Last week I had a familiar feeling in my foot – a bad familiar feeling. A feeling of pain. A feeling not unlike the pain I had last summer after Ironman, but even before that I felt it a few years back when I was a young triathlete. A young triathlete who over-trained and got a stress fracture in her foot. It was a long and arduous recovery process. I didn’t run for 4 months, but I sure did swim and bike! However, last week I felt a similar pang. It was in a different spot and the pain was not as bad as the peak of my previous injury, but it was bad.

So I have changed my training plan to be less about running and more about swimming and biking. I’m going to get new running shoes this week and see how they feel. If the pain is still there by next week, I’m going to see a physiotherapist (which is covered under my beloved health plan).

Today I had an intense swimming session doing intervals of 50m, 100m, and 200m with rests in between. My arms felt like jelly for the rest of the day and even tonight they are sore. I guess that means it was a good workout. My 50s have definitely gotten a lot faster, my 100s and 200s it is harder to tell because I really run out of steam after 50m. With the 200s, I literally felt like I could not pull any harder than I was. Doing all of these swimming intervals have really taught me a lot about the importance of abdominals in swimming, which tells me that I probably wasn’t doing it right before. I was trying to pull without anything to pull against – no wonder I didn’t go anywhere fast! Now that I know, I am working hard at it. I am so glad to have my coach to give help me out with this stuff.

Oh, and flip turns are so hard, but so good! I discovered through the video at Beginner Triathlete that I was doing them slightly wrong. So I have corrected that and am getting better at my timing. It’s hard to do flip turns while doing intervals because I run out of breath. However, as a slightly masochistic triathlete, it feels kind of good at the same time.

After all of this training, I am truly exhausted by the end of the day. It is time for bed!