Since I was a few minutes late last week, I came about 20 minutes early to the triathlon training session. I’m pondering joining the university triathlon team. It’s going to be quite challenging, but I’d get the opportunity to cross-train in biking and swimming, stuff that is quite hard for me to do by myself. Well, since I don’t have a bike yet, that part isn’t really important for now, but soon it will be. We only have a few more weeks left and I hope to have a bike before then.
The members of the team are a diverse group, from all ages. There was one old guy that totally rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t talk with him afterward. He’s an idiot. He also had trouble keeping up with the younger members.
I think there were 14 of us that started the training. Of that number, only 7 finished the training. That meant that is was quite challenging. The run start with a 12.3 kph jog to the training grounds. It was about 3 km to get there. I had already warmed up by myself by jogging to the athletic’s center. That was 1 km. I had no trouble keeping up, but I was told that the run would be even faster.
We did some fartlek exercises for about 15 minutes and started on a 4 km run at the 10 km pace. Honestly, I’ve got no idea what my 10 km pace is. Actually I do. It’s about 12kph, nothing faster than that, at least for now. I didn’t do the farltek right. I was teamed up with the trainer, but he was keeping a very slow pace to run with the slower runners. It was way to slow for me, so I accelerated to keep up with the faster runners. Basically, you are in pairs. One of you decides to accelerate and does so. The other keeps pace. The other member then decides to slow down and you start over again vice-versa. I amused myself by keeping pace with the faster runners, the team which had Evelyne. They distanced me after a while when they accelerated to meet up with the fastest team. Still, I wasn’t doing bad.
Anyway, we started running and a few of the team members were really going fast. In fact, four of them were extremely fast. The fastest runner was a young girl. She was injured and she beat everyone hands down. I was suitably impressed.
It felt good not to be last. I did bring up the rear though on our 3km run back to the athletic’s center. I took the bus and ran another 1 km home.
In total, I ran about 11 km in 54 minutes. The trouble was that I wasn’t at my best. My legs are slightly sore from my run on Wednesday. They still haven’t fully recovered from my 14 km run on Sunday. If I was at 100%, I could have probably kept up with the top two teams. Not the fastest team with that crazily fast girl, but the second team with Evelyne.
The team is diverse. There are two people in their 50s, including an older lady. Two others are in their 40s. Another one is in his late 30s early 40s. Our trainer Thierry is in his late 30s. The rest of the team is young. Most of them go to university and ages vary between 19 and 30. I kind of fit in.
I’ve been asked to come to the next few training sessions. Basically, they’ve asked me to join. Tomorrow, there is a long run of 90 minutes and a two hour swimming training. That’s going to be hard. I don’t think that I’m good at swimming.
Well, I used to compete when I was 12 or so, but I stopped years ago. I still remember what to do, but swimming is really exhausting. Still, I’m looking forward to trying it out tomorrow.
Even though I wanted to get a mountain bike in the next few weeks, I might have to get a road bike to pack up some miles before snow hits.
Fartlek is a bit like speed training. I don’t know which I like better. Suffice it to say that it was suitably tiring. I wasn’t completely bushed, but I was tired. I felt it in my legs. Tomorrow, I want to take a bag and use the sauna instead of coming home in my running gear. That was a bad idea. I was toying with the idea of running home, but that didn’t work out.
I also have to get some more running clothes. I need a softshell jacket and a few more medium thick midlayers so that I keep warm during the runs. I’ll have to take my tuque and gloves as well, as I was cold. My Arc’Teryx jacket isn’t form fitting enough. It’s too wide and large. It’s going to be -3C tomorrow morning. I’d best layer up.
What’s different between the Running Room runs and triathlon training? Well I think that Triathlon training is a lot more demanding. It’s more competitive, you are free to try and excel and there are no limits that are set. If you want to run really fast, you can do that. You aren’t held back by the slower runners. It’s quite motivating as well.
Still, I’d like to do both. For now, I can only do one Running Room run per week, and that’s the long run that happens on Sundays.
Like this:
Like Loading...
