No Pain No Gain

The triathlon this weekend was quite the experience! I'm beginning to feel like an old pro now. Maybe I am. Last year while I waited in the long line for the ladies' room, I had my jaw clamped shut for fear I was about to lose the contents of my stomach, while a couple of women who had done other races reassured me that all would go well. This year during the bathroom wait, I was one of the experienced people telling the first-timers that they would do just fine.

But even though I was reasonably sure I would finish the race, I was still very nervous. You see, my body decided to conspire against me. It started about ten days before the race, when I realized after one of my six mile runs that the back of my foot was killing me. It got harder and harder to walk, and after some internet research, I finally came to the conclusion that I had sprained my Achilles tendon. The treatment? Seven to ten days of "rest." Well, I wasn't sure if they meant complete rest, like lying on a couch for all that time, or just taking a break from running. I chose to interpret that as no running and decided to skip the last week of running workouts before the race, in hopes that my foot would feel better.

Then about four days before the race, I managed to jam the little toe on the other foot. It swelled up and made it painful for me to wear shoes. Yikes! Fortunately, that one started to feel better right away, but Friday morning I tripped over something in my pitch black bedroom, nailing that little toe just right to make it throb again. Sheesh.

I was determined not to let my feet get in the way though. I hadn't put in all that training for nothing! So my body decided to kick it up a notch-- by sending my period just in time for the race. (Didn't this happen last time too?) Yes, scarcely three hours before I was due to get up for the race, I woke up to a literal menstrual flood. Oh dear.

My mom suggested that my body was just trying to help me out by making the triathlon a challenge. Otherwise, with all my extra training it would have been too easy, right?

Yeah.

Who am I to let injured feet and heavy periods get in my way??? Saturday morning I was up bright and early and made the trip out the race location without any trouble. I had plenty of time to try and eat something, feel nervously sick, find out that I was starting much earlier than I expected, and visit the bathroom no less than four times before the 7am start of the race.

The swim was still hard. I had thought it would be much easier-- I have improved dramatically in my swimming speed and distances, and this was just a short swim. But I forgot how crazy a serpentine swim is. (That's when you swim up and down the lanes, starting at one end of the pool and finishing at the other.) They send us into the pool at 15 second intervals, and it doesn't take long before there are choppy waves, kicking feet, and splashing everywhere you turn. I struggled to get into a rhythm but I made it through the swim about a minute and a half faster than last year. (Which is quite a lot in a swim that took me less than 7 minutes.)

The bike ride was relatively easy. The route has you make a loop three times around this residential area. About half is downhill and half is uphill, and I loved those downhill parts. I wasn't spectacularly fast (compared to the other racers) but then, I had forgotten to borrow Mr. Yippy to encourage me.

After that came the run. The first half, you may remember, I consider the run of death. It is all uphill. And uphill on my injured tendon was murder. But I hung in there, though I prudently stopped to walk a couple of times. No reason to leave myself permanently crippled, right? In fact, the downhill run was so bearable (after all my overtraining) that I was actually able to talk when I finished the race. A miracle!! My sister greeted me at the end-- I was so happy to have someone there to support me. It's so much more fun to do something like this when there's someone to cheer you on.

Anyway, I did much, much better this year! Here's my stats:

Last year: This year:

Swim- 8 min 2 sec 6 min 23 sec

Bike- 44 min 3 sec 44 min 25 sec

Run- 36 min 12 sec 29 min 1 sec

Overall: 1 hr 33 min 31 sec 1 hr 23 min 51 sec

Now I just need my foot to really heal so I can start training for the Ragnar Relay in February. I'm afraid I'm back to starting from square one in that department. The upside to that is that I get to sleep in until the sprain is healed. (Maybe I should be grateful that I'm injured, right!?)