Now that I finally posted a race recap of the marathon relay, I feel like I can start posting again!  A few things have changed since my last post, the biggest being my next race.  So every now and then I’ve mentioned the ‘dumb’ race I signed up for in May, Triple T (a sprint on Friday, 2 Olympic tris on Saturday and a half distance on Sunday) … and a month after I signed up and then got injured, I stopped getting excited about it and started to dread it.  I attempted to start training in January rather than March (when I had originally planned to start working with my coach), although with getting sick and few other issues, my training didn’t get going until mid-February.  After my hips got better, and I was able to run and not just bike/swim, my coach has slowly been upping my mileage to help me get ready for the ‘dumb’ race.  Every time I trained all I could think about was all of the horrible hills on the bike and run and the cold water for the swim.  Was I ever going to train enough to be prepared to do an Ironman distance over the course of a weekend four months after I was able to start running again?

Finally last week it hit me, my hip started to get grumpy at the end of one of my longer runs, and I found myself thinking ‘what the heck am I doing?, there is no way I will be prepared for that distance by May 17th.  Not if I want to come to IMAZ injury free!  This wasn’t my A race, heck it wasn’t even my B race!  It was my ‘random race I signed up for because so many other club members did too”.

So I emailed my coach to get her opinion – was this race just too much too soon for me?  She replied saying that she thought that it was and as much as she would hate for me to not be able to race, she was worried about me re-injuring myself and getting sidelined again, and possibly jeopardizing IMAZ.  She did suggest that I could do the super sprint race that Friday night and one of the Olympic races Saturday morning, which sounded like a great idea. Phew!  So I’m still going down with the club, and doing two of the races, but they’re very short and manageable with my current fitness.

Now I feel like I can really focus on training for IMAZ… it really isn’t that far away if you think about it… 7 months… I still will need to keep building up a strong base (and core, and hips!) for the next few months, and then it’s *on* for the following remaining time.  It was just getting too distracting training for hills for one race and then switching it up immediately after and riding flats and WIND.  Maybe as I get more experienced and build up a stronger base in the next year or so, it won’t be a big deal, but for my first full, it was kind of annoying and made it hard to focus.  I do have several other races this summer, however they are pretty flat, windy and similar to IMAZ’s course (which is why I chose them), so my training will go nicely with those races.  So now I’m super happy to just focus on IMAZ!  I think it’s time to break out my sticker and water bottle for inspiration and motivation!

I bought these at IMAZ in November- the sticker is on my fridge, and now I”m going to use the water bottle for motivation on rides!

I got my short 3.5 mile run done this am, although the weather really stinks.  It was such a bummer to have to pull out my winter running coat for a run (39 degrees and rainy this morning. ugh).  Hopefully it will warm up again soon!  Tonight I have a 1:15hr trainer ride and then JMR is coming over for dinner 🙂

Off to a meeting!