Tri en France: the American proves that she is not a complete imbecile

I'm a little sick. This whole weekend I had a sore throat and then woke up yesterday with a pretty bad cough (but thankfully no sore throat). I was feeling pretty crappy today, and it was cold and rainy but SOMEHOW I motivated myself to go to tri practice.

I ran there in the rain/cold. It really wasn't all that bad especially compared to what I have to deal with in Chicago, but it kind of sucks to be sick and wet and cold. I got there 10 minutes before practice is supposed to start and as I suspected - the French are fair weather athletes. We've had nearly 30 people at practice before... today we had MAYBE 10. The track team, which usually has upwards of 60, had about 20.


Based on our performances on the test last week, our coach figured out our paces and had specific charts for each of us. The workout, as I understood it, was 1000m followed by 5x200m. My coach told me to take the 1000m at 6:40 or better and my 200s between 1-1:03... so I ran the 1000m in 5:04. Whoops. So then my coach was like "WHOA TOO FAST!" and I tried to explain to him that I didn't understand the test last week and that my stats were inaccurate. To which he responded by telling me to try my 200s between 49-52 sec. Yeah, that didn't happen. I couldn't break 53, but by the end I was so glad it was over. Or at least I thought it was over until he said "ok, 3 minute break then do it again."

That second 1000m wasn't too awful, but was 16 sec slower. Then I took all my 200s at 57 sec. I didn't think I could finish all of them, but the coach was there... waiting for me to finish. It was rough and one of the hardest workouts I've EVER done, but thankfully it also resulted in a change in my test results. Now my workouts will be based around a max of 12.5 km/h (7:43 min/mile). Apparently I'm a LOT better at 1000s than 200s - which is not surprising. I literally have no ability for sprinting and no experience in short distance.

Then I ran home and looked at my garmin. I did a total of 2.9 miles at an average of 8 min pace! EEEEK And the run itself was just under 7.4 miles - longest in France yet.

Je suis crevé. I'm gonna go collapse now.