Tri, Just a Little Bit Harder

In the spirit of making changes in my life (new city, new school, new work) I've decided to start working towards completing a triathlon. Crazy, I know, but it's something I'd thought about before but ruled out, mainly because the Central Texas area is really hilly and I hate biking up hills. But since I'm moving back to South Texas (read: no hills) I thought maybe I'd give it a go. We'll see.

My biggest fear is the running, mainly because running and I have never really gotten along. Swimming should be no problem, as I've already gotten back into swimming this semester, and for some reason the biking part doesn't seem so daunting. However, last week in my Evolution class we read a paper describing how humans seem to be evolutionarily adapted for long distance running (i.e. 5+ km). You can't argue with nature! So I'm giving it a go.

I found a 10 week running schedule meant to prep for a 5K or 10K race, and today was my first day! Yay! They start you off easy, the first week being a 30 min walk/jog on Wednesday and Saturday. You may have noticed that today is Wednesday... meaning that I have completed my first running workout!

Amazingly, it wasn't as bad as I had expected, I simply jogged until I felt like walking and then walked until I felt like jogging again. I did some pseudo calculations with Google Maps and it looks like I went almost 2 miles! It may not seem like much to you, but I feel pretty accomplished.

Now the real challenge is keeping it up as the workouts become more and more frequent and the mercury keeps rising. And that whole biking thing, I'm not so sure how that's going to work in downtown Houston.

And as an incentive to keep going, if I keep up with my running workouts for 3 weeks I'll reward myself with one of these and an armband for my ipod nano.



Wish me luck! And feel free to clue me in on biking workouts/how to get started.