Today I started Swim Bike Mom's eight to great challenge. You can check it out on her blog here. She has been such an inspiration to me in this crazy start to triathlon. Basically this plan is a clean eating, paleo-ish (although I will still have limited grains and dairy), workout and train hard, and just to keep going. I am in! I needed a good swift kick in the behind to focus on my running before October 5th. Our family's eating out needed to stop as well so the timing is perfect. There will be a couple of days where I will more than likely break the plan later in the month while we are traveling. Also, vacation comes during this challenge, but we will have a full kitchen available to us, so I am hopeful to not fall off the plan too far.
Mondays are weird for me at the gym. There aren't really any classes that I want to take that will be beneficial in triathlon that work with my life and my children's bedtime. So since I am "focusing on running" I decided to actually go to the gym and run. I also decided to get off the treadmill and get on the track. That was a much better experience! Now, I am not saying the treadmill didn't serve a good purpose for me. I found out just how fast I was really running with the RunKeeper app on my phone and used the treadmill to slow me down to a more sustainable speed. But I got to where it was too easy to just not click up the speed and actually run, or conversely, it was too easy to just stop running.
I (may) have had the best running workout in my life. I ran all of my intervals and even thought about doing more, because I knew I could. And then I wised up and realized that tomorrow is a run day again and looked at the plan for tomorrow and it has a pretty big time increase in the running intervals.
I still have a LONG way to go, but I am beginning to feel like I could possibly, actually, finish at Rend Lake in October. In hopefully three hours! You all know this is a sprint distance, and if you do tris at all you think this is a really long time. I am just going to say that a 21 mile bike ride does NOT belong in a typical sprint distance race. The bike portion is also why I decided against doing the Oly distance which was my original plan, 42 miles seemed a little too long for a first race.
Those of you who have been asking about my doctors appointment here is an update. I have had a huge amount of blood drawn. and a thyroid ultrasound. I was scheduled to go back next Monday for the results thus far, but they have to reschedule due to who I am seeing breaking her hand and having surgery. I am a little frustrated since it worked out that David is working the back side of the clock that week and could watch the kids during my appointment. It will probably be at least three more weeks before I know anything now, and that is assuming I can find someone who is willing to watch one or possibly both of my kids so I can go.
