water swim. If you go to the official reservoir entrance you have to pay something like $5 and you can only swim in a little area the size of a large lap pool, so we went to the other side of the reservoir to swim unconstricted and for free. But, we made the mistake of having breakfast, enjoying our coffee, checking in on the Tour before leaving home, and letting Dan knock down an entire tree on his way into the water (not the best karma)…

Oh DAN, you're so STRONG!!

20 minutes of swimming later, we were gleefully intercepted by a park employee and made to exit the water immediately (he herded each of us on his fancy jetski), then, the walk of shame back to our towels and clothes and shoes… If I try it again, I’ll go way earlier in the morning.

One final word… whoever told me that no pitbulls are allowed in Boulder was WRONG!! I met a pitbull mix on my run this morning, his name was Jake and he was absolutely beautiful and sweet .