Wednesday, September 20, 2006

My First 1/2..

WOW, Totally awesome! I just found out today that the Lone Star Triathlon in Galveston that will be help in April 2007 web site is up with the information! OMG, I want to register now! but registration does not open to Nov. 1, 2006, in a couple of weeks, and yikes $165 for the fee. Not too bad I guess but more than I thought.
Ok, so I was looking at the time cut offs and trying to determine my current status against the cutoffs to see if I would make it today and according to where I am today, it would be close.
My biggest question is my swim. As I have posted before I am not a great swimmer. The tri is a salt water swim, which helps with buoyancy and is also a wet suit swim with water temps in the upper 60's to low 70's, which again will help but I do not want that to be a "crutch." So what to to what to do? For now I am in my running training weeks leading up to the (2) 1/2 Marathons but waiting to really concentrate on swimming till after the Houston Marathon in Jan 07 only leaves me with 3 months to feel confident on my swim and not really sure that is a good place to be. So that only leaves me getting to the pool more or signing up for a monthly ($40) master swim class to get better. Overall, I feel it would make sense to invest say 3 months worth of masters swimming and still have 3 months to build the swim and then move on to increasing the bike endurance, what you all think? I know I will have to balance some bike training between now and then which shouldn't be a problem being as the master swim program swims at night which would continue to leave my mornings open for runs and mild biking except for longer bike rides during the weekend. IMO that is.
Currently, I am up to 7 miles on the long runs and feel good and 11 weeks out from the Las Vegas 1/2 marathon so I feel I am doing good. Being as I will be coming off the (2) 1/2 marathons in Jan 07, my run training should be adequate to carry forward for 3 months, IMO.
In the mean time I have to just sign up and get`r done!!
Any words of advice are greatly appreciated.
Rockon`

1 comment:

Sarah said...

I'm 80% sure that I'm going to do that race. I was just thinking about it yesterday and I am also a bit worried about the overall 8.5 cutoff -- it'll be close for me also. If I have a really bad day, I'll likely miss it.

For me, a slightly conservative estimate is 50 minutes for the swim, 4 hours for the bike, 3 hours for the run. That leaves me 40 minutes for transitions and unforseen events.

Swimming isn't my problem -- I can already do 1.2 miles pretty easily. It's the running and biking that I need to improve. I'm currently training for the Houston Half in January, and should have time to maintain my current level of biking (~30 miles). I figure if I do that, it leaves me 2.5 months post-Half to ramp up my biking for Lone Star, and to get a few >13.1 mile long runs in.

Anyway, that's a lot of info about me, not really advice for you! Haha. My thought though -- if you just maintain your level of biking through the fall, 2.5 months is enough time to ramp it up if your goal is just to finish (which is what mine is). That's my plan.