Moving Along

It's been two weeks since the race, and it's three weeks until the next one. Kind of hard to get back into training mode when you don't have a plan in front of you. Guess that means I'll need to get a new plan! Liz has drawn one up for the NJ tri, so we're following that but not very well. There's no sense of urgency to the training schedule like there was for TNT. Still, I'm out running and in the pool twice a week; I've only really been out on the bike once for any serious ride. I hope to change that this week. Following a reduced training regimen for the sprints will be nice, but I'll have to pick it back up in July for another Olympic at the end of August. I may add a sprint in Charlottesville a the end of June depending on how I feel.

In the mean time it looks like my running is coming along, but I still feel that I have a lot of work to do in order to put up decent times at the end of a race. St. Anthony's was a painful lesson in conserving some energy for the run. A bunch of us ran a local 5K in Reston on Saturday (which Joe promptly won outright with a 90 second cushion or something ridiculous). My previous 5K best was about 26:30 at the St. Patrick's race in Baltimore on a course with a nice, long downhill for almost the entire first mile and no real hills. I have been feeling stronger on the run and felt I could break 26:00. It was a little humid at the start, but not terribly hot. The course was an out and back on the same trail we rode and ran on during training with some small rolling hills. I went out at a 7:30 pace (yikes!) and slowed down to 8:00 on the second mile and finished with about a 8:10 pace. So, yeah, I went out a little too fast and petered out at the end, but it was still good for a 24:30 finish time. 2:00 off of my PR! That felt good, and I wonder if I can get that to translate to a 27:00 or so sprint finish? Who knows. I'm just glad that I can hold that pace for a standalone 5k for now. We're running a 10K in Baltimore over Memorial Day so we'll see what happens then. After that all that is one the schedule are 2 (possibly 3) sprint tris before the end of July.