I Don't Wanna Grow Up

Well today was my last triathlon of the season and my last race in the 25-29 age group. Next year I get bumped up to the 30-34 age group which has stiff competition. Perfect example is that I placed third in my age group today which would have put me at ninth in the 30-34 year olds but the good news I that I would have only needed to take a minute and a half off my time to have placed in that age group, so there is still hope.

Normally getting third place would be very exciting but the time between first place and third place was only thirty seconds, which with that small amount of time you start to pick apart your race and find out where you could have improved. Here is what I have some up with; there are two things that I did wrong leading up to this race.

1. The Toyota US Open was two weeks ago; it takes about a week to recover from a race of that length and then you have a week where you have to decide whether you are suppose to be training or tappering. I decided to split the difference and somehow ended up with a knee injury which takes us to lesson #2
2. The knee pain showed up on Tuesday after a 5.5 mile run which left me with four days of no running just icing twice a day. I believe the injury occured because I under pronate which caused me alot of pain in my Medial Collateral Tendon. I used a run on Saturday to determine whether I would be able to race at all today. This run was a big mistake, over all the run felt good but I ran in my Vibram Five Fingers which are great "shoes" but they are not like riding a bike, your body does forget how to use them. When I woke up this morning by calfs were noticably sore which cause problems all day.

So what did I learn from these experiences? Don't put races this close together unless you are going from a sprint triathlon to a longer race is does not work in reverse. This probably would have solved both problems. Unfortunately these two items kept me off the first place pedestal that I have no doubt would have been mine.