Setback - Argh

It is Tuesday morning following a test week. The tests went well and the "race pace predictor" that Coach Jennifer uses at Trismart was updated using my new data. The bad news is that it didn't get any faster, however, the good news is that it stayed the same meaning that we are zeroing in what can be expected. Now that I have done these test probably 10 times over the past 2 years in addition to getting a lot of live race data at the longer distances she is able to accurately project a range of what should happen at IMAZ assuming a lot of things (health, conditions, no injuries, training execution, consistency, and oh yeah, that they dam in the lake gets fixed and it gets refilled in time etc...). That is a lot to assume but we have to act as if it will happen per plan.

Now to the set back. Rene and I had dinner Saturday night with some friends of ours. I had a 6 mile all out Time Trial that day along with a 35 minutes hard swim. What testing week lacks in durationg (many shorter workouts) it makes up in intensity. A typical training week would never have me ride as fast as I can for miles or run as hard as I can for miles (or swim all out for 15 minutes). This is just really hard to do. Your heart is at max for an extended duration and there are times it is beating so hard for so long I have actually looked around to see if I collapsed if someone would be around to help me (no joke). It is just really intense workouts. The good side of all of this is they are always shorter. Just to give you some idea, this week is a build week (longer workouts, less intense) and I have about 14 hours of training on the schedule with most of that this weekend (1.5 hour run and an 80 mile bike). Last week was less than 6 hours.

Now to get to my subject line (setback). Saturday following my intense bike and swim and coming off my intense run the night before I started feeling bad. I tried to nap in the afternoon (something I never do) and just didn't feel good. As dinner went on, I kept getting worse and worse waking up on Sunday unable to get out of bed. I had strep throat about 2 months ago (following a very intense week) and ufortunately, this felt all too familiar. NBB (my son) was also sick so when Rene and KGB returned from church we went straight to the doc in a box at walgreens. Sure enough, we both had strep. I was off yesterday because I was still contagious and back at work today on anti-biotics. I will skip my run today and probably be back at it tomorrow.

It happened at a great time because Mondays are typically my training days off. Last week being light I only missed a short hour run on Sunday and a 45 minute run today. This is the time that I can not miss my long workouts on the weekend because those condition me for the long day in November. It is now critical that I get all of my workouts in to be successful at IM. Everything up til now was for the 1/2IM in Racine. Everything from this day forward is building for the big race.

All for now!

Tracy

P.S. Deborah and the Olneys had a setback as well last week much worse than mine. They got some bad news about Deborah and some of the long term effects of her Cancer and treatment have affected her urinary tract. It is not a relapse of Cancer but they think that some of the after affects have caused some issues that she will have to deal with for the rest of her life. Please keep them in your prayers, the Docs have been wrong and suprised before and there is no reason to think it can't happen again There is no protocal for what she is going through so this is uncharted territory for everyone, including the docs. My heart is heavy for them and anytime I write in my blog about my challenges I always know my challenges are insignificant. Please pray for them during this difficult time.