This post may contain affiliate links, which support the site at no cost to you.

Week one is in the books! You can read all the Sprint Triathlon training posts here.

I am not entirely sure how I’m going to write these logs, because I find the runs boring while I’m doing them! I can’t imagine how it would be interesting to others to read about them, but I also know that I love to read people’s daily logs about almost anything. And there are definitely going to be others down the road interested in beginner sprint triathlon training. So I’ll kind of feel my way through it here.

Workout summaries

Sunday: Target was to bike 12 miles and then run for 30 minutes; I forgot a hat and my ears got so cold after the first three-mile loop that I abandoned the bike plan. My ears were perfectly fine under headphones, so the run was no issue. Next week I’ll plan a little better for a January workout. The run was fine. I had some pacing challenges.

Monday: 25 minute easy run, no drama. This was on the treadmill. Mentally the challenge was to strike the balance between not so focused on what I was doing that I was bored and miserable, but not so distant from my body that my form fell out.

(Tuesday I did Pilates.)

Wednesday: 25 minute easy run, more or less the same as Monday.

Thursday: 30 minute easy run outdoors. My hip was really bothering me while I was doing it. Same pacing issues as the previous outdoor run, described below.

Challenges this week

Pacing

I don’t know how to pace myself! My “easy” run pace is supposed to be a 10:54 minute pace, or about 5.5 mph. I can sustain this just fine on a treadmill. You definitely wouldn’t call it super easy yet, and by the end of a treadmill workout I am generally at a Zone 4 heart rate, but it’s doable and I have faith that it will get easier. (I wasn’t running regularly before I started this plan, so I expect a little more of a learning curve than a regular runner might experience.)

But once I’m out on the road, I truly don’t know how to regulate my pace! I did the Sunday run at about a 9:45 pace (which the plan calls my “steady” pace) and the Thursday at about a 9:55. It definitely wasn’t an easy pace, but it was like I didn’t know how to downregulate my body. I definitely don’t know how a pace “feels”. Without my Apple Watch I would have said that I felt like I was going slower than on the treadmill! For January and February, I don’t think it will be an issue because 95% of my runs will be indoors, but I know that once the weather gets nice I’ll want to be outside.

Hip pain

I’ve been having some pain above my left hip that’s definitely associated with running. Pilates helps, and it responds in the short term to stretching. I can run through it, and it loosens when I run, but it’s persistent and annoying. I had been having some very persistent pain in my sacroiliac joint (like below your low back) that was a postpartum thing, but lately I started doing glute activation exercises, and it’s like addressing the low back stuff shifted the tension somewhere else.

Part of this is that I am very devoted to my massage gun. (We call it “the pummeler” in my house.) I have this type of massage gun and I love it, though I got it on sale for 40% off and would recommend you wait for a sale too!

If you buy one, I’ll suggest being really intentional about watching youtube videos and massaging a whole area rather than just the thing that hurts–I got myself into some trouble with my hip when I first got the massage gun last year. I had massaged just the pain, loosening one part of a tight muscle dynamic rather than loosening the whole thing, and I actually made it a good bit worse when everything else tugged the hip flexor out of alignment. Now, when I need to massage a new area, I watch a video and ensure that I get all of the relevant muscles and keep everything in balance. I definitely don’t have the expertise to write a post about this, but I did want to share my experience and try to prevent someone else from making this mistake!

Beginner Sprint Triathlon training looking forward

Next week: my first speed workout and some longer easy runs overall! Here we go!