Tri Training and the Tri Clinic

At my marathon last year, I ran a few miles with a fella and we talked about our dream races. I brought up that I had a five year goal of participating in a half-Ironman (70.3 miles), and he let out that he had just finished his first half-Ironman the previous spring. Talking about his experiences made me want to swim/bike/run one even more. At the time, I hadn't ridden a bike since I was about 8 and the only swimming I had done was doggy paddling with the kids. I did do an indoor triathlon in early 2012, but I did no real training for it and felt like I "winged it" rather than aced it. His advice to me was to stop thinking about it too much and just go for it. He said to sign up for a half-Ironman and the pressure of signing up for it would push me to train for it. I was not quite as ambitious as that, but I did look up triathlon races around Dallas later that day as I lay recovering from my first 26.2 run.

I raced in the McKinney Salty Dog Triathlon in June 2013, with very little training. I had swam a handful of times, and the longest bike ride I had done prior to the race was a 10 mile ride with friends the Monday before the Sunday race (and the longest before that had been about 5 miles....eek!). I was woefully undertrained, but still finished with a time of 2 hours, 12 minutes. My goal had been to finish in under 2.5 hours. And did I mention that I did the bike portion on a mountain bike?? And that there were "rollers" (which felt like freaking mountains on my mountain bike!).

Immediately following the triathlon, my running group ladies (who had cheered me on at the race) and I went out to breakfast at Spoons. It was there, eating a pimento cheese sandwich with bacon and jalepenos (seriously, it's delicious!!), that a group of us ladies decided to do our next triathlon. Seriously, I have a problem with signing up for races immediately following other races! So, on September 14 I will be competing in the Cooper Institute Fall Sprint Tri.

With September being only a few short months away, I decided to up my game a little with the tri training. One of my friends found a bike group that meets on Sundays for 18-25 mile rides. They let me borrow a bike so that I can test ride bikes and find one that suits my needs and I have been enjoying the comfort of a road bike. I'm seriously praying that by some miracle, I can afford one before race day. Doing another tri on a mountain bike will not be fun. It's seriously a lot harder! My other friend has offered to teach me swimming technique, and we've been able to get one lesson in so far. I've done a little training on my own, but still not as much as I'd like. This is all going on, of course, while I am at the beginning of my marathon training. Because that's how I roll :)

My friend Shannon discovered a triathlon training group called Tri Daily (the DFW Tri Club). Yesterday they had a triathlon clinic with workshops on running, biking, and swimming. All of which were free of charge and included childcare (which is awesome because Derek had to work). We went to the biking and running portion, and they totally worked us over!

The biking portion took place in the LA Fitness spin classroom. They talked about drills that you could do on the bike (one legged biking is the only one I can remember) and techniques for riding efficiently (feet parallel to the ground) and how to climb/come out of the saddle. I have a hard time with coming out of the saddle because I have very weak core muscles. I've been doing the 30 Day Shred DVD again two - three times a week, but I still feel pretty wimpy - especially trying to come out of the saddle on a road bike that weebly wobbly from my lack of being able to control it while I'm out of the saddle.

The run clinic focused on getting you to run on the ball of your feet rather than your heel. I know that I am a heel striker in running and walking. I have tried to correct this problem by trying to remind myself of correct form and aiming for more fore-foot strikes, but retraining yourself to run correctly is a hard task. And it hurts! By landing on your fore-foot rather than your heel, and pushing off more efficiently, you use a different set of muscles. Those muscles are often undertrained due to your continued improper form, and it can be a little painful/irritating at first while you relearn to run with the correct technique. The drills to help you accomplish a fore-foot strike, though, made all of us in attendance feel a little silly. The way that they had us running almost looked a little prance-y. Okay, we all kind of looked like tinkerbells :) Or at least felt like it! But after the drills, they had us run a few laps around the parking lot, and really I could tell a difference when I focused on the way my foot was hitting the ground.

Overall, the Tri Daily Tri Clinic was really enlightening. And it opened my eyes to the wide variety of people participating in triathlons. At the McKinney Salty Dog, it seemed like everyone there was a hard body and had perfect muscles, had completed a half or full Ironman with the tattoos to prove it, and looked like they had done hundreds of tri's before. My friend and I who competed both felt a little out of our league and were intimidated by the type of people we found at the race. However, at the tri clinic, there were people of all ages, shapes, sizes, and abilities. It was awesome! A lot of the people that were there were already members of the Tri Daily group, which is kind of like my running group, but focuses on multi-sport training rather than just running. And it's lead by trained coaches with focused workouts helping to create triathletes from the ground up. I'm really thinking about joining Tri Daily. At the Tri Clinic, they had a little expo, and they also had another group there - Triple Threat Tough. That group seemed to have a lot of workouts in The Colony (vs Tri Daily which was Grapevine, Dallas proper, Plano - and maybe someday soon even Allen and McKinney), though, which is a bit of a drive for me. I do admit, though, I liked the jerseys/trisuits of Triple Threat Tough better than Tri Daily (what? You don't pick your tri club based on the shirt design?? Oh, me neither).

I learned a lot yesterday, and feel ready to take on my triathlon in just a few short months. Right now, my biggest hurdle is tackling tri training while also marathon training. It's a tough combination and it's hard to know how far to run each week and still be able to cross-train in the other tri disciplines. I know I'll finish both races, and that is what really counts. It would be nice to go into them confident as well.