Ready to Tri?

It's currently almost 2am and I just finished a horrendous paper that is supposed to pass for my English midterm. Yikes! Anyway, I'm over it, so on to running!

Last night we had our weekly track practice with the Team. After a mile warm-up with strides, we got into groups to do the workout: 2x1200 at threshold (aka 10k) pace then 1x1600 at marathon pace. We ran the 1200s between 9-9:30 which was perfect and the 1600 around 10-10:30. Overall, not too bad I think. One of our coaches, David, told us stories to make the time go by faster and it definitely worked! Before I knew it we were cooling down. Ended up doing an even 5 miles overall. Afterward a group of us headed to Chili's for my roommate's TNT fundraiser and were so hungry we practically inhaled our food! Great way to end the night : )

Story time!

Today I did a fast 4 miler instead of my 6 mile tempo. In fact I may have to switch Wednesdays and Thursdays in my schedule because I just don't have the energy for a tempo after 8 hours on my feet at work. Today's run was solo, and it was actually kind of nice to run by myself again. As much as I love running with others, it's a great feeling to just zone out and have only my thoughts to occupy me. I felt really good during the run except for a few little nagging pains...I think my shin splints are flaring up again : / Since I have a half marathon on Saturday, I'm going to do a short and easy run tomorrow (today?) then take Friday off completely. I'm really looking forward to going home for the weekend and running a race on my own turf! I do have some big goals for the race, so look for those in an upcoming post.

And finally, on to what I alluded to in the title of this post - a triathlon! As I've mentioned before, I really want to do a triathlon, both for the experience and for the cross-training benefits for my running. I've been swimming about once a week and slowly getting better, and I'm planning on getting a bike when I move back home in June. Anyway, one of my goals for this year is to complete my first triathlon, and while perusing the race calendar for Sacramento I stumbled across the Luna Bar Women's Triathlon Festival. The sprint distance includes a 0.5 mile swim (open water), 20 mile bike, and 4 mile run. I love that it's an all women's race and I think the distances sounds doable, but I'm such a newbie to tris that I really don't know if I should make this my goal race. It's at the end of August, which would give me all summer to train, but I have no clue if that's enough time. One slight downside, however, is I have a marathon the weekend before : / Anyone with tri experience, I would appreciate any advice you can give me! With so many running races the rest of the year I think this would be really beneficial for cross-training, too. Even though nothing is for sure, I can't help but get excited by the possibility of this race!