Hi!!! It's been so long since I wrote a blog post thingy and I thought since I'm sitting in the oil change place not doing anything productive, it's the perfect time to write.
This weekend is Vineman 70.3. I don't remember when I signed up, other than this silly race sold out in about 0.5 seconds. I haven't done a complete triathlon since August 2011, and since I signed up for Ironman New Zealand I thought I should do a half just to get back into race mode.
My training had been going well and I was up to running 9 miles. I sat down with my coach and we had a plan that included working with his wife (former all-American record holding swimmer) to fix my swim technique and build some strength. My biking was going well, watts creeping back up and I was getting comfy again on the Tri bike. But as luck would have it, I went out for a run back on June 2nd, and my whole left leg just collapsed and I nearly fell.
So, training went on a bit of a hold while I rested and tried to figure out what happened. Sports Dr. diagnosed the injury as IT Band Syndrome and basically said I could forget about running. I accepted that for a few days, then got depressed, then got angry. I went to my ART guy and endured some excruciating pain, but we pinpointed the problem to my lower hamstring. I didn't run (hello aqua jogging!!) and laid off biking hills and hard intervals.
Now Vineman is three days away. Yesterday I ran for 20 minutes. There was some pain, but it was manageable and felt OK if I mixed in some sideways skipping, backwards jogging and walking.
So as I sit here at the oil change place, I'm trying to come up with a game plan for the race. So far, I've got "swim as hard as I can". After that I don't know. I'd like to run and finish the whole race. In order to do that, I need to bike pretty conservatively. I don't really know how to bike conservatively in a race though. Even when I'm not injured, I always bike too hard and blow up on the run. Maybe for this race though, I should put my ego behind me and bike "easy-ish" so that I can at least finish. On the other hand, maybe I should bike my brains out, live in the moment and worry about the run when the run happens. After all, I'm a biker not a runner, dammit!
I have a feeling my game plan will take shape on race day. If you see or hear about some crazy girl sideways skipping out of transition or backwards jogging out on the run course, that would be me. I'll post an update after the race - stay tuned!
xo
Mer-OoO
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