Battling Bloggers

After checking out this month’s edition of Stridelines and seeing the photos from the Reno-to-Tahoe relay team, one thing has become clear: I definitely need to find some of those Texas flag running shorts between now and March 1, 2008.

Why do I need shorts, and why do I need them by March 1, 2008? Well, for the Texas Independence Relay, of course. It’s a 200-mile relay race from Gonzales, Texas to the base of the San Jacinto Monument here in Houston. I will be running with 11 of my running blogger friends as part of the awesome Battling Bloggers of the Texas Republic team, and we’ll be having a casual competition (at least I’m going to think it’s casual) with the Texian Road Warriors team of Woodlands-area runners.

I’ve been interested in doing one of these large, multi-day relay races for some time, so I’m really excited. Tons of runners, cramming into a van, sweaty, smelly, running through the night…what’s not to love? I’m the slowest person on the team at this point, which is a little depressing, but I’ve still got 7 months to improve my times.

While I haven’t been biking or swimming much lately, I have increased my running, even though I haven’t been posting about it as much. I did 6 slow treadmill miles on Monday night, and the BAF-prescribed 8×30-30 speed session last night in the oppressive heat. I won’t say much more, as they were pretty uneventful runs. The 6-miler was very slow. 12:00 pace. I was going for distance, not speed. Yesterday’s speed workout was excellent, but hot. Good grief was it hot. Very, very hot. Did I mention hot? No? Well it was hot.

I’ve also signed up for a few more races, after planning to run last Saturday’s Maribelle’s 5K and having to bail when Jose and I decided to go to Corpus. This Sunday I’ll be racing in the Eastside Triathlon, next Sunday I’ll be racing in the Ironbabe Triathlon. Both of those are sprint distance. September is up in the air, since I’ll be out of town two of the four weekends. In October I’ll be doing the USA 10-Miler for sure. And in November I signed up for a bit more of a challenge. No, not another half ironman, but somewhat close: the 50.5-mile race being held in November as part of the Tri One-o-One series in The Woodlands. The 101 distance is somewhere between a half and full ironman, and I wasn’t ready to tackle that. So I chose the 50.5 distance: .93 mile swim, 40.3 mile bike, and 9.3 mile run. It should be a great event.