Is my Garmin broken?

What a weird, wacky, wonderful week in my mid-season break world!

I managed to keep my promise of doing 20 minutes worth of yoga after each bike and/or run.  Post-swim yoga doesn't exist in this house.  I've been using the free Yogamazing podcast off of iTunes.  I love that it's a mere 20 minutes long, yet it hits everything that I want it to hit (namely those tight hamstrings of mine).

The weather down here has finally broken-- we have rain!  It's been glorious! For about 2 hours each afternoon, the temperature drops 10 degrees and my day suddenly becomes brighter.  I wish I were brave enough to run during our summer storms, but I do not have a 'death by lightning' wish.

I received some new kicks in the mail this week in the form of the much hyped shoe of the season-- the Saucony ProGrid Kinvara.  I'll be posting a review of them this weekend.  I wanted to do a few different types of runs in them before providing my initial opinion.  Stay tuned!

The big surprise for me this week came during yesterday's interval bike/t-run.  Since Scott & I are on a mid-season break, we are pretty much training however we please.  Yesterday it just felt like a good day for a short, intense brick.  I haven't done a short, speedy brick in a very long time.  Actually, I haven't done anything short and speedy at all since the Heartland Sprint Tri.  That was nearly 1 year ago.  Wow!

Anyway, we planned a 20 mile ride with intervals followed by a 20 min. t-run.  The idea was to get off the bike and then nail the first mile of the run.  I wanted that first mile to be run as though we were in the final leg of a sprint tri and had 5K to go.  So it wasn't flat out, blow yourself up; but, the goal was to run HARD while making sure that it was a pace that could be sustained.  The remainder of the run was to be done at an easy pace.

The bike intervals were awesome.  It felt good to open up the lungs and push the legs.  The slightly faster riding that we've been doing has definitely been paying off.  I can't ever recall being able to keep that sort of interval pace outside of a sprint race.  Improvement!

I haven't done a flying dismount since I face-planted myself into T2 at the Madeira Beach sprint in May '09.  That road rash hurt and I've been a chicken ever since.  Being that the intervals went over so well and since I am on a mid-season break (really milking this, right?), I decided, "what the heck?!?"  One flying dismount served up slowly, but surely!  No face-plant, no road rash!  Scott is going to work with me on the dismount a couple of times per week.  It's getting it's own little block in the calendar.

So there I stood-- facing down the run.  I haven't run fast off the bike in a long, long time.  However, short and hard is what I love and I was ready to GO!  I started my Garmin and down the road I went-- 92F, sweating like a pig but with more gusto than I've had in quite a while.  I felt great!  Short suits me for the most part... even when it's hot out.  I didn't look at my Garmin at all during that first mile.  I wanted to be able to 'feel' the pace out; to settle on something that I felt I could hold for 5k.  I relaxed into the run, controlled my breathing and thought about maintaining a fast turnover.  Keep those feet moving!

Then I heard it.  The glorious chirp of the Garmin reporting my mile split.  I looked down.

HOLY MOLY!  Is my Garmin broken?

I never expected to see the pace that came up, but let's just say that it was a huge milestone for me.  I have never, ever run this fast off the bike.  Period.  Not for my win at Danskin, not for the two AG races that I lost by the skin of my teeth.  Never.  I suppose that my surprising open 5K PR this past April should have been a bit of clue that I might be able to handle the sprint run a bit better this year.  However,  I have had so much trouble pacing my bike properly for the HIM races that I've done (and hence, have had two craptastic HIM runs), that it never occurred to me that I might be conditioned enough to keep everything together for a shorter distance.

I ran the remainder of the run feeling like I was on top of the world.  Honestly, it took me back to the days when running 20 or 30 minutes straight was a huge accomplishment for me.  It felt wonderful. I thought a lot about the cycling base that I've built up over the past year and how it's slowly but surely enabling me to be the short course racer that I want to be.  I thought about the process of stress, recovery and adaptation-- how all of those longer bike rides and miles of easy runs have laid a beautiful foundation for which I can now build speed upon.  Most importantly, I thought about how impatient I used to be in regards to the 'process' and then I reflected upon how patient I have become over the past 8 or 9 months.

Needless to say, right now I am stoked.  I'm doing a local sprint tri in mid-July and while this is not an "A" race or even a "B" race (it's actually the race that signifies the end of 'play' time and the beginning of serious B2B prep), I plan to bring it!  I know that in the game of triathlon, you never know what race day will hand you, but I do know that I plan to do my very best and give it all that I've got.