the road to tri

Years ago doing a triathlon seemed like a pipe dream. I remember when I was running a lot in the Summer of 2008 (I had a lot of thinking to do, but let us not dwell on sadder times). While I was stretching after one of my typical hometown runs at Rodale I was asked by a stranger what I was training for. My response: “Oh, I am training for a triathlon.” Did I also mention I am a compulsive liar? Just kidding, but the idea just struck me as something I’d be interested in doing. Unfortunately the next several years were overtaken by schoolwork, boyfriends, and overall lack of fitness. Senior years for me have been the worst, and by worst I mean I am a total lazy fat ass. Senioritis in every way. Regardless, I got my ass back in gear once I moved to Arlington in September 2012. I was on my own, time to get life back into order. But then I injured myself in the following months and as you can read here, it completely changed my approach to working out.

During the course of my rehabilitation I was encouraged to bike and swim. I had always dabbled in the two but never truly committed a lot of time to either one. So… to make a long story shorter, I ended up with one of these:

And then this:

And then upgraded my old school ten speed to this:

Now all I needed was a push, that motivation to actually sign-up for a sprint. In typical me fashion, it came by way of a birthday party bus. Now I know what you might be thinking, another goofy injury? Fear not. Although the night got a bit silly, it is also where I managed to meet my tri-buddy Andy. My life is a maze of random encounters but this one worked well in that we both shared interest in doing a triathlon but needed that person to motivate us to keep up with the training. So after the hangovers subsided, I held him to our bus promise and found us our first triathlon: The Luray Sprint.

Why Luray? Well first of all, why not? Although, in truth the timing worked out well in that we ideally wanted a sprint in the August-September time frame (Luray is August 17). The Nation’s Tri was thrown around but it is expensive and honestly, who wants to swim in the Potomac?

The Luray Sprint consists of a 750m swim, 27K bike and 5K run. I have been training for the last 10 weeks and feel pretty confident. I am a bit late on blogging about it as I could have been updating with all my crazy training for the last 10 weeks. No worries, I will be throwing in posts about what I have been up to and also what is to come. I will have to thank my tri-buddy again for the push to start this blog. It’s #triorbust. Time to get it done.