I realize I’ve posted a lot already this week, but I had such a great training day yesterday that I can’t wait to blog about it. The weather has taken a turn for the fantastic, finally, and Christine and I took full advantage of it.

Lacamas Lake 8 mile run

Normally I wouldn’t blog about a single training run, but I posted a little teaser on Facebook about putting a running tip into action that improved my running pace. At the Mock Tri, the person leading the running clinic mentioned a little trick to improve your pace….wait for it…I felt so silly for not knowing this…swing your arms faster and your body will follow!! So I did it, and, it worked! My running pace on long runs usually falls to about 10:30 and the pace for my 8 mile run at Lacamas was 9:50, my fastest pace for that distance. In fact, my first mile pace, where I was really working on moving my arms faster, was 9:17, my fastest pace ever. I’m posting my splits from my Forerunner. I was, and still am, so excited!

Garmin Forerunner Quick Release Kit

Garmin Quick Release Kit

The Quick Release Kit for my Garmin Forerunner arrived. This allows me to transition the GPS unit from swim, bike, to run quickly and easily. While I knew that the Garmin would not transmit GPS data through water while I wore the unit on my wrist during my swim, I didn’t realize that it would not regain satellite connection upon exiting the water, which caused the unit to not notify 0.25 mile marks during the run portion of the Mock Tri.

The quick release mount allows the Forerunner head unit to be popped off the wrist strap and quickly attached to a bike. It includes a bike mount and wrist strap with quick release head unit mount. This allows me to carry the GPS unit in my swim cap during the swim, snap it onto my bike at T1 and then onto my wrist strap at T2 for the run. It snaps on and off very easily while still being very secure.

Wrist strap without Garmin, with Garmin attached, mount on bike without Garmin, with Garmin attached.

Open Water Swim Practice

I was not very happy with my swim experience at the Mock Tri. I felt choked and constricted in my wetsuit, which negatively impacted comfort level and prevented me from being able to swim with my face in the water. I really needed to get to the bottom of this and determine if there was something I needed to do while donning the suit to prevent this or if having tri sleeves under a sleeveless wetsuit was too much bulk over my chest.

I am ecstatic to report that I believe my issue was related to improper donning and race adrenaline! My swim at Klineline Pond was fantastic! This time I made sure to not only pull excess suit from my arms and legs into the core, but to pull excess suit from my neck and chest down into my core. I think I just pulled the arm excess into my neck and chest at Mock Tri. It was night and day different.

I ended up swimming just 0.25 miles as my goal for the swim was to get comfortable in the wetsuit and we had a running clinic in Portland to get to after the swim. We met two other members from the Tornadoes Swim Team, swam out to the floating raft and had intended to swim the pilings from the raft to the beach and then repeat, but ran into another swim team member and changed course. Not having enough time, I swam with the group for a ways and then exited to get changed for running clinic. A great swim and also the first time to use the Garmin in my swim cap to track my distance.

Good Form Running Clinic

Foot Traffic hosted a Good Form Running Clinic put on by a rep for New Balance. It was a great clinic and included individual videotaped running analysis to see how you run and learn how to correct it. And it was FREE!

Good Form Running focuses on four elements of running to improve your pace and prevent injury:

• Posture
• Midfoot
• Cadence
• Lean

I suggest that you click on the Good Form Running link above and watch the videos about the four elements rather than having me explain them. This technique eliminates “heel striking” through correct posture and tempo. Oddly enough, the trick of swinging your arms faster to increase your running pace came up again in this clinic!

Through the video analysis I learned that my lean was great, but that my cadence was a little slow that causes my stride to be too long and lead to heel striking. Increasing my cadence should correct this. I am looking forward to my next run to begin to implement these techniques and improve my running. While I love running to the Gladiator soundtrack on my iPhone, I am going to take the advice of the New Balance rep and download new music with the suggested 180 beats per minute cadence. She suggested jogtunes but you can find others online too.

Alright, that’s it for now!