I always forget that I have blogs. Meh.

Philly Tri sprint in three days. Tapering in progress.

I’d update more, but I’m really, really hungry…

Tomorrow is my last Monday-morning strength training before the triathlon. As of Saturday, tapering begins. This is off of a training plan the coach sent out for team members who did a race last weekend. I had to adjust it to bit since I race next Saturday (the 26th), but I think it still did a good job. I definitely miss having a coach on Mondays; I feel like I got a much harder workout with him than I do on my own despite following his workout guide (it feels like it’s missing something, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what).

On Saturday, I did an 80-minute bike ride around my town plus a 10-minute transition run. There are a few okay hills around here, though the one road that has the BEST rolling hills is terrible for riding–poor visibility, narrow road, poorly lit in the morning/at night. The wind has kept me working, though! It’s always really nice on my way out when I get a super sweet tailwind, but once I start circling back, I really start to feel it. It’d be nice if the wind could just disappear for the triathlon, but if this past week’s wind and rain are any indication, next week will be just as rough.

The 10-minute transition run went well. It was supposed to be at “RPE = 3/4”–which means “rate of perceived exertion 3 or 4 out of a scale of 1-10 with 1 being very easy and 10 being very hard.” I’ve come to realize, though, that I have a terrible time judging what speed I’m moving after I get off my bike. Every moment feels SUPER slow. I pushed too hard and ended up doing a mile in ~10 minutes with a little to spare. I was tired and had a side cramp when I got back, but after resting for a few minutes, I actually felt pretty good. I guess my best bet is to ACTUALLY take it easy as soon as I get off the bike and let my body adjust to running instead of cycling. It’s nice that I finished my mile in under 10 minutes after a hard ride, but if I’m going to run another 2.1 after that, I would do better to ease into it and then pick it up rather than burn out. Besides, after swimming, I’m definitely going to be tired.

I also had my first experience with Gu. I didn’t want to try it out for the first time on race day and risk getting sick, so I did it on Saturday. It tasted TERRIBLE–good lord! I had the strawberry banana flavor even though I know that I don’t like banana-flavored things. Overall, I think it definitely helped; despite tasting terrible, I managed to get (and keep) it down, and it’s probably the only reason I was able to run afterwards (my transition run practices have always been terrible up till now). I bought Clif Shot Blocks as well, so I’m going to test them out on my Wednesday ride/run. I’ve had them before on my bike, so I don’t think they’ll be a problem for cycling, but I’m wondering how my stomach will feel if I try running with them there.

I’m definitely getting nervous and excited–probably an equal mix of both. I keep dreaming about triathlons. In the last tri dream, I had an excellent swim, but the bike ride was inside a building, and you had to get off your bike and go behind a curtain at one point, but someone had taken down the green flag that marked the curtain spot before I got there and I was pissed. The run was an eating contest–something involving mashed potatoes and sausage. I was so angry and planned to complain to the triathlon organizers for giving me such a poor first triathlon experience.

Compared to that dream, the real race will be a piece of cake, right?

I talked to a friend yesterday about transitioning. She’s a real triathlete, not like me–she’s done tons before and has more coming up this year. I pretty much had no idea what happens during transitions since my chance to watch/participate in the NYU team’s only triathlon of the year, so I realized I better find out soon what happens.

You put your stuff on a towel? Really? And Gu. I should eat some of that sometime while I’m on my bike to figure out if I can handle it. Socks and shoes, right–I need socks. And then I was reading online afterwards and I guess there are different swim caps based on your wave. Plus I think I have to go to some kind of pre-race meeting either Friday or Saturday morning. But there’s likely time allowed for a swim warmup, which is good because I can have a few minutes to practice my breathing before the race starts. Just thinking about breathing is making my heart flutter right now.

And I know I’m being paranoid and overreacting. I know how nuts-o that last paragraph sounded. But I can swim, bike, and run all on their own. The triathlon is when I learn if I can do them together*…

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*Okay, I know I can bike and run together. I’ve done that in practice. It’s the doing-it-while-under-pressure deal that has me worried….

Back at NYU, the tri team met every Friday for a swim. Since I was so pathetically bad, I also went every Sunday on my own. I was never the best swimmer. In October, I couldn’t even swim one lap. But by the end of April, I was up to 800m in a row, and it was awesome. I never went particularly fast, and sometimes I freaked out and had to calm myself back down, but somehow I still enjoyed it.

Now that I’m back home and four weeks away from my triathlon, I’m worried about my swimming. I can’t find a pool here that has lanes open for swimming. There’s the high school pool, but it’s only open on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons for two hours at a time, and it’s open swim, not lanes, so it’d be a mess to navigate. The local YMCA is so freaking expensive wtf and there’s no way I can afford it. There are two gyms nearby, and one of them is much cheaper than the Y, but it still costs money that I don’t have. And there’s a local aquatics club, but again, necesito dinero que no tengo.

I should just go to the high school and at least play around in the water. After all, I’m more nervous about my comfort in the water than I am about being able to swim the distance. The thing is?

I hate the high school.

Hate it, hate it, hate it. I hated it when I was there, and I still do. My dad graduated from the same school 32 years before me, and he loved it. He’s even the alumni president. But I didn’t like it at all. I counted down the days till I could escape to college, and now that I’m stuck back home again, I’m counting down the days till I get a job and can move permanently. I don’t want to go into the high school alone.

I also don’t know where the pool is. I know it’s somewhere in the back of the school, but where? I took swim lessons as a very small child there, so it’s not like I remember much more than “back of the school.” Do I need a swim cap? Will I look dumb if I wear my goggles? Will people get annoyed if I’m swimming laps? What if I’m the only one there and they shut down the pool? What if I enter at the wrong place and school security comes after me? I’m not in the mood for being embarrassed, especially not by any of the cranky teachers/security that walk the halls.

I’m such a baby sometimes. I want to move out and get a job on my own… but I can’t even work up the guts to explore my old school by myself.

Get up, get up!

I suppose, since this is a first post, I should give some background or something, but those kinds of posts are really boring and are sort of  useless if there aren’t any readers. I probably can’t just launch straight into story-telling mode without SOME background, so the basic rundown is:

1. I’m a 22-year-old girl (the term woman still doesn’t feel quite right)
2. I’m a recent (read: within the past month) NYU graduate
3. I joined the NYU Triathlon Team in October 2009
4. My first triathlon is in 4 weeks (sprint distance)
5. I’m living at home in PA with my parents until some wonderful soul hires me and gets me out of this boring town
6. I’m not exactly the best athlete in the world.

It’s not that I don’t try to be athletic. I did mixed martial arts growing up and loved it. It’s just that when I hit college and stopped working out, my body was all, “Boy, this relaxing thing is nice!” and now it’s accustomed to sitting around and doing nothing. I’m working on it, bit by bit, but it certainly is a long and interesting journey.

Now that the boring stuff is over….

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Back in November, when I was barely a month into the tri team training, I came home for Thanksgiving Break determined to run. The holiday meant we would miss our Friday swim, and the coach wanted us to get out and keep moving. I didn’t have a pool available, but I could certainly go for a run. I hadn’t heard of any Turkey Trots around here, so I decided just to go around the neighborhood.

I knew of the website walkjogrun.net, and I wanted to determine how far around my neighborhood was. There are two ways around:

1) Follow the main road all the way–the short route.
2) Follow the main road to a split, take the extra loop around the back to hit a hill, and continue back on the main road–the long route.

I measured one of the routes, found that it came out to .98 miles. I didn’t write down which route it was since I thought it would be easy to remember. I ran two loops on Thanksgiving Day. It was fun, and I was proud since I couldn’t even run ONE mile just a month before. Over winter and spring breaks, I ran again. I couldn’t remember which route was the mile-long distance, but I was confident it was the longer one.

Cut to yesterday, June 3rd. I had just decided that after my triathlon was over, I would train for a half-marathon. I’ve done a 10k race and a 5-mile race, and I’m starting to get the racing bug. I looked up a training plan, and I decided to do one of the runs it suggested:  easy run, 2 miles, 11:47 pace. My 10k was at a 9:50, and my 5-miler was at 9:41, but hey, if the computer planner wanted me to run at 11:47, I was totally cool with it. Am I lazy? Yes. Do I care? Only sometimes.

I set out for my run. My pace felt really fast for a while, and I thought, “Wow, I bet I’ll have my fastest mile yet!” At the split, I continued on the long route. When I hit the hill in the back of the neighborhood, I checked my watch.

8:47.

“That can’t be right,” I thought to myself. “I must have slowed down a lot. I bet it’s this hill. I should go harder.”

So I did, making my feet move faster and trying to relax my forever-tense upper body. I got back on the main road and felt confident, knowing I only had a bit more to go before the mile mark. I checked my watch.

11:40.

“What?!” I was mad. Was I really that slow? Maybe races made me go faster because there were other people to push me. Maybe I was so horribly lazy that I couldn’t even motivate myself to run an 11:47 mile on my own.

When I hit the starting point, I turned around and headed back the opposite way. Maybe if I went down the hill instead of up I could still make it in time. Maybe the hill was really steep. Yeah, that was it. I motored back to the hill and let myself fly down it, hearing the coach’s voice in my head: “Don’t let up on the downhills. You’ll pass a lot of people that way!” By the time I made it back to the front of the neighborhood, I knew I must be well above my goal. I looked at my watch.

I had 4 minutes to make it in time. I pushed, and I pushed… and I failed.

I was so disheartened when I got back to the house. I sat on the floor stretching, petting my dog. At least he didn’t care if I was fast or not. He just liked that my shirt was smelly. That’s love, that is. As I was scratching his ears, I glared at my mug of watered-down Gatorade and wondered what I was possibly doing wrong. I thought back to a conversation I had with my sister two weeks before. She was training for her first 5k, and we went running together.

“You have to do the hill in the back and run the long way around to make it a mile,” I told her as she warmed up. “Otherwise it’s not a full mile.”

“Are you sure?” she asked as we trotted up the street. “I measured it online. I thought it was a mile.”

“I measured it too,” I said, waving my hand. “It’s, like, .98 miles if you go all the way around, and then you have to do a loop around the block.”

“Oh,” she said, and that was that. Of course I was right. After all, I was the athletic one, wasn’t I?

After remembering this conversation, I grabbed my mug and headed upstairs. I went back to walkjogrun.net and redid the loop. Maybe the map was wrong. Maybe my neighborhood was much bigger than it thought it was. Sure, the site used Google Maps, but maybe Google was wrong. It was possible, right?

I quickly measured the distance again. Once I had made the final click, I looked at the distance:

1.3 miles.

!!!

I felt ridiculous. I measured the shorter loop, and sure enough, that’s the one that came out to .98 miles. That means I wasn’t running an 11:47 mile. No, I was running my usual 9:40. I wasn’t a failure; I was an overachiever.

Moral of the story: Don’t let me do basic math, not even counting.