San Diego Spring Action

I've been on a blogging hiatus since my last update in February after a crazy trip to race in Argentina. 10 days after returning from Argentina, I fractured one of my metatarsals during a run session. I've never had any running-related injuries, and there weren't any warning indicators leading up to the sudden pain I felt during that session. It was baffling.

I spent the next 8 weeks working really hard to improve my biking and swimming, and aqua-running 5X60min a week. At times I would get frustrated that I wasn't able to be out running with the crew, or that the pain in my foot wasn't improving. Paulo would remind me that the running would come back relatively quickly and to use this as an opportunity to be a faster swimmer and stronger biker.

I went into the San Diego WTS race last Friday with 4 weeks of running in my legs. I did all of my running on the treadmill at 8-10% incline, starting with 5 minutes and increasing by 5 more every few days. We wanted to be conservative so that I can be sure to be healthy and fast later in the season. I was excited to see how my swimming and biking would compare with the girls at this level of racing, and planned to just run as fast as I could.

Race recap: The swim was aggressive at first with everyone fighting for position, and then it calmed down after the first buoy. I had a pretty good swim and exited the water with a group of about 10 girls. The first few laps of the bike were fast and hard because my group was trying to catch the pack ahead of us. Once we all formed one group the pace slowed down some. On the 7th lap, my pedal came out of my crank (still in my shoe). After some choice words, I dismounted and screwed the pedal back in. By that point the pack was gone, but I started riding with the hopes of not losing any more time. The pedal came out again a little later, and this time I was out of the saddle trying to get some speed, so yea, you can picture what happened - I went down. The pedal was out of order and I was out of the race. Bummer. I came away with just some road rash that's slowly healing. One of the medical volunteers told me that dog saliva would speed up the healing process, but my dog is in Virginia unfortunately.

A full recap of the race can be found here:
http://www.triathlon.org/news/article/san_diego_elite_womens_race_recap

Yesterday for my champagne birthday (24 on the 24th) I decided to treat myself to some super sprint triathlon action. This was a great opportunity to work on some fast transitioning and racing racing with a stacked field of women right in San Diego. The race was a swim-bike-run x 2 and the whole thing took place in a parking lot (lots of laps) and I came 8th. Running back into the water after the first time through reminded me of my lifeguard beach olympics days! I made a bone-head move on the second bike portion and went out for another loop not realizing we had already done the full five, so that cost me a little bit of time, but other than that I loved the format and am excited that USAT will be putting on two more later this season - one in Las Vegas and another back in San Diego.

Now I'm on a plane to Orlando where I will visit with my folks for the weekend (after not seeing them since October!) and race the St. Anthony's Triathlon on Sunday. Stay tuned...