Thursday, June 26, 2008

Don't Want to Train

Training for the upcoming Spudman Triathlon and St. George marathon is not going well. I'm having a hard time running, so I've been trying to do more swimming.
It's been almost three weeks since Vikingman, seems like a lot longer though. My IT band is giving me some problems, I've never had problems with it before, but the last mile at Vikingman was just a little more than my body really wanted to do. Been back on my bike and had a few good rides, no pain. I rode a 20 mile flat ride with Rosemary, we took Taylor and Kyle on the bike path from SB to Fairmont Park, I had never rode this before and it was a great, fun and easy ride and the boys had a great time. I think tomorrow I'm going to ride with Kristin. I've ridden a few times my usual hilly loop and found myself just puttin' along, no desire to really "train". Spudman is certainly do-able without any great training volume, however I really wanted to pr this year and I don't think I will. My biggest concern is lack of training for the St. George marathon, since I haven't been running, I am way behind on any training plan. I will try a run/walk this Saturday and see how it goes.
Lessons learned from doing a half ironman:
1. I know I did this too early if I cared about any other upcoming events. Note to self, do not schedule half, olympic, sprint, marathon, century, in that order. I knew this wasn't a wise order, but it seemed to work best with life.
2. Go to yoga. When I got busy trying to fit training into a busy life, yoga was the first thing to go, if I hadn't skipped out on yoga maybe I wouldn't being having the ITB issue.
3. I am a fair weather athlete, you can't pick the weather on race day, go train when it's windy, hot, cold etc.
4. I rarely wear full finger gloves at home, I wore them for Vikingman which was a great decision, however, unwrap everything and dump in pockets or Bento box, no zip-locs, no unopened shot blocks etc. Speaking of Bento boxes, mine is some off-brand and it is tiny, buy a big Bento box.
5. When it is cold you can put hand warmers in between your toe warmers and shoes and you can duct tape closed any holes in the bottom of your shoes. I also used hand warmers in my gloves and had no problems with burning my hands. I slipped the warmers in my shoes and gloves during set-up in T1 (lots of baby powder in the gloves) and had no problems getting the gloves on. (Thanks SBR sports for that great advice)
6. Swim more, find some open water options. It is just not convenient to do open water swims but my swimming panic attacks are going to cause me a DNF, it's just a matter of time.
7. Pack every piece of workout clothes you own. Just kidding, but I almost packed everything I had for all different weather scenarios. Who'd have thought that June would be so cold, the previous years race reports were all about the heat.
8. Neoprene caps really help. I tried it out at the pool before the race and when I took it off I could tell a big difference. Make sure you body glide the chin strap area.
Would I do this race again--don't know, I'll have to think about it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

great blog and links too, but would not go near sbr sports though. Well online anyway!