Time to Get Serious

   Play time if over.  Time to start REALLY training.  Don't get me wrong - Andrew and Jessica at FTP have been kicking my butt during the off-season - and it's been paying off.  I've gotten a PR in a recent 5k AND I'm getting faster in my swim.  It's just that I haven't really been training with an end-goal in mind; so therefore no detailed spreadsheets counting down the weeks to a race and no daily diary of how I felt after each workout.  A part of me loves the freedom in this.  Just to work out and then race and see what happens.  But the detail-orientated spreadsheet geek in me is kind of freaking out.  Especially with Augusta slowly sneaking up on me.  So it's time to get serious now.   I'm not sure what that will entail yet, but I'm sure it will include spreadsheets.

   On a side note, Dudley, me and the crew from FTP rode the CRAM (Clarksville Rotary Annual Metric) on Saturday.  This ride (along with it's sister ride on Memorial Day) is somewhat legendary because it's FLAT, FLAT, FLAT.  Though it's named after the metric - there is also a century ride.  People travel from all over the country to try to break a 4:00 century.  If fact, I think the national PR for a century was done on this course.  However, we only did the metric - which was enough on a 95-degree day.  Good news is that I felt great.  The longest I had ridden this year was 40-miles, so I wasn't sure how 62 was going to feel.  But it was really a lot of fun.  Had a great open-water swim on Sunday, too.  Maybe only swam 1,500 meters, but that really helps with my mental state.

Next up - Mach Tenn!  YIKES

Catching Up

Tri season is here and I need to catch up on this blog.  Since I last wrote, I've only competed a one race - the Country Music Half-Marathon.  The race was fine.  It, as usual, was crazy hot.  In fact, I had never seen a race where more people needed serious medical attention.  It was worse than Augusta, which was technically about 15 degrees warmer.  Fortunately though, I haven't heard of any serious injuries.
Here are my FB observations from the race:

CMHM Observation #1 - iPods and large races don't mix. I can't tell you how many people almost took me out today because they were futzing with their iPods, or were in their own worlds and not paying attention to where they were going.
CMHM Observation #2 - White spandex shorts probably shouldn't be worn by anyone.
CMHM Observation #3 - Some people will do ANYTHING to get in front of a race photographer. Really? There are about 50 of them along the course. Is it that important to get your picture taken by
EVERY ONE of them?
CMHM Observation #4 - This is more of a suggestion than an observation... When hiring people to shuttle runners back to the start - make sure the driver knows how to get there. My driver got lost going from LP Field to Centennial Park.
CMHM Observation #5 - Every year while I'm running this race (3x so far) I think, "I'm never doing this again." And then when I get home I think, "That wasn't so bad." :-) Thanks to everyone who ran with me over the past few months training for this thing, and a huge thanks to the volunteers. Congrats to all of the runners. See you next year.

And now on to new things... I met 4x Kona Champion Chrissie Wellington this week! She was in town for a book signing so me, Dudley and about 300 other tri-geeks went up to ACME Multisports to hear her speak and buy a book. She seemed very nice, although I had a hard time relating to her because she's SO GOOD. She's never lost an Ironman distance race! It almost became comical as her achievements were listed - she almost wins every race she enters. I KNOW she trains extremely hard and is VERY focused, but the way she described her races was almost "I woke up one morning and decided to race an Ironman - and I WON." She's a legend. It was very cool to meet her.

Dudley and me with Chrissie

The FTP crew with Chrissie

Now, as far as what's next - I have the Mach Tenn tri next week. It'll be interesting to see how I do compared to last year. I know more of what to expect, but my training is so-so. The Preds season really cut into my training time. I tried to fit in what I could, but I know I didn't swim as much as I should have, or ride for that matter. However, thanks to FTP and my buddies at East Nasty, my running is pretty strong - for me anyway. I did two sub 8-minute miles at Tuesday AM training, which I've never done previously. How that will translate to a tri - I have no idea. We'll see!

 

Rock & Roll USA Half

   This has been a month in the works - I'm a little behind.  Here, finally, is my recap the Rock & Roll USA Half-Marathon, which was March 17th.  We (Dudley, my parents and me) started our morning at 6am and headed down to the Metro, which was the suggested transportation from the Race Directors.  They made it very clear that parking was limited and racers would need to Metro down.  Being that I'm from the DC area, taking the Metro was a no-brainer.  There was a stop right at the Start / Finish line.  SO much easier than driving downtown....unless the train breaks down.  Which it did.  Apparently, so many people got on the Metro at the stops leading into the race area, that the doors of the train broke.  So here we were sitting on a VERY crowded Metro train, just waiting for things to get fixed.  We were on the train for about 20 minutes before an announcement came over stating that we have to evacuate the train.  It is now 7:30.  The race starts at 8:00.  No announcement about if another train is coming, or when this one is going to get rolling again.  Just "Get off the train."  So we do.
   Immediately, about 1/3 of the runners start running towards the escalators leading out of the Metro station.  I know from the signs that we're at the Smithsonian station, but unfortunately, I have no idea where that is in relation to where the race start.  All I know it that's somewhere behind the Capitol.  (And when I lived here, "somewhere behind the Capitol" is NOT a place where you'd want to get lost.)  After a short discussion with my parents, Dudley and I decided to make a run for it.  That we would just follow the other runners the 2.5 miles to the start.
   So we exit the station and it looks like a scene from an Armageddon movie.  Runners are everywhere trying to figure out where to go.  They're pounding on cabs, trying to get their attention.  They're running across busy street to get to the DC Rental Bikes.  It's nuts.  Again, it's now about 7:35.  I figure we'll be able to cover the 2.5 miles in time for the race to start as long as we hustle.  It'll just be a good warm-up, right?
   Wrong.  I'm not sure who the person was that told me it's 2.5 miles to the race start, but they had no idea what they were talking about.  We walked for about 20 minutes and had just passed the Capitol when we saw someone ahead of us finally hail a cab.  We started yelling and were able to get them to wait for us.  We still had about another 2.5 miles to go!  We never would have made it if we had tried to walk the entire way.  We pulled up to the start at about 8:10.  The race had already started, but we were in Corral 16 so we had a little time to spare.  We waited in line forever for the Port-a-John (all the while a volunteer was yelling at us to get in our corrals) and then moved to the race start, where we jumped in with Corral 20.  What made me mad here is that there was a REALLY long line for the Port-a-Johns right at when you got to the race, but there were about 30 that were not being used at all just out of sight, around the corner.  REALLY?  Why not move those so people knew to use them?
   Anyway, we finally get started.  It was a BEAUTIFUL day in Washington, D.C.  with a clear, bright blue sky.  Unfortunately, it got a little hot on the route, but not too bad.  All was well until about mile 4 when I needed to use the Port-a-John again.  Nerves from the crazy morning, I guess.  I saw one behind a band stage, but there were about 15 people already in line.  I knew there were two about a mile up the road, so decided continue on to there.  BIG MISTAKE.  We waited in line for TWENTY MINUTES.  It's one of those situations where you're damned if you wait and damned if you don't.  We thought about moving forward to the next set, but we didn't know how far up the road they were.  (They weren't marked on the map or at every mile like most big races.)  It turns out the next set wasn't until around mile 8, so it was good we stopped, but it just KILLED our time.   All together, I counted SIX Port-a-Johns on the course.  No where near enough for the 25,000 runners there.
   Other than that, the race itself was pretty standard.  I felt OK.  I was pretty much ready for the race to be done at mile 10.  Dudley did great.  I guess my Couch-to-Half Marathon training program worked OK for him!!  Overall, I think it was a good race, on a beautiful day in one of my favorite cities.  It just would have been nice to know what our race would have been like without the Metro madness and the twenty minute delay in the middle of the race!

Ouch...

Had my first post-Half run yesterday.  Wow - that was hard.  Only three miles, but my legs felt like lead.  I tried to do a few hill repeats just for kicks and they didn't go well AT ALL.  I thought I'd be recovered better by now.  Guess not.  Hopefully, I'll be OK when I join the East Nasty 11-mile training run on Sunday.  Should be interesting.

On a different note, I'm trying to pay more attention to my eating habits.  I'd love to drop about 10 pounds by the Country Music Half Marathon.  We'll see how it goes.  I'm not really "dieting," but trying to be more careful about snacking.  Anyway, this is a yummy recipe Dudley made last night.  Seems pretty lean. Check it out.

http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/chicken-roasted-sweet-potato-salad-00000000008027/index.html

It's Been a While

   So, it's been a while since I've posted.  The good news is that it's been due to laziness in blogging rather than activity.  I've been BUSY.  While full tri training hasn't kicked in yet, I've been steadily training for half-marathons since January.  I even ran one - the Birmingham Half in February.  That will definitely go down as the COLDEST race I've done so far.  It was 20 degrees with a 13 degree wind chill at the start.
   A week later, I had the coldest training day ever.  This time it was around 30, but there was rain, which turned into snow, then turned back into rain.  It was a 12-mile training run, which was fine for the first six.  That's when the chills got to me and I just froze the the remainder of the run.  Not a whole lot of fun.
  But now, it's mid-March and it's warm, and the plants are blooming and it's LIGHT again for our night runs, which is fantastic.  I was getting sick of running in the dark all the time.
  Which brings me to today.  I'm currently sitting in my parent's kitchen in Northern Virginia.  Tomorrow is the Rock&Roll Nation's Capital USA Half Marathon.  This has been the race that I've trained for since January.  I'm physically ready... except for one thing.  My toe.
  I'm not sure what the heck happened because everything was fine for my six-mile run on Sunday.  No pain at all.  No pain on Monday (rest day) either.  Then Tuesday, the top of my foot started to hurt.  I figured it was the heels I was wearing.  We went for a 5.5 miler after work, and while it hurt, I was able to finish.  I figured it was just a one-day thing.
  But it wasn't.  It's now Friday and my foot still hurts.  I haven't been running in hopes that it would heal, and it has a bit.  I can walk, but I still feel "it."  I'm REALLY hoping it's not a stress fracture, though it has the symptoms of one (WebMD is not my friend).  My thought with this is that if it is a stress fracture, I'm out for six-weeks no matter what.  I may as well try to run the race tomorrow.  If it gets too painful, I'll pull out.  But I'm hoping I wake up tomorrow with no pain and ready to kick butt! I'm especially excited because my husband is running this with me tomorrow.  We haven't run a race together in about two years.  I hope I can do it!

What's Next

  I've taken a pretty decent sized break from this blog, and unfortunately from training.  It wasn't really on purpose.  I took about two weeks off after Augusta to recoup and rest.  I was pretty burnt out after 5 months of training.
  But then I caught a cold and I've been fighting that for the past two weeks.  That hasn't been fun AT ALL and I haven't been able to train.  I feel like my 5 months of training have completely gone down the tubes.
   Not that I'm feeling better, it's time for me to get off my ass and training again.  I know I have several goals for next season.  1) PR in the Half-Marathon.  My PR is 2:13 so anything better than that would be fantastic.  I would LOVE to break 2:00.  Would. LOVE. To.  My goal race for that is the Tom King Half in March.  It's completely flat and would be a good course for it.  Kicker is that it's on a greenway so the potential to get caught up in traffic is likely.  But still going for it.  
   Also on the list- the Birmingham Half as a warm-up in February and the Rock&Roll Half in DC as a "fun race."  It's the week after Tom King so I won't be in any shape to run it.  But it's in my hometown so I'm really looking forward to it.
   As far as tris - I'm thinking about the New Orleans 70.3 in April.  Might be too much with all of the Halfs, but we'll see.  Definitely going to hit either REV 3 in Knoxville and/or Memphis in May triathlons.
    I'm doing something really crazy tomorrow and registering for the lottery for the NYC marathon.  I have no desire to run a marathon EVER - but would LOVE to run NYC.  So I figure, what the heck?!  Enter the lottery and see what happens!  :-)
   Training starts tomorrow!!  See you on the roads!

Augusta 70.3 - Race Report

   After five months of training, it was hard to believe the race was finally here!!  The weekend started bright and early Friday morning when we met up with my friend Holland for the drive down to Augusta.  We wanted to check in Friday so we could just relax Saturday and figure out what the heck we were doing on race day Sunday.  Unfortunately, that didn't happen.  Traffic was bad so we didn't make the 6:00 check-in deadline.
  Check-in didn't open on Saturday until 11:00 so we got there about 10:30 hoping to beat the line.  About 300 other people apparently had the same idea because the line wrapped about 3/4 around the Marriott convention center floor.  Fortunately, the line moved fast and we were able to talk to a few athletes who had done the race previously, and we had a lot of our newbie questions answered (like when do we put on our wetsuits?  And what do we do with them when we're done?  Ahh - the innocence of inexperience.)
  Check-in went fine.  We learned that over 3,200 people had registered for the race, making it the largest Half-Ironman ever.  Which made me feel pretty good because I figured with that many people, I wouldn't finish dead last!!
   After check-in was the expo.  Ironman stuff was, obviously, everywhere.  They're brilliant marketers, those IM people.  When you first walked in, you saw a poster with the IM logo on it.  Pretty basic poster. Nothing too special.  But then you looked closer and you could see that all of the competitor's names were in the logo!!  How awesome is that?!!  So, of course I had to get it.  BUT THEN - I saw the T-SHIRT that had all of our names on it.  Of course, this was $15 more than the poster.  But I had to get it anyway.  I did put the poster back though.  :-)

   After that, we went down to the dock to check out the water and then went to go set up our bikes.  Every wonder what 3,200 bikes looks like?

Well - there you go.

   After a good dinner, all that was left to do was to get a good night's rest.  I actually thought that was going to happen until I woke up at 3:00 am FREAKING OUT.  Seriously.  Total freak out.  Didn't ever go back to sleep either.   I wasn't too worried about it though.  I had so much adrenaline going that my lack of sleep wasn't going to hurt my race at all.

   The alarm finally rang and we packed up and headed down to the race.  

Let's go racing!!

   Augusta has a set-up where the transition is a mile away from swim start.  So Dudley dropped us off at transition where we set up all of our stuff.  Most of the women setting up around me were first-time 70.3ers as well.  It was great to talk to them and realize we were all pretty much in the same boat - as in clueless.

   Next thing we knew, we were on the bus heading down to the swim start.   The weather was scheduled to be over 90 that day, but it was in the 70s at that point.  Fortunately, it was swim-suit legal with the water temperature being around 72.  One of the things I'll remember from the start of the race was how the women were acting prior to the race.  The men all went first so for a while there were about 1,500 women waiting to start racing.  The song "I Love Rock & Roll" came on and women just went nuts dancing, cheering and clapping to the music.  For some reason, I don't think the men did that prior to their race.  :-)

All ready to go!!  

  This was my first wave start so I was a little intimidated.  I've heard horror stories of people getting kicked, pushed and dunked underwater at wave starts.  Being one of about 200 women in my group at the start didn't help my anxiety either.  But I had already made a mental plan of my race to just take it easy for the swim and the bike portions of the race, so when it was time, I just eased into the water and treaded water until the start went off.   Then once the airhorn blew, I paused about 30 seconds to let the thrashing of the water subside.  No need for me to get hit and panic right at the beginning.  Then I started to swim.  The wetsuit helped my confidence greatly.  It's so buoyant!  Plus, the swim was down-river so the current was with us.  I just got in my groove and swam.  I didn't push myself, but I noticed I was starting to see swim caps from the groups that went before me, so I was happy about that.  

  I swam off course a little and got covered in what can best be described as seaweed.  But we were in a river so does that make it riverweed?  Anyway, there was a ton of it.  I'm happy to report I didn't suffer from the freakouts like I did in Chattanooga.  I just kept doing my thing until I saw the exit buoys.   I was definitely ready to get out of the water though.

   Next up was the ride.  Again, sticking with my plan, I was just going to cruise this part.  I'd been told by many people who had a lot more experience than me to ignore the instinct to hammer at the beginning of the ride.  Sure, I'd get passed, but I'd catch them at the end.  And that's exactly what happened.  At the beginning, I felt like I was getting passed by everyone!  But I just kept reminding myself that I still had a half-marathon to go after this ride so I needed to chill and enjoy the ride.  And I did.  Fortunately, I didn't have any mechanicals or other mishaps.  I just rode at a pretty even pace for 56 miles.  Other than a mild headache, it felt really good too.  I even remember thinking "I could do this all day!  I don't know why people think Half-Ironmans are so tough!"  Famous last words...

Coming into transition.  Hi Dudley!!  

  

So I come into T2, rack my bike and get ready to run.  I have a plan for the run as well.  Start out at about an 11:30 pace for the first three miles, then bump up my time 30 seconds every three miles after that.  If I did that, I'd end with a 10:00 pace.  Unfortunately, for the first time, my plan had a wrench thrown in it.  I could tell almost immediately that something wasn't going "right" with my run.  It wasn't my legs, though they were tired, they weren't cramping or anything.  But that headache I had in my ride was getting worse and I just didn't feel good.  I immediately changed plans to a nine-minute run / one-minute walk routine to try to get into a groove.  That never happened though.  I went from not feeling "right" to flat-out feeling sick.  I thought maybe I was dehydrated as at this point it was over 90 degrees and about 95 percent humidity.  So the first rest area I hit, I took some Ironman energy drink and poured water over my head.  Didn't help.  I then just felt full and sick.  So my plan then changed to run as far as I can until I feel sick, then walk.  Once that went away, start running again.

Me.  Concentrating on just putting one foot in front of the other.

   That plan worked until Mile 4, when I actually threw up.  I've heard of people throwing up in races, but they usually make it sound like they're bad-asses pushing their bodies to the limit until they hurl.  I'm not that much of a bad-ass.  Nope.  I think mine was a heat-related illness.  It was kind of funny because I kept thinking "surely I'm not going to throw up.  I'm not going fast!"  But sure enough, I did.  

   I was hoping I would feel better afterwards, but I didn't really.  Have you ever tried to run after puking?  It's not easy.  I could walk fine, but every time I tried to run, I would feel nauseous, so I'd have to stop.  I continued with my "run until I feel sick" plan, at some points only running for about 30 seconds before having to walk, until mile 11.5 when I got sick again.  Bad.  To the extent that runners asked me if I needed medial attention.  I just pushed them off.  Are you kidding?  I've been puking for the last 11.5 miles!  You think medics are going to let me to continue?  NO WAY was I not going to finish this race.

   Fortunately, once I puked that last time, I felt a little better.  Not great, but better.  I could actually run a bit longer than 30 seconds at a time.  After what seemed like an eternity, I turned the corner to the finish line.  People were lining the finishing chute clapping and yelling.  It was very cool.  I was a complete dork and threw up my hands like I won the whole damn thing.  I didn't care though.  I was SO happy to be finished.  Not just because I felt like crap, but because this had been a five-month goal achieved.  It felt pretty freakin' cool.

  

   So there you have it.  I was a 1/2 hour past the time I'd hoped for my finish because of my illness, but I still think that's OK.  I'm bummed because had I known I was going to be sick for the run, I would have killed myself in the swim and bike.  Maybe I could have still made my time goal of 6:15.   Who knows?  I'm thrilled I finished and, overall, very happy with the experience.   And the good news is that I wasn't sore AT ALL the next day, which leads me to believe that my conditioning was there - that it was definitely the heat that got to me.  I'm already looking forward to next year to so I can beat my time!!   Good news is that it shouldn't be that hard!!   

Augusta 70.3 times:

Swim: 30.09   71st out of 180 who finished (over 30 dropped out)

TI: 5:25

Bike: 2:59:09  63rd

T2: 2:39

Run:  3:06:02  136th!!  (Oh well - I at least finished!!!)  

Total time: 6:43:34

Thank you to my ever supporting husband Dudley and to Holland for talking me into this craziness!!   Also thanks to my parents and all of my friends for their support and well-wishes!