Tri waits for no man (or woman)

Today was unutterably rubbish.  I will expand upon this at some point in the future (thereby making it utterable, I suppose), but this is not the time - suffice it to say that I am fine and you are not to worry about me.  However, even though I've only been training for two days before today (and one of them was a rest day), I find myself with fresh purpose.

Even before taking into account the aforementioned rubbishness, fitting in my whole 20 minutes of running today was always going to be a bit of a struggle.  The main problem was that I had to be at work early this morning for a photo-shoot.  Bearing in mind that I am a lawyer and not a model/photographer/editor/journalist, this was quite some occurrence.  I found myself being pimped and preened by a make-up and hair lady who seemed mildly obsessed with my hair (in front of my boss, which was just weird) before pretending to have a meeting while a photographer who referred to himself as a piano player and his six-strong entourage took endless pictures that I'm not convinced I'll ever want to see.  The result of this was that my whole day was a little behind and I had a couple of trowels' worth of slap on my face that would need to come off before I did anything vaguely athletic, thereby making my original idea of running at lunchtime incredibly cumbersome (much time for make-up off and get changed, actual run time, shower and change time).

Day 3 and counting...

I formulated a new plan, which meant that I would go to netball training after work as usual and then as soon as I got home I would dump all my stuff and get out of the door.  I had to have another change of plan though - I set off from the office a little bit late for netball and then when I got to the tube, the trains were all too packed to get on.  At the point where I was already half an hour late for netball, I gave up and went home, then went straight back out again for my run.

I haven't been running for running's sake for a very long time, so I was expecting twenty minutes to be very hard.  I'm pleased to say it wasn't even nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.  I did need to have a short walk in the middle as the sides of my ankles were hurting (an issue I always have when running after a long break) but from a cardio-vascular perspective I was absolutely fine - I had been expecting to have more than one walking break, so this was a good result.  I did a small tour of my local area, only nearly got bitten by a dog and must have managed a negative split since I turned back exactly on 10 minutes and had to run past my house to get to 20 minutes.  I only managed 1.29 miles (2.07km), but it has shown me that the 2.5km I need to do in the triathlon should be a doddle in 11 weeks' time as long as I keep up the training.  I just keep having to remind myself that running is the discipline I'm least good at, that the session was marked "easy pace" and that it will get easier as I progress through the programme.

Tomorrow, I shall mostly be cycling.  The jury's out on whether that will be on the turbo trainer or a cycle into work and back...