Slow and steady

A rather lovely 10-mile run this morning with my friend B., from the summer running class. She's a bit slower than I am, and hasn't been training consistently since the half-marathon we both did in early August--this makes it amazingly easier to keep the long run to appropriate pace! Usually I'm doing it with L. and S.--L. is exactly my pace, but perhaps does less cross-training so my endurance is a little better--S. doesn't train consistently but is fast. I have to hold 'em back and then let 'em off the leash for the last couple miles only! But L. and S. are both (separately) out of town this weekend...

(A nice little fast bit by myself at the end, just to make sure my legs remember how to move quickly...)

(S. is on an Alaskan cruise, and I really hope he's doing his training runs while he's away--I am the coach, I am going to be rather disappointed if he does not run a significantly better time than me in our October half-marathon, he's so speedy! But even before he left he was claiming that he would be unlikely to be able to do any long runs because of the danger of being chased by a bear...)

B. and I had lots of triathlon conversation--she's doing her first sprint triathlon next weekend. She has swum a grand total of once, and has borrowed a bike from a friend and ridden it a couple times. This is a lesson to me--I am the queen of overpreparedness, if I get a convenient chance to do one of these I should just do it, even though I feel so nervous about cycling I seriously am good to go on swimming and running. I mean, there's always room for much improvement, I do not have open-water experience to speak of (just had one practice session in August) and I look forward to becoming a faster runner and swimmer in future, but really, I'm quite fully functional and with fairly decent fitness! A mile swim and a ten-mile run are as nothing to me! I was taken aback, looking the other day at a training plan for an Olympic-distance triathlon, to realize that my regular weekly training hours are higher than that already, and that I kind of could do one in a few weeks if I just had a couple decent longish bike rides....