Frustration Again!

Today is Thursday and it's the day that I normally meet my triathlon coach for my weekly morning workout. Currently, Coach Baker has a bum wheel. He has a broken toe and has been unable to do "normal" workouts for him. Therefore, he gets to actually stand on the sidelines and coach rather than coach AND participate. I figured this would be a good thing this morning in that the workout would be especially intense because he would have my under a microscope. It was definitely headed in that direction until I had the old "pain in the calf" problem again. I got through a nice warm-up followed by some pretty good drills to get loose and get the blood flowing. After the drills, he had me do some striders which were basically 40 yard sprints at about 80% intensity. I like those because I feel like I'm best suited for those types of bursts of energy over the endurance stuff. Once those were done (which I liked a lot), we moved into the beginning part of the serious workout. He had planned to do, what he called a 4-3-3-2-1. More on the specifics of that at the end. Meanwhile, I started with a timed mile at what he considered my 5k pace. In a nutshell, I ran the mile in 7:00. I felt good and Coach said I was pacing about a 1:45 per lap pace for a 5k. I was happy with that and didn't feel too bad. I felt like I could keep going. Anyway, we moved on to the next portion which consisted of a 3/4 mile (3 laps) at a slightly faster pace. He wanted me to go about a 1:40 per lap pace for 3 laps. That's when the wheels fell off! On the back straight away of the first of the first of the 3 laps, I had that sharp pain that occasionally get in my calves. This time it was in my right calf rather than the left. It's so frustrating because I was really starting to fall into a groove. Richard had me stop, we talked about some things health-wise, and he told me we were going to do some tweaking to my run program to try and fix the calf situation. Basically instead of trying to mix in some hard fast and intense runs, we going to strictly focus on slow endurance building timed runs. That suits me fine if I can ultimately run long distances without any pain. Besides, isn't that the objective anyway? I'm in this to build endurance anyway - which is slowly coming along (and I mean slowly)!

The workout that Richard had planned consisted of:

800 meter warm-up
Various drills (2 each) - high knees, butt kicks, kareokes, skips, defensive slides
4 - 40 yard strides (80% sprints)
400 meter slow jog
1 mile - 5k pace
3/4 mile (3 laps) - a little faster than 5k pace
3/4 mile - same as above
800 meters - slightly faster than 3/4 mile pace
400 meters - slow
Warm down & stretch

Obviously, I didn't make it through the entire workout which really frustrates me. I can't figure out if it's a hydration issue, or a fatigue issue due to last night's swim workout, or if it's just a physical physique issue. I'm getting to the point where I want to go have it checked with a sports specialist. Hopefully soon. We'll see.