Winter FOCUS

If you take a look at any of my triathlon results there is no doubt where I am falling behind. This winter my main focus is teaching my body to run fast and that means TRAINING fast. I've already started!

When I ran into Kelly Williamson in Austin she said doing shorter races like 5K's were a must to help with my running. She was right on! My coach, Nick Waninger also has the running paces I need to train at broken down from 200 meters to marathon pace (easy, interval, tempo, repeats...) and I love having those numbers to focus on.

The past 3 weekend I have done 3 running race: 10K, 10 mile trail race, and a 5K

The 10K was a race on the Southern Illinois University Campus sponsored by the Army ROTC. My swim coach asked me what my goal pace was and I responded with 6:40. I went out pretty hard and my first mile was 6:10. I thought wow, I can run this pace? I just kept ticking the miles away and ended up breaking 40 minutes with a time of 39:08 (6:17 min/mile). Not bad for my first ever 10K!

The next weekend Jeremy and I went and did the Tunnel Hill 10 Mile Trail Race. It's an hour from our house and ranked the 7th best 10 mile trail race in the US by Runners World. The race is a straight shot and they shuttle you to the start in school buses. My goal was to maintain a 6:30 pace, managed to hold 6:28's and finished in 1:04. Yesterday, I did a 5K (That hurt!) and being in a wind advisory didn't help. It was a women's only race, but the pacer was a young, male high school trackster so I kept fairly close to him for the 3.1 miles and finished in 19:45. At all of these races I got comments on my cool Snapple gear, everyone was impressed with the matching apparel! Love it!

Couldn't be happier with how my running is going so far—today it was good just to go out with my dogs and run slooow for recovery. Next weekend I'm going to visit some of my favorite people in St. Louis and hang out at the awesome triathlon store Swim, Bike, Run St. Louis. A lot of us are doing the Skippo trail race. I opted to do the 20K. Should be a blast!