174 days, 8 hours, 52 minutes and 27 seconds

When I sat down to write this post I decided to take a look at the IMC Countdown Clock... as you can probably tell from the title, at that time there were 174 days, 8 hours, 52 minutes and 27 seconds left until the cannon goes off.

Whenever I look at the countdown clock I get this sort of nervous (and yet excited) butterfly-like feeling in my tummy. No matter what the clock says, it always feels like very a long amount of time until race day and yet, a very short amount of time all at once. Go figure.

Anyway, since my last two posts have not been very training specific, I decided a little reflection on the last week or so of training might be nice... and while I’ve had days of feeling tired, days of bruised and cramping calves, and even a few days seriously lacking motivation, in the grand scheme of things, the last block of training has gone quite well and the positives definitely outweigh any negatives.

During the work week, training has been consisting of 2 or 3 shorter/speedier runs, two somewhat challenging swims and an intense bike trainer session on Wednesday nights. This is followed up with bigger volume days on the weekend (usually a long swim and long bike on Saturday followed by a long run on Sunday). I find it’s a good mix, in that things are similar enough from week to week to get into a nice routine, but each workout is different enough that I’m not bored with it.

A week ago Saturday, I had a great “long” bike with Kirsten – a 3:30 outing that turned out more like 3:45. It wasn’t super hilly, but had a few nice little rollers. As we rode and my mind wandered, I realized that it was probably one of my longest bikes ever... and while I did find I was losing energy a bit in the last 20 minutes or so, I realize this was probably because I didn’t consume enough food/gels, so I figure, with a little tweak here and there to the nutrition, the long bikes will just get easier. Otherwise, I felt like we covered a large portion of Greater Victoria that day, and am quickly realizing that the biggest challenge of a long bike is going to be finding decent routes to ride!

After that outing, this last week has been a bit of a recovery week (which has been nice), ending with a treadmill test on Saturday. I'm not great at treadmill tests. Each time I've done one I hit the stop button on the treadmill thinking I've reached my max, only to feel like I could have pushed harder, could have held on just that little bit longer. I find usually when I hit stop, it isn't so much a matter of feeling like my lungs or heart are going to give out, as much as I feel like I'm going to be shot off the back on the treadmill cause my legs just won't turn over fast enough! This usually leaves me feeling slightly disappointed in myself, although I'm trying to shake that and focus on the more positive aspects of training.

Anyway, all that said, I do feel pretty positive going into the next few weeks of training and have decided that one of my new missions for the coming weeks is going to be to find a nice brightly coloured tri suit to wear this race season. Triathlon and shopping... I like it :)