Welcome back from the holiday weekend for those readers who honored veterans yesterday on Memorial Day and my UK friends who had a bank holiday yesterday. This is a short work week here as well as we have Thursday off for Ascension Day and then I will be working from London on Friday.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I finally pulled the trigger and registered for my first triathlon, the Geneva International Triathlon, which takes place on July 19th. There are multiple course lengths but as this is my first, I opted for the short course.

500 meter swim – 20 km bike – 5 km run

or

.3 mile swim – 12.4 mile bike – 3.1 mile run

When I glance at these distances none of them seem overwhelming, not even the swim. However, I know that the difficulty comes in asking my legs to run even 3 miles after they’ve kicked my way through an open water swim and pedaled up a challenging bike course.

Therefore, after consulting multiple websites and starting to read Your First Triathlon I kicked my butt into full gear last week. I don’t have a full plan in place yet and clearly need to add biking into the rest of my weekly workouts but for now, I’m happy to have logged some solid run and solid swims last week. I already know that this week will include a training ride with Charlie in London and next weekend Bo is helping me practice clipping in (que the fear) while we enjoy a long ride in Geneva! It doesn’t hurt that I have two training partners for my triathlon even though neither of them are in Geneva. Charlie is doing a triathlon in June and I’ve loved being able to text her questions back and forth as she is ahead of me on the training journey.  If you head over to Theodora’s blog today you can see that she just started training for her first 70.3. Her workouts inspire me to push through and wake up even when I don’t want to and we often text each other updates from workouts we dread like pool swims.

So, without further adieu, here’s a recap of last week’s workouts:

Monday: Rest day

Tuesday: AM: 1800 meter swim including 50 meter race in the middle PM: 2 hours of music power yoga at InnerCityYoga

Wednesday: 3.5 mile trail run including hill repeats with Renaud

Thursday: 2000 meter swim including 100 meter race in the middle

Friday: Intense track speed workout with my friend and running coach, Renaud. My plan was a 1 mile warm-up followed by 8 x 400 meter repeats at 1:40 pace followed by 1:20 jogging before a 1 mile cool down.  More details to come on this workout later this week as I have an awesome app to share with you and tips to figure out what your speed pace should be!

Saturday: 5 mile shakeout run through Rome with my friend Raj

Sunday: Walking approximately 6 miles through Rome

Your turn – If you’ve done a triathlon before, what is your #1 tip for a rookie?