Mental Breakthrough

There is a local sprint race that runs every Tues. night during the summer that is quite a bit of fun. It's called the Winding Trails Tri-Training series, and is a 1/4 mile swim, 5 mile mountain-bike, and 3.1 mile trail run. This is the race that first got me started in Triathlon's 3 years ago, and has been a lot of fun ever since. My best ever time was 1:05:14 last year, and I've been struggling with my pace since most of my training is more long distance oriented.

Last night I set a new record in 1:03:37 by finally breaking through mentally. I'm not a great runner, and have struggled to run under 30 minutes at this race. Part of the issue is that I think that I'm not a good runner... but also I haven't really pushed. Last night I felt pretty good, but mostly I decided to just go for it, and deal with the pain. I've often heard that sprint racing is tougher mentally because to excel you simply need to go as hard as you can without worrying about blowing up. I feel like I finally turned the corner last night as I ended up running in the 27 minute range, hurting most of the way but really pushing hard the whole way. It feels great today to know that I can really run the whole course instead of just managing the race.

Now if I can break an hour...