SheROX in Sixteen Days

I suppose for my first post at Blogger, I ought to just jump right in and skip the pleasantries....

Last weekend was the Philly Women's Triathlon. I considered doing that one before my training buddies suggested to me last winter that I consider making SheRox my first. The mentoring program was the selling point, but as it turns out, I didn't really use it all that much after a few emails early on.

So I volunteered at the PWT with the Fairmount Running Club to be the rockin'est water stop on the planet! We had a ball and I got to observe some serious stuff. There are some pretty amazing athletes competing, but there are also a LOT of women who don't train at all for a race like this and last Sunday was a bit hot. We saw some pretty whipped women come through the water stop a mile from the finish line.

I realize women choose these races for tons of different reasons, but I personally think nobody has any business (even if you're just doing it for fun) competing in an event that will take her two-plus hours to finish without *any* (or very little) training. A couple of weekends before the PWT I volunteered with the same club for the Philadelphia Insurance Tri's water stop under the Strawberry Mansion Bridge. It was the Olympic distance race, and it was a lot different from an athletic standpoint. I learned a lot at both races.

So, I'll be doing SheRox on Aug. 3rd and since I already did Thundergust, (a small Tri in South Jersey... I blogged about it here) it won't be my first. I've been trying to strengthen my weak points... my swim and my transitions. In the pool, my swim is actually not bad. It's hard to train the mass start and just swimming the whole 800 meters in a crowd, and those are the things that slowed me down at Thundergust. My training group is small, so our "mass starts" are about 5 people in one lane of the pool. It's fun, there's no stress, and I usually pull ahead of all but one of them. This is not what I experienced at Thundergust!! I'm thinking I'm just going to have to get a few more races under my belt to have the experience. I'm not sure if there is any other way to prepare for that.

I compared my Thundergust results to the Philly Women's Tri results and (even though it's probably not wise) I see that if I had done the same times (horrible swim, long transitions, and all) at the PWT, I would have been 4th in my age group. I'm now having fleeting fantasies of placing in SheRox, but only fleeting! It doesn't help that I have friends egging me on. They love to tweak my competitive side.

Training is going well. My husband, Dave, commented on the heat wave that began today, and I said it was a good training opportunity (in all seriousness!) and he said, "That's one way to look at it, I guess!" So I biked to work today (and it was my favorite commute so far, and fastest!) which means I'll be biking home again at 3pm, in the heat of the day. I'm well prepared and looking forward to it.

I got Swim Workouts in a Binder for Triathletes by Bernhardt & Hansen, which a friend recommended. It's waterproof and meant to use on the deck, which I love. My other workouts are getting pretty moldy in their plastic sheets. I look kind of goofy lifting my goggles to my forehead and putting on my glasses to read workouts in the pool, so I tend to use the same ones (memorized) over and over. I've been in a rut. I needed something to kick start my swim, and this book is good. Maybe as a bonus I'll even get stronger.

My run is up to about 14 or 15 miles. Rather, it's up to about 2 hours and 20 minutes. The next thing after SheRox is the Phila Distance Run, so I've been adding to my time on the trail. Someone suggested I try for the marathon this year instead of next, but I think I'll stick to my plan and wait until 2009 for that. The 2:20 run was NOT that great. The one before that, 2hrs & 5 minutes, was very good, but after the 2:20 run I decided I want to back off a bit. I'm at least going to wait until the heat backs off. I hate carrying water on the trail. (And it always runs out anyway before I want it too!) Also, I tend to go too fast on the longer training runs and I wind up tired and/or slightly injured before the end. I've been trying to get some discipline, but so far I'm terrible at it. On the other hand, for short distances, there's no harm in kicking it. My race pace on the shady trail at Thundergust was 7:55, and I'm wondering how I'll do on the asphalt in the full sun at SheRox. We'll see!

I'm going to Run for the Hill of It July 26th. It's a five miler on my "home court," Forbidden Drive from the Northwestern trailhead to Valley Green & back. I've been running that at lunch for almost a year now. It's my favorite training run.

[photo at top: SheROX Philadelphia 2007; at bottom: Forbidden Drive from mike feagans' photostream at Flickr.]