Racing, dayton, testing and a return to the blog

Geeez it's been a while. Oops

Updates updates.
I raced on Jan 1 and it's unclear as to what my pace was. I think the official clock said 8:34, garmin said 8:23? Who knows, but what I DO know is that I got 3rd in my age group so that was nifty.

Isn't it snazzy?

 Then I returned back to school where I've been back to my crazy 7-10 hrs/week of training. I don't think I've actually hit double-digits in the hours/week yet, but we'll get there soon enough. In January I went back to Dayton which was ridiculous again. It was cool because I had done it last year and to see the differences was pretty awesome. I swam, what I believe was 100 y farther and I ran more than 1min/mile faster. So that was exciting. I don't think I'll make SUCH drastic changes in my second year solely because I'm not building a base anymore, but hopefully I can keep getting a little better.

On the second day we did a relay! Here's my relay team: Pasta Dinner. I don't understand the name either... it doesn't matter. I somehow ended up doing the whole bike leg myself which was both fun and funny. We didn't place to poorly, somewhere in the middle of all the teams, but most importantly we had fun cheering each other on.

Peter, Brad, Anna, Me, Nathan

OH OH and reflection of how my job on our exec board actually does something - Brad's shirt is one of our 2012 dry fits and mine is our team shirt this year :) I can't really take credit for the team shirt other than well... ordering them. But those snazzy dry fits are designed by YOURS TRULY.

Last week was testing and my bike test and swim test definitely showed improvement. Nothing quite as exciting as that! My run test showed improvement from last year, but honestly was not near my capabilities. There were a lot of factors working against me so I'm not too upset about it. My other addition to training has been strength/weight training which has been a cool challenge. I actually really like it so that's important!

Today we had a track workout which I just completed on a goose poop-covered track. It was really charming. During my run test I had experienced that chest pain I talked about a while ago, talked to my coach, he told me to breathe through my nose this week while I run. Difficult, but I forgot to do it for my first 400 (workout was 400 repeats) and sure enough I was not feeling too great. Worked hard to concentrate on that for my next 400 and it went away. WOW. I feel stupid, but still kind of relieved to have a quick solution! We'll see if it continues to fix my problems.

I know this may have been a boring-ish post. I'll come back soon laughing at myself.