I finally ran a triathlon!

Well, let me qualify that.

I fell in love with the local RPM class at the YMCA. It’s a 50 minute class on a stationary bike. There are a number of songs that are played. Each song has a different activity: either warming up or down, fast cycling, hill climbing, or a series of high energy bursts. This workout has been the most intense workout that I have ever done. I feel like I reach 100% of my maximum.

Since I like it so much, I started taking two classes in a row on Mondays (the only day in the week where they do this). That was a tough step, but I got used to the workout. I then started swimming afterwards. Which is where I made a mistake.

Since I did a tough workout with my legs, I decided to only swim with my arms. It was hard, but I worked my way up to four laps between rest periods. Unfortunately, I got so used to this that swimming with the side-stroke while kicking with my legs seemed unnatural to me.

I tried jogging for a while, but my sacroiliac joint started hurting me. When I tried “running” on the elliptical machine at the YMCA, I found that I could jog without pain. So I would jog for 60 minutes on the elliptical machine (and find out that I traveled 5 miles (at least according to the display)) before my RPM class.

I then made a leap in swimming. I would mix up my swim routine to be two laps of swimming with a kickboard. Then I would swim two laps with my version of the breast stroke. Next I would swim two laps with a back stroke. Finally, I would swim two laps with a front crawl. The differences in the stokes allowed me to rest somewhat and combine the four strokes into one eight lap segment before I would rest a little bit. After doing four of these, I am only 3 more laps away from a mile (35 laps).

So I have recently started to combine running, cycling, and swimming into one workout. Once I got used to that, I decided to take a day off of work and go for the big one. I ran 13.1 miles on the elliptical in three sessions (the stupid machine will only let you run for 60 minutes). Next I swam one mile. Then I took the two RPM classes back to back (since I can cycle at around 14.5 mph in the real world, I figure that I went 24 miles).