Tri season is over, now what?

Well, tri season is over.

How I spent my summer

All in all, it was a great summer. I managed to age group place in most of my races, even doing it twice with ‘legit’ 3rd place finishes rather than those slightly odd 5th place ones (I mean, I’m not turning down those medals, but it is a little weird). If Subaru ever updates the points standings I think I ended up placing second overall in the points total for my age group, so that’s kind of neat, even if it is largely because only a handful of people shell out the $$$ to do at least 3 races! I really did enjoy doing the shorter races over the summer, which I think are a little more in my wheelhouse than the longer stuff, if I’m honest.

So obviously the thing to do next year is an Ironman.

I think I almost fainted when that arrived in my inbox.

Still kind of in denial that I really went ahead and signed up for it, but here we are. My focus is now pretty much completely on that beast of a goal and what I need to do to get there healthy and properly trained. I have a rough idea of how I plan to train for it (essentially, focus on the bike and have a strong bike leg to leave myself lots of time for the marathon), but nothing is concrete or written down or official yet. I’m going to spend the next few months building a solid swim/bike/run base, strength training (!!), and having some fun with things. Like bike rides to check out the fall colours and lots of running planned largely around taking pictures of the sunrise, even if I can’t begin to compete with my little brother on that one.

Which brings me to the fact I’m running the Oakville half marathon on Sunday. Which I can’t say I’m feeling super enthusiastic about. I signed up for it way back when because I needed something to motivate me to start building my long runs beyond the strugglebus 8ks I was doing back in June, when every run felt awful. It worked. I slowly (both in terms of # of weeks and the actual paces) worked back up to half marathon distance, focusing largely on keeping my heart rate down and adding 10 minutes or so onto the long run each time (other than race weeks, which sort of acted as cut backs).

I appreciate the sentiment, Waterfront Trail, but I think we can all agree I wasn't looking particularly good 10k into that run.

Running feels decent enough, I guess, and my pace on the 16k I ran this Sunday was down to a not entirely embarrassing 6:14/km, but with no speedwork or high effort stuff in there at all, I have no idea what’s going to happen at Oakville. Clearly I am not aiming for any sort of PB, and the weather forecast looks more like July than September. High of 26, feels like 31, WTF? - and we all know how well I deal with heat, HAHA. Although at least we start early so it shouldn’t be quite that bad during the race.

So my plan is pretty much to flip my watch onto the suffer score screen so I can’t see my pace, keep an eye on my heart rate, and whatever happens, happens. Really, goal #1 at this point is don’t aggravate my sciatic nerve - I had a flare up after Guelph Lake II that is now under control, and after a whole summer blessedly free of back pain, I’d like to get back to that. Slow and steady running seems to be the ticket, so I’ll be sticking with that for a while yet.

So, don’t expect too much excitement in that race report next week. Except for the fact that Sam and Ivanka are also running the race, and Amy and Nicole are lead cyclists! And a morning spent with friends is always a good time. Fun beats out chasing PBs right now for sure.