Six Days to Recover

Six days. I've given myself only six days to recover from an oly-distance tri before racing the Steelhead IM 70.3 this weekend. I don't know why six days seems like too short a time - most of us runners have raced multiple times in one weekend in our younger days. Maybe it's because the Steelhead race is a BIG one AND a qualifier for the 70.3 World Championship in November. Six days of recovery doesn't seem like enough time to do my best. It could very well be a disaster in the making (and by definition, then, I must take on the challenge).

But the tri season this year has felt like a desperation exercise for me ever since Ironman Coeur d'Alene in June. Finding races taking entries that don't conflict with events at work has been a challenge. So here I find myself robbing my body of needed recovery time in order to lend meaning to my triathlon season before it ends.

The only way to approach the race cram is to learn something from the experience. Will I be able to push my 44-year-old body through 13.1 miles after a hard 56-mile bike? Tomorrow I will know the answer. I have high hopes after last year's two half-iron distance races only eight days apart. Surprisingly, my run in the second one was five minutes faster. But that was eight days of recovery. And I was one-year younger. Stay tuned.