The Last Push

This Sunday I'll hop into the water to start a triathlon for the first time in nearly a year and 1/2.  My last tri, well that didn't go so well.  After the worst swim I've had in a half iron and a far too painful bike I decided to call it quits and go drink wine.  For that race I was under trained, not motivated and really had no desire to actually push myself; at that point I was burnt out.  But ever since moving back to NY I've been excited to race again, my schedule has more stability, I'm loving my new job and couldn't be happier back home.

I've been training incredibly consistently logging about 15 hours a week of work outs.  My weight is down to 189 and my basal rates while being wonky of late have slowly crept down from the 16+ units a day they were back in May to about 14.5 units per day now.  Although I still become incredibly frustrated with my pump from time to time (seriously I don't remember a love-hate relationship like this with OPP) my blood sugars have become much more stable.  So everything seems to be moving in the right direction.

But... I'm nearly as nervous for this triathlon as I was for my first way back in 2008!  After today I'll have swam a total of 6 times since March of 2011; so although I know I can cover a .9 mile swim I'm not sure my arms are going to agree with me.  My bike has been incredible of late, I'm not sure if I've crossed the 10,000 hour threshold Malcolm Gladwell has written about or if the weight loss has made me faster on the bike but in training I'm sustaining faster speeds for longer than I ever have before.  And my run is super solid my zone 3 pace has dropped from an 8:45 min mile to an 8:25 min mile and I've been able to ramp that pace up at the end of runs without bonking.  Most importantly, I have not hit one low that has cut a workout short in some 2 months.

But with that I haven't done a brick yet, I'm off for my last swim today and I don't know if I can string together a race.  Katie keeps telling me to treat this race as a practice race, to just let it come to me and have fun; that it's been so long since I've raced to take it one step at a time.  I'd love to say I can do that, I'd love to say that all this is just a step to getting back into great shape and having fun with the sport again.  I guess Sunday will really tell me how far I've come physically and mentally, stay tuned....