A Depressing Day

It has been 18 days since I last ran more than 50 yards. Today as I was driving I saw a ton of people out for jogs and I was getting the urge to get out there and join them. Not being able to run has really been pretty depressing for me, if it weren't for swimming and cycling I would probably be hating the whole world right now. As I was driving and feeling this urge to get out there and join the pack, I managed to talk myself out of it as I knew my knee was still hurt....but then I saw her. There she was trotting along without a care in the world just enjoying life to its fullest; she was an overweight over-aged women. That's when I started getting pissed! How is it that a fat old women can run and I a 23 year old in shape kid can't?! So I threw out all reason and decided to finally strap on the running shoes and go out for a run. I decided that I would stop running as soon as my knee first felt pain.
I started out feeling great, had a decent pace going but wasn't pushing myself hard by any means. The first mile went by and all was good, I actually began to think that maybe during my forced time off the knee had got better. At mile 2 I realized that it was all in vain as my knee suddenly started hurting just as bad as before, so I walked back to the truck cussing the whole way. Looks like I'm still injured. Really sucks!
I'm pretty worried about my race that's coming up in a month and a half, I need to train for it by running...not just swimming and biking.

Saturday Race Day

So I've now done a triathlon and I can say it was pretty sweet. I was way nervous on Friday night and once Saturday rolled around I couldn't even eat. I felt like I was about to swim at state finals. Right before the race I actually managed to calm down though and kind of clear my head.
PRE-RACE
I woke up around 6:00 and drove to the Burnham's house cause we were all going up there together. I slept most of the way to the Toole, where the race was. Once we got there I really had no idea what to expect and I think that is why I was so nervous. We unloaded all the bikes and started setting up. For the first 15 minutes or so I just kind of watched all the other athletes trying to figure out what my routine would be. After getting checked in and all that I went over to the transition area and found my spot on the bike rack and got set up. This was more challenging than you might think because I didn't know what I was going to want between events, I basically just copied the guy next to me and it seemed to work okay. At 9:00 the olympic distance guys went off and that was kind of cool to see them swim, I still had an hour before my race though. People around me were getting there wetsuits on and stretching out. I thought that was kind of stupid cause we still had an hour to go, and I was right, I latter heard them complaining that they were sweating to death.
THE SWIM
I've never swam with a full wetsit on before, but I liked it. We were allowed to start in the water and actually get in about 4 minutes before we took off. I tried to warm up a little bit but didn't really know what to do so basically just floated there, this would come back to haunt me. I consider myself a decent swimmer so I went up close to the starting line, second row back. Well turns out that I do swim fairly fast and I should have gone first row, some idiot that was much slower than me made it so I was caught in the middle of the pack after about 15 seconds. At that point someone from behind decided that they were tired of being there too and actually swam right over me, surprisingly this didn't really affect me though and I decided to follow him. At this point I realized that open water swimming in a race is nothing like race swimming in a pool, it was either get out of my way or pay the price. I soon found myself doing exactly what had been done to me, I swam right over someone. I didn't help that the water was so murky, every stroke I would take I would lose sight of my arm at about the elbow. I did manage to kind of break away from the pack and with about 300 meters to go of the 250 M swim my arms started to get really super tight and cramp a little bit (next time I'll warm up better) but I still managed to finish and was withing the first 10 out of the water.
THE BIKE
Getting out of the water and running to the transition area was interesting because I had no shoes on and was kind of light headed, try swimming for 13 minutes then running. People were cheering though and I managed to keep going. The actual change took me longer than I wanted but once I was on my bike I was doing well. Still a little wet it was kind of cold at first, and it took my legs a good mile just to get warm. I was going pretty good though and actually managed to pass a couple of people, until the last 3 miles when the wind was suddenly in my face and my legs were getting tired. I pretty much died and people started passing me, even my "big" friend Matt passed me. I was also only wearing a jammer so by mile 6 my butt was getting pretty sore. I did finish though and going into the transition area I knew I was going to have to go pretty fast on the run to make up for my loss in the bike. My knee was beginning to give me a little trouble though.
THE RUN
I haven't done a whole lot of running right after biking and it would have really helped to have done some. My legs felt like jello and even though I wasn't at a lose of breath I just couldn't go. I managed to keep going though and pushed through the awkward feeling until I eventually got the blood going through my body a little bit. I could see my Matt about 200 meters away and all I wanted to do was beat him, I really didn't have anything much left in the tank though. By the halfway point (1.5 miles) I had closed the gap between us to about 80 meters. I really started to to try and catch him at that point and gave it all I had. My knee was killing me by this point but I caught him with about .25 miles to go. I hung with him a while then with about 200 meters to go there was a hill and I went numb and just started running as fast as I could. That last bit of the race is the best part because everyone is there cheering you on and you feel pretty good, once you finish just the sense of accomplishment is good enough to make you want to do it again.
THE RESULTS
So it turns out that I ended up beating Matt by 8 seconds and got first in my age group (20-24). They actually gave me a medal and it was all pretty cool. Overall I placed 25th and in all the guys I placed 22nd out of 112. Do for being my first tri ever I feel pretty good with the results.
The swim took me 12 min 44 sec for 750 M. My first transition 2:16. The bike took me 39:50 to go 12.4 miles. My second transition only took 39 seconds because all I had to do was get off my bike, I still don't have cycling shoes. The run 3.1 mile run I managed to do in 23:55 going at a 7:43 min/mile pace. Total time was 1:19:22. My goal was 1:15:00 but I'm still okay with my time. Really though it was a lot of fun and I'm psyched to do another race.If you click on the pic it will get a little bigger.

Just 2 Miles to Go

Last Friday I ran further than I have ever ran and went 9.4 miles, after doing so my ankle was kind of jacked up and I decided to take a few days off to recover; by doing this however I lost some of my drive for running. Three days passed and I finally motivated myself, against my will, to get out and run on Tuesday, I went 3.9 miles and the run hurt the whole way. The next day I decided to do the same run and it seemed to go a little better. Yesterday I came to the conclusion that I needed to stop pampering myself because I only have a little over 2 weeks until my sprint tri so I decided to go for a 5.9 mile run that I've done a bunch of times. I headed out at a decent pace and decided to run the easy way, hitting up all the hills first leaving me a relatively flat 3 mile finish. The run was going well and I was actually feeling pretty loose, the sun was out and there was a cool breeze to keep me from getting too hot, in short it was a great day for running. When I had almost reached mile 4 I realized that there seemed to be some road construction up ahead. I wasn't too worried because from past experience I figured I could just run through the construction zone and no one would care; turns out though that they had totally closed the road! Once I got up to where they had closed the road off I was stopped by some construction dude who seriously looked like he thought he was a body guard for someone special. I asked him if I could just run through to the other side (200 yards away) really quickly as I was almost done with my run. He apologized and explained that due to the dangerous machinery I wouldn't be able to pass and would have to find another way. "Dangerous Machinery", ie: 1 dump truck, a front end loader, a couple pick-up trucks, and a bunch of guys standing around doing nothing.
I thought I could possible woo him with my amazing convincing skills and explaining that if I were to just run back the way I'd come it would end up being an 8 mile killer hill run and that if he let me go through I'd be careful and be done in with my run in a matter of minutes, just two miles to go. He looked at me like he really didn't care, kinda smirked and said, "Wow, 8 miles huh? That would be a pretty decent run then!" The over-weight construction dude obviously wasn't a runner of any kind and I could then tell I was only wasting my time.
I really didn't want to run the hills again because they would have killed me, so I took off down a side street in hopes of finding a way to the other side of the freeway where I needed to be. Yeah the section they had closed off was actually an underpass below the freeway to the only road that led back to my house.
After running down a road that ran parallel with the I-15 I finally found an overpass that crossed the freeway and after making a couple wrong turns down dead end streets I finally made it back to my route and finished the run. I ended up having to run an extra 2.5 miles so instead of my 5.9 mile run I ended up going 8.4 thanks to the fat construction dude, but I guess it all ended up okay. The moral of the story: watch out for road construction! It can totally change your run.

April

With less than two months to go before my first event in Salt Lake I decided going into April that I really needed to pick it up with my workouts and start increasing my efforts in order to get in shape. April was a good month for me and I feel like I was able to take some big steps of progression. I was able to get in over 50 miles of run training, doubled my swim, increased the bike by a little too, and incorporated weight lifting into the mix also. Lucky for me I have no social life cause otherwise all this would be affecting it. On a typical workout day I spend around three hours training, which feels really good to know that I'm actually doing something again. With any other sport like baseball, football, or anything you easily spend that much time training so I felt like I wasn't doing enough when I would go run for 30 minutes and be done, but now that I've got a good base and can do some serious training sessions I just feel good again.
Yesterday I ran the farthest I ever have at any one time, running 9.4 miles. I did it at an 8:39 min/mile pace taking me 1:21:30 and felt really good, lately though I've had this pain when I run on the inside of my left ankle, while running yesterday it would sometimes hurt but wasn't that bad....I should have iced it but didn't so it hurts pretty bad today and is kinda swollen. Really though I'm not too worried about it as it doesn't seem that serious.
I'm excited for the races I have that are coming up and hope I'll be able to do well in them. I'm not too worried about the sprint because I know I'm already in shape for it and that it will just be a matter of working out the kinks and nerves of never doing a tri before. The whole not having a bike issue has got me a bit nervous I'm really not sure how I will deal with that yet, and I still need to find a wetsuit to swim in....which I've never done before, I don't know how it will affect my stroke. All in all though I feel better about it all now than I did before April.

Fear

I've decided that I've going to be doing the Portland Marathon this year and because of that I'm started running on a more frequent basis, but the last couple of runs I have noticed a little pain in my left ankle. I really don't think this is anything to be too worried about as the pain comes and goes and in never that intense, just to be safe though I took the day off and have only stretched the ankle and haven't really put any stress on it, tomorrow I'll try it out for 6 miles and see how it goes. Like I said I'm not really that concerned about it but it makes me think and leads me to my biggest athletic fear, what if I actually get injured while working out and it sets me back weeks? I really don't have that kind of time to recover and rebuild. I guess there really isn't anything I can do if it happens but it's definitely one of my fears. Another fear is that I will come down with some kind of sickness at some point with only weeks or worse days before an event. That would basically have the same effect as an injury.
Then there is the ever present "super-virus" fear. First let me explain what the super-virus is. Genetically Doug (my brother) seems to be plagued and I managed to catch it in a foreign country. Basically its when you get diarrhea for no apparent reason at all. Laugh or gag all you want but this is a legitimate fear. If this were to happen in the middle of a race what do I do? Odds are it won't happen but odds are that planes won't crash either but it happens. One such experience happened to me yesterday in fact (not a plane crash). I had about half a mile left on a 6 mile run and was feeling pretty good when all of the sudden my stomach starting turning for no apparent reason. With 50 yards to go it was as if someone hit the emergency release button and I was serious trouble and now pain. It took all I had left in me to luckily make it to the restrooms that were located at the park I had ran from, but what if this would have happened about a mile earlier....not pretty. So you can see why this is an actual fear for me.
Well I guess if something happens whether torn something or something less sanitary I'll just have to deal with it when it happens....life's kind of that way.

Just some quick stats

After all I'm a baseball fan so here are some of my running stats
Miles ran:
February 20.4
March 30.0
April 25.3
Total 75.7
I bought a pair of running shoes March 11th and they cost me $92, so they have really cost me $1.81 per mile. Unfortunately I haven't done as good of a job with my swimming and biking stats but they basically would reflect the same thing, increasing monthly. I expect my running total for April to be at least 40 miles.

Still Here

So its been quite a while since my last entry but that doesn't mean that I haven't been working out and training for triathlons. In fact I've been doing some pretty decent workouts and I really feel like I'm making some progress. Today I actually signed up for two triathlons: the Stansbury Park Sprint Tri and the Burley Idaho Annual Spudman, which is an Olympic size race. The Stansbury Park is on May 23rd and consists of a 750 meter swim in open water in a man-made lake, 20 kilometer bike ride, and then a 5 kilometer run. This will be my first time at an actual race type triathlon and just thinking about it makes me kind of nervous, but I'm really looking forward to it. Some challenges I have to face besides actually doing the race are, what I will use for a bike, and what I will use as gear for the event ie: wetsuit, ect.
The Spudman is the last Saturday in July and consists of a 1500 meter downstream swim in a river, 24.9 mile bike, and a 6.2 mile run to kill you off at the end. By July I hope to be in really good shape and kind of have a decent idea as to what I'm doing.
I haven't really decided yet but I think I'd really like to do the Portland Marathon this year too, I just have to see if I can fit training for it and the actual race into my schedule. But those are my plans so far, the two tri's are a go already.