Where to go from here?

A few weeks back I finished my 3rd official race of the year, completing the Solana Beach sprint tri. It was a lot fun. First time I really pushed it, and arrived at the finish line pretty much empty. I got passed just before the finish line by someone in my age group too, I had burned enough fuel by that point that I just couldn't really mount a challenge. I didn't really realize it, until I looked at the results later and saw that he ended up beating me by .02 seconds. Grrrr.

I'm now taking a bit of a training break. I'm clearly not 18 any more, and my body is politely (and sometimes not so politely) telling me to slow down. My knees are hurting and my body is generally pretty sore. My IT band is aching and my flexibility is worse than ever before. So I'm enjoying cutting back a bit, just swimming more for run and being a bit more casual on the bike and the run. Two weeks have passed and I am starting to feel much better.

So here comes the question. Where to go from here? I have decided to make an all out high intensity effort for what should be my last race of the season. I've signed up for the October Mission Bay Sprint Triathlon. After picking up the Time Crunched Triathlete by Chris Carmichael, I'm planning to start 5 weeks of intense training at the end of this month to prepare for Mission Bay. I'd like to see what I can do when I really focus my training and kick up the intensity. How close to the top 20 in my age group can I get? At the Solana Beach race I finished 36 out of 90 in my age group with a total time of 1:09:06 I have no illusions that I can get fast enough to break the top 20 yet, but how close can I get?

So again comes the question. Where to take the racing from here? I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of races very close by. Most all of them are sprint races, with a few Olympic distance sprinkled in. There is the one half ironman (Oceanside 70.3) but for the most part just sprints. So do I just focus on sprint distance since there are so many of them around? Or, do I try to step it up to race Olympic/International distances?

In writing this post, I have come to realize that I really don't have time to train properly for the next Olympic distance race. I haven't run 6.2 miles yet, and don't think I really have the time to get myself safely up to that distance. Bike won't be an issue, and in my last tri swim group I swam about 1.2 miles, so I can make the swim. But realistically, while I could probably finish, I don't think I would be happy with the result.

So I think the next step is to continue to rest up, play and have some fun before really hitting it hard at the end of the month. I'll try to document the training as I go through it. It will probably be fun to look back on after the race.