Bring out the trainers

The weather has definitely taken a turn for the worse so Monday night we dug the trainers out of the closet and set them up for our first indoor bike ride of the season. Tuesday the alarms sounded and only I actually got out of bed. I did a relatively easy hour ride and took the evening off to go shopping! My lovely sister and future brother in law got me a gift card to one of my favorite stores, Ann Taylor Loft. Combined with a 20% off coupon, I was able to find exactly what I was looking for: new black pants and dressy cords for work. It was exactly the kind of break from training and talk of triathlon that I needed.

Wednesday morning the temperature was 44 degrees, the wind was rocking the trees, and the sun wasn't going to rise for another 80 minutes. So we turned off the alarms and rescheduled for an evening run. Chad and I left home and work at about the same time and ran towards each other, eventually meeting right around the Jefferson memorial. We decided to add some hills to the run so we headed out to the Custis trail which is perfectly rolling. After about an hour 15 it was time to turn around and head home and a few minutes later I realized that my heart rate was getting a little high. I dropped back a little bit, keeping Chad within visual distance. We ran through the Georgetown water front area and up to the Lincoln. We both had to take a bathroom break and then headed onwards. It was about 1 hr 52 min into the run and starting up again hurt. I really needed to drop the pace back and focus on getting some skip back into my step. Eventually it came back and we were running about 8:30 min miles. That was definitely up from the sub-7s we were holding up to that point, but our average over the whole run ended up being 8:06 min miles. That's not bad for 2 hrs 24 min!

The wind had definitely picked up and we were both freezing by the time we got home. I must not have drank enough because I think I was having some dehydration induced nausea later. Same thing happened last week so I will try to be more careful about taking in more fluids. We've got 2 more long runs on the schedule and then we can take down for taper.

My brother and his girlfriend are coming to visit us today. As it turns out, it's a rainy, windy day. Perfect for sleeping in and doing a trainer ride. Unfortunately Chad's trainer broke right away so we had to take turns doing an hour ride and now I'm at home waiting for Paul and Sarah while Chad gets in a long swim.