Racing a Triathlon Tomorrow!

I am signed up to do the Square Lake Sprint Triathlon tomorrow for the 5th time in 6 years (missed last year due to a wedding). After two different injuries earlier this year (glute in Jan and calf in April), I’m feeling a lot better about my current fitness after a handful of good TC 10 Mile training workouts:

Garmin is calling my training "productive" for the last 3+ weeks.


The last 12 weeks: in a good stretch of "productive!"


My typical pre-race run yesterday: 3 faster "pickups" in the middle.
(Easy to spot those...)

Here are some pre-race thoughts:

SWIM: Survive. And start easy so I don’t blow up and have to tread water like I did once a few years ago. Try to swim straight. (Yeah right.) No real speed goals.

BIKE: See what speed I have on these “endurance” legs. I just came off a huge month of biking, and I noted that it was a lot of decent miles on my tri bike, but I don’t have the same top-end speed that I had two years ago when I posted a 23.0 mph average as my bike split at this race. Two years ago, I also had a big month of biking before this race, but there were two differences: it was fewer “workouts“ with more time spent commuting on my bike, but the actual workouts were faster than they were this year. (So a PRO and a CON when comparing my bike fitness to 2 years ago.) I’d be happy with a mid-22.x mph bike split this year (which would be my 2nd fastest, smack dab between my current top-2 bike splits at this race of 21.9 mph and 23.0 mph). But I'd also need a perfect morning to be fast, and it could be chilly and/or drizzly.

RUN: Suffer!! Try to keep speeding up and negative split the run. This race in 2024 was my fastest 5K in a multisport race (18:02) as 2024 was the best year of running in my life. So I’m not hoping to re-create that same split, but I’ll see how close I can get to that. I want to keep it sub-18:30. Can I hit 18:15? I want to make this fast if for no other reason than it being a good tempo run in the middle of my TC 10 Mile training.

OVERALL: Can I be top-3 again? In the first 4 years I did this race, I finished 2nd, 3rd, 3rd, and 2nd overall. I’ll be gunning for a podium finish, but it really comes down to who shows up to race. So my main goals are about turning in a good performance, and less about how I place overall as a lot of that comes down to simply who toes the line with me.

Sometimes when I am preparing for a race, I specifically WON’T look at my splits from previous years just so I don’t become complacent with how my current race is going and think "well, that’s about the pace I held last time, so I’ll just try to hold this here" when I could maybe be pushing harder. BUT I’M VERY AWARE OF MY PREVIOUS SPLITS AS MY 2024 PERFORMANCE AT THIS RACE WAS ONE OF MY BEST MULTISPORT EFFORTS EVER. So I’ll be thrilled if I can get anywhere near those splits. They won’t be holding me back! We’ll see if I go out as aggressive on the bike as I did in 2024, or if I hold back a little, as I am less sure of my bike "racing speed" at the moment. But then I hope to go hard on the run and really put myself deep in the hurt locker.

Well, off to race shortly!! Wish me luck, and check back for a race report!...

Here are my race reports from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

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Friday Funny 2638: Funny Animals

Lots more funnies posted all day long on SportsAndLaughs.tumblr.com.

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Friday Funny 2637: Home Improvement 'Fails'

Pet door install fail.










Roomba picked up a chunk of drywall. Oops.




All doors are the same size, right?


















Too much expanding foam on the other side of the wall.

Lots more funnies on SportsAndLaughs.tumblr.com.

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Mysterious Left Foot Pain!

Last Friday, I had a normal speed workout: it was my 2nd round of 2x2 mile intervals during this TC 10 Mile training session (with my 1st round being three weeks prior). Then Henry and I walked around the State Fair a bit (not too much). Then a lazy few hours at home followed by a quick trip to Henry's school for some beginning-of-the-semester conferences. My left foot started to ache a little while we were walking around his school after conferences.

So when we got back home, I took off my shoes and used a golf ball on the floor to help "roll out" the bottom of my foot.

But it did NOTHING. Surprisingly.

It was achy and sore all evening. We walked around the State Fair a bit that evening, and I thought it helped a bit, so that was promising:

Sweet Martha's Cookies... our FIRST time having them!

It felt better once I woke up on Saturday, but then started to hurt quickly after moving around. And it didn't like it when I clipped in or clipped out while on a bike ride. I was getting worried by that evening. I took some ibuprofen and a sleeping pill at bedtime Saturday night.

By Sunday, I was sure my running and biking were over for a few months. It just hurt so bad. I went for an easy walk mid-afternoon and was limping and had to slow-up 0.6 miles into it. I was bummed. I was coming to terms with not running the TC 10 Mile, and trying to figure out if I'd have issues with a walking boot on an upcoming family trip. I was wondering the best time to go in to get an x-ray as I was 100% sure I broke something in my foot. It just HAD to be broken.

Sunday was my first day under 10,000 steps since early April 2023. I broke my 1,252 day streak that day (3 years, 5 months, 3 days of 10K+):

Last 4 weeks, with the blue line being Sunday.
(More on my streak in this post from 2 years ago.)

Because I've had nerve pain issues in the past (my 2019 "injury" that kept me from running from August until March 2020... the ONLY good thing about March of 2020 was that I was starting to run again!), I knew I needed to truly test it. Afterall, if it was a stress fracture or something that was going to keep me off my feet for weeks-to-months to heal, how much worse could I make it over 1 run? So I got up Monday morning to try a shorter version of my normal Monday long runs. I was almost insulted when I woke up and saw my Garmin telling me I was ready to train hard:

Shove it.

I took off on my run and nearly stopped after 3 blocks. The pain was getting worse. "No, I need to TEST it." So I kept going. I nearly turned back for home after a half mile, but I thought I'd try getting down to the river... "Let's see how it acts going DOWN and UP a hill." So I did a weird loop down by the river that included that nasty steep hill at the 5 mile marker of the TC 10 Mile.

... and it wasn't feeling horrible. I was 2 miles into this run and thought I'd try running the next 4 miles hard. (A "normal" long run for me is 2.5 mile warm-up, 6 miles hard, and another few miles as cool-down to hit around 11.5 miles, so this was a shorter version.) And it didn't feel bad running fast. In fact, by the end of 4 harder miles, I hardly noticed the pain! And in my cooldown, it felt 100% A-OK! It wasn't until I finished running and took my first WALKING step that the pain came back. And it was back instantly, but it wasn't horrible.

Notice half-mile splits 1-4 looping around. Then going hard from split 4-12.
TC 10 Mile hill at mile 5 is right behind the word "University."

My 4 harder miles were decent: I had half mile splits of 3:00, 2:58, 2:59, 3:02, 3:03, 3:00, 2:56, 2:56 = 23:58 (5:59.50 / mile pace).

As I just "lived my life" on Monday after that run, the pain started moving around a bit. I took that as a good sign! If something was broke, it wouldn't move around, right? And it sure wouldn't feel better when RUNNING! It went from more of a pain on the inside of my arch to a pain more around to the top-inside of my foot:

Was lower on Friday and Saturday. Was more on top of my foot Monday.

I didn't do my heel exercises as it would stress out that pain a little, but otherwise it was a normal Monday... well, usually I have around 25K+ steps on Mondays because of a my long run, but this Monday was more like 18K because of a shorter long run and some final semester prep, but my foot felt WAY better than the day before when I barely got in 9K steps!

Tuesday I was on my feet a lot for my first day of the fall semester, and turned in a pretty average 16K+ steps (normal for a non-running day) with no big issues!

And I woke up yesterday (Wednesday) and went for a 6 mile run AND FELT NO ISSUES!! It's not 100% gone, but it's now feeling about 95% better, and I think that's due to pushing it hard on Monday and "resetting" it!

So for the time being, the TC 10 Mile is ON, and so might be a triathlon this weekend... more on that shortly (after some "Friday Funnies" tomorrow!).

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First 5 Weeks of TC 10 Mile Training

This is sort of a follow up to last week's "August in review" post about a HUGE biking month. August was also my official kick-off to TC 10 Mile training. I was ready to start in mid-July, but the Raspberry Run (and then recovering afterwards) kept me from starting 2 weeks earlier.

I did a post like this 2 years ago when I re-used Coach Jen's workouts from 2010 (those are the only 2 years I went sub-60: 59:05 in 2010, and 59:23 in 2024).

Only this year, I'm comparing 3 years worth of times. So RED TEXT means I was slowest of all 3 years, ORANGE TEXT means it was the middle time of the 3 years, and GREEN TEXT means it was my fastest time of the 3 years of doing these "Coach Jen" workouts for the TC 10 Mile:

That first workout was a hilly run from Jen, and that kinda screwed up my calf a bit which is why the next 3 runs were all non-Jen runs. That scared me and made me COMMIT to making sure every Wednesday run was just an easy run.

So then I re-kicked off the "Coach Jen" workouts with my fastest 4 mile tempo. But that could have been "artificially" fast as it was a FLAT trail.

For the 3rd week, I posted about both of those hard runs in the same post. Feeling good about the training!!

The biggest mental shift happened after the start of the 4th week. I cranked out a PR for that 2x10 minute effort on my long run and was suddenly looking at 3 out of my last 4 runs being PRs for those TC 10 Mile workouts! I was hoping to do some Coach Jen workouts as to not look too shabby at the TC 10 Mile after an injury in January and again in April. I was NOT thinking about racing WELL at this race... until just after that run!...

... but then I started turning in some slower times. That mid-summer heat came back, and I had some hot steamy runs that really sucked. I had my stickiest run ever just before the start of this training, and we had a few more bad days in later August. The 8 x 3:00 hard / 3:00 easy wasn't a hot day, but it was extra hilly. And I turned in the worst performance ever for that workout.

And that final full week was split (as I posted about both of those runs in this post): I had a GREAT long run on Monday, but then a hot and slow tempo run on Friday... that run on Friday was 90 sec slower than the last time I did it. Ouch.

Finally, I never posted about that last long run in August on the 31st, but that one felt OK. It was humid, but I felt like I did OK for the conditions. Coach Jen really likes to descend workouts and have me get faster throughout, but this one was just a FAST 5 MILER in the middle of a long run. No descend. Just fast from start to finish. In the humidity, I cranked out a 30:30 for the middle 5 miles (with no mile split dropping below 6:00), and like I said, I felt OK with that. I ran a 30:02 two years ago, and a 29:26 in 2010, so it was my slowest ever. But not depressingly so.

Bottom line: after a big month of training, I couldn't expect any more than what I see above! If at the start of the month you'd have told me that I'd do 8 Coach Jen workouts in August and run the fastest version of 4 of them, I would not have believed you. We'll see what these final few weeks hold, but I'm happy with how things have been going. I'm not looking to drop below 60 again, but I'd be happy to post something faster than 1:02:00, and POSSIBLY even shoot for sub 1:01:00 on a perfect morning. Lots of workouts between now and then though...

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