Endurance Turtle A journey through this turtles triathlon adventures

Lately I have been doing physical therapy for my lower back. I basically have had lower back pain since I hit puberty and it has gotten progressively worse. I finally had enough and had my doctor write me a prescription for PT. Through the Pasadena Triathlon Club, I found a place called CATZ. CATZ works mostly on athletes and gear a lot of their methods to the active person. But I plan to do a whole post on that later….

Anyway, they have me doing a lot of core work and plyometrics and I think it is paying off! One month ago (early on in my physical therapy) I went for a run at the bowl, then I went again this week and I shaved a whole minute off of my pace, check out the stats!

Click on the image to expand-

For my run on March 1st, I actually did an interval run. So I ran for about .8 miles then walked a minute, then ran 4 minutes, then walked 1 minute, etc… By the time I was toward the end of my run I was doing about a 9:50 mile pace when I ran. To me this is AMAZING! I had sort of come to the conclusion that I just wasn’t a runner. And it didn’t matter what I did…I would always suck. I also have to tell you that I didn’t do any actual running between the runs you see above. It was all that core work that really improved my run! So now I am convinced that I need to do even MORE core work and who knows how far I can take this. It would be great if I could get to a point where I am running 10 minute miles with no walking breaks, but I still need to do some more work before I hit that goal.

Running is also my weakest part in triathlons. This is the make or break it point for me when it comes to getting on the podium (for Athena). If I can get better at my running, I know I can really rock some of the courses out there!

In other news, the evil girls are back again:

I am just going to give in now and eat a whole box (because that is what happens anyway). Maybe I will eat so many of them that I throw up and then can’t eat anymore, wait…isn’t that an eating disorder?

Happy Hump Day!