Am I Still Gazelle-Worthy?

One of the biggest sacrifices of all of this training is that I can't make it to my Gazelle running workouts as much as I want to. My goal is running "maintenance" right now and hitting at least one workout a week. Of course, I've forgotten just how damn hard they all are. I've purposely slowed myself down at each workout instead of trying to keep up with the lead group. While it's good for me to be doing that at the moment (maintenance, remember?), it's also very hard to hold back. Unfortunately, I've learned the hard way that my long rides and runs suffer when I push myself so hard on these other workouts....not to mention the fact that I'm more prone to injury when running at full-tilt.


Last week I hit the 2000m workouts at Zilker. These repeats are pretty hard to pace because it's 1.25 miles of pure speed. 2000m is so very different than an 800m repeat. With 800s, you know the pain is short-lived. 2000s are a different story. Plus the loop that we do tends to go on...and on...and on. I have a tendency to go out too fast and try to hang on at the end. That also means I start seeing double by the 2nd repeat because I'm so whipped. This time, I slowed the first repeat way down and tried to settle in. It was a little more challenging as some of the gates were padlocked so we had to run around them.

#1 8:54

Pretty slow...time to pick it up for the next few.

8:23
8:11
8:11

Nice...Right on target.

Some were doing a 5th repeat, but I held back...There's just no reason to push too much when my "A" race is three months away.

This morning, I talked Amy into going to the Gazelle workout: Wilke Hill Repeats.

I'm not sure why I wanted to do this workout after my swim/long bike on Saturday and my long run on Sunday. Well, truth be told, I didn't want to do it, but I also want to feel like I'm still a part of the Gazelle bad-ass group by doing this workout. My goal was to just do 7 forward repeats, 3 backwards and 3 sprints. A year ago, I was doing 10 repeats and today I just committed to 7 since I hadn't done this in a while. As always, the first repeat is the worst as your lungs feel like they are going to blast out of your chest and your legs are burning with lactic acid. I'm so slow at these repeats, which can be frustrating as others cruise by, but I'm also consistent. Slow and steady...slow and steady...There goes Marcie. Damn, she's good at these. We started before the lead group and were eventually passed by them. It's cool...slow and steady...


I'm happy to say that we did complete all of the repeats and even took a longer cooldown run afterward. I definitely had energy in me for more, but knew it wasn't necessary. Maybe by March I'll be back up to 10 repeats. Maybe not.

Wednesday's workout is the dreaded 4-mile tempo run. There's no such thing as taking this one easy. Not sure yet if I'm going to attempt this one during this week. I'm scheduled to do 15.5 hours of training and already have 17 hours mapped out if I hit all of the workouts. I've got to cut back somewhere. Theoretically, I could and probably should sit this one out and focus more on my swim and cycling workouts.

We'll see as the week progresses! I hope I'm still Gazelle-ish after all this IM talk.

Coming soon---some changes to the blog. I already screwed it up recently so my next goal is to just completely give it a facelift. By the end of this year, tritobefunny.com will be much more than just my self-indulgent chatter.