I've been terrible at maintaining my blog this season. What can I say? Sometimes life just gets in the way. To say that 2012 has been stressful is an understatement. As I mentioned in a previous post, my parents' house caught fire the night before the Mach Tenn Tri in June. My company was also recently sold and my "fun" second job in freelance sports production started taking up a lot more time which took up many of my weekends. Suddenly, many of my workouts went from trying to hit specific times and distances to just getting in workouts when I could.
But that being said, I still had some good race results this year (Thank You FTP Coaching!!). I got 2nd AG at the Old Hickory Tri, won my AG at the Hustle for the House 5k, took 20 minutes off my previous Olympic tri time, and finally broke an hour for a 10k. I'm particularly happy my running is improving. I, by far, worked on that the most this season, and it's exciting to see my times drop. I'm still not "fast," but I'm faster than I was and I'm OK with that. Baby steps.
All of these races were to prepare me for my "A" race, which is coming up this weekend - a redo of the Augusta Ironman 70.3. Last year, I had great swim, a great bike and then got some sort of heat-related illness on the run. No details here, but let's just say it wasn't fun and I missed my planned finish time by about 45 minutes. I wanted to return to Augusta and redeem myself.
Kicker is that, now the race is here, I feel like I should be more excited. I would love to be all "I'm going to CRUSH this race," but I'm not. I don't know if it's because I've done this race before, so I don't have the "first time race jitters" or if the year's events have just worn me down. I think I'll get more excited once I'm down there. Right now, I'm just kind of like "Yeah, I'm doing a half-ironman on Sunday. Whatever." Not that I don't know it'll be hard and painful. I'm just not nervous that it'll be hard and painful. It's a weird feeling.
The good news is that I think I'm more fit than I was last year. So I guess that question is going to be what is stronger? The mind or the body? My body gave out last year. Can I get my head in the race this year to pull off a better result? Baring some crazy event like me being eaten by a gator (WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT THE GATORS LAST YEAR?!!), I'll finish the distance, but will I mentally be willing suffer enough to get a better time? Check back in on Tuesday to find out.
