Countdown, going longer, and update

There’s only 5 and a half weeks until my race in St Petersburg, Florida!

The countdown is on, and I’m starting to get pretty excited.
As I expected, I feel pretty confident in my bike/run ability, but am still kind of worried about the swim. I haven’t yet actually swam a straight 1500 meters, so I guess I should probably get to that soon. I got some good advice from a teammate though, and now focus on just keeping a steady slow tempo when doing long swims. I know it might be a bit of a copout, but I feel that I get annoyed when doing long swims because I keep losing count somewhere around 500M. At that point, I really end up not knowing how many laps I have done, and honestly don’t know if I’ve done 300 or 800, so just stop. To address this, I was looking at picking up a swimming lap-counter. These devices are typically the size of a large ring, but is worn on your index finger. Every time you finish a lap, you just press a big button on the front with your thumb, it marks a lap, and your good to go.

From the bike/run side, everything is looking great. In the past few weeks I’ve done a couple 2.5 hour bike training sessions as well as some long runs. Last Saturday I ran the equivalent of a Half-Marathon in under 2 hours, which would be a new PR for me by over 15 minutes. I ran it at a very comfortable pace until the last kilometer or so, at which point I got excited to finish in sub 2, so kind of punched it up a notch. My worries about my calf sprain have also subsided. I’ve been running pain-free for the past couple weeks in both my old training shoes, as well as the Zoot Ultra TT 4.0 shoes that I think caused the injury in the first place. Although the shoes are meant to be worn sockless, I personally find it more comfortable with socks. If I choose to wear the Zoots on race day, I’m not sure if I’ll go sockless or not. I guess I’ll have to do a few more training runs both ways before I make a decision.

In other good news, the weather is finally nice enough to bike outside, so this past Sunday, my team and I did a 1.5 hr bike ride, followed by a 1 hour run. (Timex GPS data to come)

I also finally received my official TNT Tri singlet!
I’ll get a photo of it up from Sunday’s training run with it on as soon as I have it available to me.