Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Tri-Factor Triathlon: Freshman Triathlon 2013

This 'race' (if you can call it that) is the exact opposite of the last time I did the same distance back in 2010. Maybe it's age or just laziness, but I was a good 7 minutes slower than I was 3 years ago! And that was running with mud-caked feet!

I had been training half-heartedly before the race because...honestly?....I just didn't really take it seriously. At the back of my head was the constant 'they're all friendly distances so chill!' And chill I did. A lot of it. Especially the week before the race. Plus I guess I could use the whole 'injury' excuse, but I think I've pretty much milked that sorry little reason dry.

That said, I did enjoy the race. I was pleasantly surprised each time each leg ended. It is nice (and rare) when you think 'this leg is over already? that's fast' at the end of each leg. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I am fast...I'm saying the distances were just that short!

The swim leg went pretty well considering a fairly decent current I was swimming against and some slight choppiness. I sighted a gazillion times, which probably explains the aching neck, but that also meant I swam straight for a change. The first 20m of my swim my speedy swim amazed me even and I was all 'check me out dudes, I'm going so fast and swimming over every dang slow person out there'. Obviously that was short-lived and the rest of the swim was just spent dying a little and trying to catch my breath from that short spell. I think I got beat by a breaststroker at the end. And she was speedy. I spent the last 10m or so (between desperate gulps of air) trying to swim over random people just to catch up with her and I missed by a hair. Darn.

My bike leg was also better than many many other bike legs I've been for. Mainly this time I didn't have every man and his dog overtaking me (woohoo!) and I think I may actually have overtaken a few people. I was an idiot and packed the wrong bottle of water though (Side note: I need to spend some ass time on my road bike when training for stuff like this, because I tend to forget how to work the gears or what damn bottle fits in the bottle cage!) so because the bottle kept getting stuck on the cage I didn't actually dare take it out. Which meant I was just thirsty the whole way.

My run was shameful. This leads me to how important it is to do brick training. And that I didn't bother to do any. I really tried to run, I did. But whilst my spirit was willing, my legs felt like they were just weighed down by cement and weren't quite moving at the speed I was trying to get them to move at. I tried pumping my arms harder, but that did nothing except perhaps made me look ridiculous. It's amazing how much of a rhino you feel like right after you get through the transition. Anyway, because my legs weren't behaving, I took that as a good reason to stop running. So I walked. When I tried to run again, my knee hurt. So I walked some more. And even more. Soon it was the turn around point and I managed to find a girl going at a nice consistent pace I could stick myself behind and drag my heavy feet along. In the last 100m, my legs found it's groove and I made some wild crazed dash to the finish line...only to have a child beat me at the last 1m. Pffft.

I finished my teeny tiny race and thought I did awesomely and today after looking at the results, it seemed I had more of a 'meh' performance.

Swim leg (200m) - 05:19 mins
Bike leg (10k) - 31:56 mins
Run leg (2.4k)- 16:50
Overall - 54:04 mins

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Running Music-less

Due to a string of reasons most of which are due to my scatterbrain, the last two runs I did were done without music. Strangely enough the last two runs were also faster than my previous runs and I didn't get a stitch. Perhaps I could better control the pace when it felt like a stitch was coming on instead of having to pound out the beat of whatever song that was blasting in my ear. On a side note, my mp3 player is full of songs with quick heavy drum beats. Me thinks I overestimated how speedy I was and now half the time I'm trying to keep pace to the songs!

The thing about running song-less is that I have a repeat rift of a song in my head THE WHOLE RUN. Which kind of becomes irritating after a while. Take for example my go-to Beyonce song every time I want to run, all that plays in my head is 'all the single ladies, all the single ladies'...and that's it. That's all I remember of the song, which says a lot for how great my brain is at absorbing lyrics of any kind. So about halfway through my run yesterday I figured I should think up another song and then this christian song popped in, but I only knew '10,000 reasons for my soul to sing'. It was highly frustrating running to a single line in a song rather than a whole song. Maybe that's why I ran faster than usual - I was just sick of my one lined song and wanted to get the run over and done with.

So the conclusion, I might do some short runs music-less in the future. My friend Chris does his runs (long AND short) without music and I thought he was nuts, but I can see a kind of logic to the madness. You do become a bit more in tune (pun intended!) with your body and you're able to react accordingly without having to do some weird run which doesn't sync with the beat of the song - I've tried this, trust me, it is soooo hard. I'm not so sure I could last a longer run without music, but that's a moot point at the moment since I've only been doing 3k runs anyhow!