As a child I grew up with the smell of chlorine imbedded into my skin. When I walk into a swimming pool I feel right at home, and swimming up and down following the never ending black line just comes as a second nature to me. But you already knew that!
What you probably didn’t know is that we trained countless hours with our swim team and part of our training, especially during the off season, was spent running trails and countless loops around the pool. Back then running was my number one enemy; I would do ANYTHING to escape that part of our work outs. As a matter of a fact, I was notorious for walking as much as I could, out of sight out of mind… or so I thought. I would keep an eye on my coach and as soon as I was out of his sight I would start walking. At times we were 40+ people training and guess who was the last one to make it back from all those runs… yup you guessed right, it was me. If it was not the last one I was pretty close to being the one.
As a teenager that was one of the ‘medicines’ we had to take if we were to come back from the off season with some extra lbs. The rest of the team would get to play soccer, basketball or any fun sport, while ‘us’ would go around, and around, and around the pool. I think that is when my love-hate relationship with running started, to start with I already despised it, but during those years it got even worse because I saw running as a punishment.
After my swimming years were over I had no desire to step back into a pool for a long time, I would coach swimming but you would not see me swimming. This lasted for almost ten years and even then it was pretty sporadically. It wasn’t until I got pregnant with my son Marc that I started swimming again on a more regular basis.
Those years in ‘hiatus’ from the pool I also took a break from working out for a while, but after I realized I had to do something I got into spinning, aerobics and even running. As a matter of a fact that is one of the things that got me and my husband to spend time together, who would have thought that something I used to hate as much as I hated running would be the one thing that brought us together.
Back then we just ran for fun, we would do 5 or 6 short runs a week, no HR monitors, no specific paces, no races… that is how I started falling in love with running.
Right before I started triathlons I thought I was an ok runner (little did I know), it was quite the eye opener when on my first season with TNT I realized that the only thing I was ok at was swimming.
After working on my run and bike with Jeremy, I improved quite a bit on both, but surprisingly enough (for me anyways) my bike splits seemed to be stronger when compared to the rest of the field. So, last season, being the second season working with J we focused on my run. And although my run has come a long ways I still didn’t feel like I could run forever (the same way I feel in the pool).
As I have mentioned before on this blog this year is about improving my run again, which means I’ve been running quite a bit, and this is just the beginning. I have notice a big difference from last year though, although I am not running with a Garmin (naked running is so much fun J) I have a bunch of different loops from my house, depending on how long I have to run I know what I should be able to do.
Last year I remember struggling with the off season running, not only I was running more than I had been accustomed to which means I hurt physically, but even mentally it was hard on me.
This past couple of weeks I’ve felt strong on my runs, being back on some structure was good the first week but took me a couple of days to get back into it. Being the excitement of going down to Florida
This brings me to week 2 & 3 of training; swimming has been good since I don’t have to force myself into the pool but once a week. With the trip down to Florida
Week 2 Total
Swim - 75 min - 4000m
Bike - 4 hrs
Run - 4.2hrs
TOTAL - 9.5hrs
Week 3 Total
Swim - 75 min - 4000m
Bike - 4.3hrs
Run - 4.4hrs
TOTAL - 10.1hrs
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