FEATURES

The Good, The Bad & The Painful...

Saturday, 08 September 2012 02:10

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2012

By Suzie Fox

August; The Good, The Bad & The Painful

The first weekend of August I had an 8:09 half marathon PR by following a written progressive run workout at the Optumhealth Performance Minnesota Half Marathon. This was also at the tail end of a 24 hour training week with no taper and 2:20 of training the day before which was great news for the rest of my season which is all long course. My official time ended up being 1:30:13 so I wish I would have been paying a little bit more attention and snuck in at sub 1:30 just :14 faster. Next time! ...

Later that day my girlfriends and I headed over to Madison for a girls' weekend to preview the Ironman bike and swim course. We got a little lost on the bike route and ended up riding almost 130 miles instead of 112 but it was a great ride and I loved what I saw of the course that we actually did ride on. Kortney and I went for a transition run after the ride and the following day we swam at the race site and ran 11 miles. The weekend was a total blast and got all of us excited for race day!

After a month off from racing for an uninterrupted long course training block I was very excited to race Pigman. Half Irons have been my nemesis, I have done 6 of them and 4 have been medium dazzle efforts and 2 have been epic failures! I was hoping that Pigman would be lucky #7 and I would finally have a breakthrough half.

I felt really strong on the swim but I when I exited the water and glanced at my watch I wasn't impressed with my time. Only a handful of seconds faster then last year and couple mins slower then I was hoping for but an improvement is still an improvement so I will take it. The challenge for me at Pig has always been the heat and cramping, this year the temp was perfect and the challenge ended up being the wind on the bike. It was exceptionally windy out there, especially on the second half. The last 6 miles we had an unbelievable headwind and my speed was mostly in the single digits. My bike fitness is superior to last year and I biked smarter and harder then 2011 but ended up riding about a minute slower and didn't get anywhere close to the bike split I was hoping for. As I left T2 I crunched some numbers and realized with a 1:30 half marathon I could still break 4:40 so that became my mission. I felt really good on the run and decided to use the same building run planned that worked so well for me at the half marathon three weeks prior.

The hardest part of the run at Pig is the huge hill at mile 11. I started thinking about that hill nonstop at the turn around and kept telling myself to save a little energy to get up the hill and once you are up that hill you can relax and let it rip and finish strong because the hard part will be over. After climbing to the top of the hill I was so happy, just 2 miles to the finish and still on pace to break 4:40. READ MORE