RANT, RANT, RANT

I’m beginning to wonder if this is the first year that my coach has added runners to his triathlete group. I’m getting the sense that he’s not sure what to do with us, especially those that aren’t running fall marathons. After deciding not to do a fall marathon I sent him an email with a list of 5k-10k races that goes through October 29th. I guess I assumed he’d write workouts for me with the idea of peaking for that last race.

Given that my previous schedule only went through yesterday and that Tuesdays are typically speed workouts, I emailed him this morning to see if we were meeting tonight. Usually we meet at the Macaleter track at 6:30. I figure if I didn’t hear from him, I’d just go to the track and hope someone was there, if not, I’d workout on the track by myself. At 4:20 I got a group email saying “No practice until Saturday. Enjoy some downtime after TCM weekend. This is the time of year to back-off on running…blah, blah, blah.”

Hmm, so I guess I’m on my own for the next month. Not that I can’t come up with some workouts for the next 4 weeks, but part of the idea behind hiring a coach was trying to gain some ideas regarding tapering and peaking. Plus the suddenness of it really bites. I mean I like to kind of know what’s on tap for my hard workouts so I can mentally prepare for them.

Tonight I was like “now what?” You know how they say you should know what you’re trying to achieve with every workout? Well tonight I felt like I had no clue. Obviously, there was no need to drive 20 minutes to the track. Should I do a track workout near my house? What kind of workout; 800s, cruise intervals, tempo run, etc.? I decided to just run to the track and see what happened.

By this time, the weather wasn’t helping my mood either; 60 degrees for both the temperature and the dew point, plus rain. Thoughts of getting in a hard workout were vanishing rapidly. They disappeared completely when I got to the track and there was a football game going on in the middle of it. Screw it, it’s supposed to be cooler in two days. I’ll run hard then. Instead I managed 5 miles at a brisk (probably sub-7:30) pace.

Okay, rants over (for now).