A New Year Begins
After the San Francisco Triathlon I started a restoration period. I had been going pretty much nonstop, at least with swimming, since the end of last September. I still did at least 30 minutes of swimming, biking, or running every day the past three weeks. I’ve noticed that training motivation has a bit of an inertia aspect to it. When you’re going strong it’s hard to stop, but when you start taking a lot of rest, it can be harder to get back up and running smoothly again. Thirty minutes a day is my way of keeping things really easy while staying relatively fit.
I went back home to Alva, Oklahoma a week before Thanksgiving. The change of pace and environment was a nice complement to the restoration period. It was warm enough that I could bike and run outside. For swimming and strength training, I worked out at the Wellness Center. It’s a pretty nice complex and all of the equipment works great. The only problem is that the 25y pool is kept at around 88 degrees, I think, which is really warm. I have to slow down quite a bit to maintain an aerobic effort.
On Wednesday we drove up to my grandma’s house outside of Kansas City. Sprint has a Thanksgiving Day 5k run on a certified course on their campus, and I ran in that on Thursday. Out of the 5000 entrants, I finished 8th in 16:08 (5:12.51, 5:15.70, 5:14.62, 25.66). I was only hoping for a 16:30, so I was pretty happy. Considering that since July 1st I’ve run less than 300 miles, when I finally get my volume and intensity back up to respectable levels, I should be in a pretty good position to run a lot faster. Halfway through the 5k I felt my foot start to hurt again, which wasn’t the best thing to feel, but it was a pretty minor sensation, and with the rest since then, I’m hoping it was just because of wearing racing flats. As I continue strengthening exercises, hopefully the pain goes away for good.
So, today was the first day of my 2009 triathlon season and to start things off, I rode about 1:25 in the morning and did a 5100y straight swim in the evening. I’m still figuring out what races I’ll do this coming year. I’ll probably do the Stanford sprint “Treeathlon” in March. My first major race will be in Oklahoma City in May. That will be a pretty exciting race because it is in my home state and the bike course does loops around the state capitol building. Then, it looks like the continental cups in Geneva, NY and San Francisco will both be in July. Nationals is in August, so my major races will be over a lot sooner next year. Hopefully I do well enough in them to be ready for a World Cup, but we’ll see how things go…definitely a lot of training between now and then.
Filed under: Training
