The Slowest On The Team

Last night I went to my doctor for acupuncture for my right shoulder. I'm not sure how I hurt it (falling off the bike, perhaps?) but it definitely hurts and wasn't feeling much better over the weekend. It's definitely feeling a little bit better this morning, although still not back to normal. I'm hoping that it'll be mostly better by Saturday!

This morning was the group Terrier run and I was finally able to get up early and it wasn't raining, so everything worked out for me to make it to the run today. I switched the shoelaces on my shoes back to the regular laces, so my feet were a lot happier than they had been on Sunday when they were falling asleep with the speed laces on. I'm going to try to go at lunch today to see about getting some different speed laces, so stay tuned for more on that.

When we got there, instead of doing our usual strides workout, we did some body strength work as well. We started by doing 15 push-ups and then we would stride over to the other side for another exercise. We did squats, plank position for a minute, lunges, back lunges, mountain climbers, more push-ups, and some other get down and jump up exercise that I don't have a name for.

The run today was a 5 or 6 mile tempo run, unless you were racing this weekend. Then you were just supposed to do a 4 mile run. Of course, you were supposed to increase the pace for 30 seconds every 2 minutes, but I sort-of skipped over that part of the instructions and just focused on the 4 mile run part. The whole group headed out and north.

I was towards the front when we started and then every single person on the team passed me. Seriously, even the older guy who was walking part of the time was faster than I was. How depressing is that? When he passed me and then started walking I thought to myself that I could totally catch him now. Right when I was almost there, he started running again. So, basically, I'm not even in competition with the 50+ age group. Grrrr... I really had just starting feeling more confident about this triathlon and now I'm just thinking about everyone blowing by me on the run.

I knew I wasn't running as fast today as I did on Sunday or even the past couple times, but I thought that was okay as I didn't want to push myself too hard before the race on Saturday. I ended up running 3.75 miles in 39:21 (10:29 pace) which I think is fine for my level. There was, however, also a lot of walking involved (walking to and from the meeting place) which ended up being 2.5 miles of walking.

All in all, I do really feel okay with where I am running. It's just really frustrating to be the slowest one all of the time. I know that if I just keep at it I will improve, but I am starting to feel like I've hit a wall on pacing.