Hi! Everything is just going wonderfully over here 🙂 Time sure is flying though–how is it the end of July already!? And my next race is Sunday! I’m doing the Pittsburgh Olympic and am getting really excited! I’m going to know a TON of people on the course and spectating and I just can’t wait for that! I will be wearing my Pittsburgh Triathlon Club race kit and can’t wait for all the cheers I will give and receive for PTC members. What a difference this race will be from Philly where I only had my Dad and Melissa as fans. I was getting a little nervous for this though, feeling unprepared since after Philly I had a recovery week, then only 2 weeks of training (and one of those was just awful due to heat and humidity being killer) and now taper! So I just was feeling like I hadn’t trained at all. I talked to my coach and she was like ‘Welcome to racing season! You trained all spring and now it’s racing time!” And she is right. I worked SO HARD all spring to get to the racing and now it’s here. The hard work has been done and now it’s all about maintaining and racing and having fun. I feel better now that I understand that.

So something potentially life changing happened yesterday. I went on a fun group recovery ride with the PTC. First of all, we went on a flat trail except for a few bridges and it was awesome. My heart rate was like 130-140 and I barely felt like I was working at all. I expected that we were going like 10mph based on perceived exertion but it turned out we averaged 15.5mph! I couldn’t believe it! So fast and easy without all those hills. I definitely want to go back there and really push to see just how fast I can go!

So my mission now is to rediscover my love and enjoyment of running. If I want any chance of long distance racing I need to change my attitude from suffering through runs to enjoying and looking forward to them like I used to. Really, before I got my Garmin running was fun. Now I really stress out about pace and it makes it not so fun. 2 things I’ve done this week have helped a lot. I changed the screen to not display my pace so I just focus on HR and time and just look at pace at the end. Also I’ve been listening to Chris McCormack’s “I’m Here to Win” on audiobook and it has been making the time FLY by!

Ok, so that’s about it!

Before we go though, I just want to give a HUGE congratulations to my coach Kim who rocked an AWESOME race on Sunday at Ironman Lake Placid. First overall amateur with 10:11. What an inspiration!