Back in Action!

(pardon the delay in getting this July summary posted… I wrote it in mid-August and now am finally posting it in early September… I’ll try to back-date it appropriately)

July has been a rough month for my triathlon aspirations. On the flip side, it’s been a very fun month socially. I attended my brother’s bachelor party at Dewey Beach and I hosted a real barn burner of a multi-person birthday party for my 30th.

I came down with a bit of a head cold three days before Coteau-du-Lac and it just didn’t get better. I made it through that race with a decent result (23rd, inside the time cut-off, no points) and then tried to rest up and heal for San Francisco. For two weeks, I would wake up every day with a mild sore throat, it would go away during the day and then come back with a vengeance at night. I loaded up on zinc and vitamin c … but no luck. The San Francisco race was a bit of a disaster for me, as the body just wasn’t there.

Luckily I’d built a two-week break into my 2010 plan, and it arrived at the perfect time. I hoped that two weeks of light-to-zero training would be just what the doctor ordered. But the doctor didn’t order up cross-country travel and college frat house style partying during that break! So I finished my “break” with the illness still lingering.

The day after my birthday party, I felt good enough to go for a 12-mile run with a few friends … and I decided to believe that I was healthy again, whether or not I really was. I went into a pretty good training week – 45 miles of running, including a track workout, 25k of swimming, a criterium and an Olympic-distance triathlon. Not exactly easing into things, are we?

My weekend race was the Federal Escape Triathlon. I managed to squeeze out a narrow victory over Charles Rivers in a hard fought race. Charles has consistently been a solid age-group performer in the Seattle area but he’s clearly upped his game this year!

I felt pretty trashed for my evening swim after the race … and equally so for my Sunday AM long run. With two weeks’ additional perspective, I should have just bailed on both of those workouts. Ouch.

In the two weeks since that race, I’ve settled back into my regular-season training cadence: track workout on Wednesday, Seward crit on Thursday, long run Sunday, various other weekend racing, weekday morning swims, weekday evening runs … the body’s response has been mixed … but that is part of coming out of a break, right?

The second half of my season will bring Kelowna, Pacific Grove and Tuscaloosa in rapid succession, plus the possibility that I get into the Pan American Championships in Puerto Vallarta. I also have two weddings and a Kona camp during that stretch, so I’d better be really careful about recovery.