The start of what’s next...

Well fall is here and tri season has slip on by again. Some years it seems like you can never race enough and other years it’s like the season lasted forever. This was an odd year for me. I only “raced” twice, 3x if you count the relay in Kirkland. And of those I really didn’t see IMC as a race, more of a long days journey. At times this year I really wanted to race more and feel that start to finish pull of faster, stronger, better. However, with schedules and training it just never really happened this year.

I don’t think it was a bad thing, because on the other hand with all the Ironman training if I had forced a bunch of races in I might have easily burned out and stopped training all together. As it was there was a quickly approaching window of time that was about to close and shut out all of the momentum. Towards the last few weeks it was hard to even think of being on the bike for longer than 2 hours or have to run AGAIN afterwards for a few miles. So it’s hard to say, either way it was a long season that I’m extremely happy to look back on.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been supporting Alley in her running season. Unfortunately, she just got back from a bone scan on Friday and the Doc told her that she has some stress fractures in her femora. She was running in the Portland Marathon and felt tightness and shape pain around mile 13 and had to walk by mile 15. Long tough day for a tough lady. So hopefully she’ll be back on her feet in time to get some snowboarding in around February.

I’ve been getting back into track and running 4x a week. It’s been really really hard to get the pace back up after a season of trying to slow the pace down for IMC. Last year I was training everyday comfortable speed around 7:10 pace. The last few weeks I’ve been in around 7:45. last week for my first long run I wanted to run at :15 slower than my intended pace for Seattle half and man was it hard to stay :20 slower. And that was just 8 miles! It’s hard to say where to put that.

So coming up I’ve entered in a few races just to get the feel and pace worked on. Tomorrow I’ve signed up for a 15K out at Magnuson park. I needed to get a 10 miles run in and didn’t think at first it would be a good idea to race 9 miles just yet, but then the more I thought about it I figured “why the hell not” If any thing I’ll pace it out with my half marathon pace and see where that puts my training for Seattle at. Plus I’m a firm believer in the notion that ever once in a while you have to sign up to get your ass handed to you from time to time. It’s good for those “what the fuck have I been doing?” moments that can really push a break through in self limiters.

So coming up I have:
Magnuson 15K, Seattle Turkey Trot 5K, Seattle Half Marathon and then the 12K’s of Christmas in Kirkland.

I’m not sure if I’m ready for tomorrow, but then again that’s the point right!?!?