1st practice – not my best showing

I showed up to practice today, nervous as I’ve been in a long time! The distance team was driven outside of town on a less busy/no stop sign road. The team and I did about a mile and a half warm up, and then started the threshold.

Wow… Simone will be so helpful for me! We’re actually the same height, which is really funny, and our threshold paces are the exact same (5:55-6:05). It’s just awesome.

We did 1×20 minutes today, 1 minute rest, then 5 minutes.

Only problem? My legs. I did well until about 18 minutes. Then my legs came undone… it’s so weird. Not sure how to describe it, but it’s the exact same feeling I had last week when trying to do a 20 minute threshold. They just start turning over at a slower rate and aren’t able to react at all.

This is SO unlike me, especially at this threshold/tempo pace. This is usually my strongest workout, and I typically do 40+ minutes at this pace (broken up differently each week). Today was just 25.

How embarassing! I wasn’t too far behind, but still… I don’t want to “tag along”! I’d like to be up with her, each of us helping the other. So, I need to get back to my normal, and then I’ll be up with her without any trouble.

I’m considering taking a few days off. I’m a little scared, because that means the last 3 weeks will be poor in terms of mileage, but I need to get over this ASAP. What’s the deal? Does moving and stress of work really take that much out of you? (closed on a house last friday, moved over the weekend, and the following weekend I travelled to Denver for a trade show for the ski shop… too much) I haven’t done strength yet this week (tonight was going to be my first session of the week, but I decided to skip), and I think I’ll go easy on it if I do much strength work at all.

So, even though today wasn’t my best showing, I am SO happy I was able to run with them! Looking forward to training more with them, as well as trying to help coach/help the team out a little!