Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Training and sickness

I have been building up base mileage for the past two months getting ready to start seriously training for my first half-ironman. In two and a half weeks, I'll be running my first tune-up race, the Tobacco Road Half Marathon. Since it is just a tune-up, I am not changing my workout plan much to accommodate it. Still, I need to have some sense of what pace I'm capable of, so this week and next week I have planned a couple of workouts that should help me assess my fitness: Today, I have 6 * 800 on the schedule, and next Tuesday I've got a 4-mile tempo run.

The only problem is, I'm sick with a cold. I did run yesterday, but I came home with my nose running like a faucet. I got worse all day yesterday, and slept fitfully. I pulled the plug on today's workout before I went to bed. I'm starting to feel better now and will probably be in good enough shape for an easy run tomorrow, but not the 2500-meter swim I had planned. This was supposed to be a pickup week after I cut back last week, but that plan is shot to hell.


So what to do about the workouts? I had planned a double on Thursday, with a morning easy run and an evening trail run followed by beer with the running club, one of my favorite events of the week. I think now I will try to slot in that 6 * 800 in the morning and suck it up and miss the beer run that night. Argh. Then I'll do my swim on Friday before resuming something more like my normal schedule on Saturday. I won't get near the amount of mileage I had planned for the week, but hopefully I'll emerge healthy and ready for the following week.

Oh, and did I mention that I'm signed up for a half-ironman in June? It will be my first, the Eagleman 70.3 in Cambridge, Maryland. Somehow I became obsessed with the idea of completing one while I was in India, and then somehow I signed up for one... and then I signed up for another one, the Augusta 70.3 in September. I figure after these two events I will be ready to go all-in on triathlons or give them up completely. Either way, it should be an interesting ride!

First, though, I just need to get over this cold....