Heather Lendway

Hello! This year has been a little more than busy but I’m trying to catch up on some blogging now.  I’ll take you back to the last week in April.  I was looking forward to some short course racing at St. Anthony’s in Florida but unfortunately life had a different plan.  Early Monday morning of race week I woke up with horrible food poisoning.  I was sick in bed for two days on a liquid diet.  When I did come around on Wednesday my diet was made up of bread and smoothies.  Friday I had my first real meal when I arrived in Florida for the race on Sunday.  While I wasn’t working out much my body definitely was not get the nutrition it needed going into a race.  If it was a local race I definitely would have sat out but I had my plane ticket and a Air BNB all paid for so I decided to give it a go.

Swim

Race morning was insanely windy so they ended up cutting the swim course in half (this has rarely happened in the long race history).  We did a beach start, typically we start in waist deep water, this was also abnormal since the water is only a foot deep for about 200 yards, therefore we were running instead of swimming.  I was behind a group of 5 girls, while the waters were really rough, I struggled way more than I should have and the group gapped me by about 10 yards.  We existed into shallow water at the beach, with even more running, followed by a longer run to transition due to the course change.  The “swim” change was more than unideal for me.

Bike

I lost a lot of time running to transition but I could still hear our very own Jerry MacNeil announcing the ladies as they exited.  I could see athletes in the distance as I mounted my bike and set out to catch them.  Unfortunately I was making up zero ground and slowly athlete by athlete started to pass me.  I willed my body to push harder and hold onto these athletes that I should be able to bike with but my body did not respond.  After getting into a horrible mental hole I settled in and tried to just do “my race” as best I could.  At the last out and back I could see I was so far behind from where I thought I should be I knew I just needed to finish.  Coming into T2 I was far out of where I wanted to be but I put on my shoes and grabbed my race belt to head out for a run.

Run

I tried so hard to push some sort of decent run pace but again my body just wouldn’t respond.  I trudged along for a very long 6 miles.  When races get tough I try to distract myself my cheering on the other athletes in the race.  I never stopped running but I sure thought about walking that 10K on more than one occasion.  I finished the race running a slower pace than my slow half marathons.

While the race was more than disappointing I have to remember what my body went through that week.  Having food poisoning and taking days to recover from it with little to no training doesn’t is far from ideal race prep.  Hind sight I should not have raced but part of me figured I paid a LOT of money to be there so I might as well get a workout in.  I should have just let my body recover.

I at least got to enjoy some outdoor swimming!

I also met some Tri Team LC teammates!