No Longer My Own Boss

This weekend marked a big change in my triathlon training. I am now being coached! Here's the background on how I made this decision...

Now that I am a member of the Golden Gate Tri Club I decided to take advantage of an awesome program they offer to prepare for Wildflower. Every year they offer their Tri and Give (TAG) program to prepare for the Oly distance and Half Ironman Training (HIT) to prep for the long course. They also have HIT later in the season to prep for Vineman. Both programs are coached by the awesome coaches at Tri More Fitness.

I signed up for TAG to prepare for the Wildflower Oly, with the plan to then transition to the HIT program to prep for the Vineman half. The TAG program is marketed towards people who are new to triathlon, but there are several of us who have already done tri's and there are lots of people who were already runners, cyclists and swimmers before they joined TAG. This weekend was our first set of workouts, a short ride and run on Saturday and a longer run today. There are 40 people in the program, and I think ~25 showed up at each workout. Every week the coaches load our training into Training Peaks on Sunday nights, and we have group workouts on Wednesdays (track night), Saturdays and Sundays. The other training we do on our own.

I joined this program for lots of reasons. The big one is that I thought it would be great to meet people and make new friends, since that is one of the main reasons I joined GGTC. Also, they really start at the ground up with skills training, so I know I'm going to be getting some good swimming and running instruction, and I'll also have ample opportunity to work on my bike handling skills (which need some serious improvement). While I'm confident that I can push myself on my own, and don't really need a group to keep me accountable I think that the social aspects of this group will keep training fun for me.

Aside from our upcoming vacation, I have tons of training stretching out before me from now until July 18th so having some company will be nice. I think it's already working, I ran 5 miles with a friend in the group this morning and the run flew by as we chatted. We'll see as the next few weeks unfold how I adapt to no longer being my own boss when it comes to my training.