*aggressive sneezing*

This week I did my first workout with the university’s triathlon club. While I’ve been racing 5 and 10Ks regularly throughout college, triathlons always fell under the category of “I should try that sometime, I swim a lot and bike a lot and run a lot, but it sounds like it takes a lot of equipment I definitely don’t own.” (I have not one but two wetsuits, and neither of them are triathlon-appropriate.) But the NUI team’s racing season is in the spring, I have an unprecedented amount of free time (during my last co-op I was working two jobs on the side—why do you have to sell your firstborn to afford rent in Boston?), and the pool at the university gym is really nice. So on Wednesday night I jogged over to the gym, where the team met up and ran through a seriously Lord of the Rings-esque forest to a nearby track to do speedwork. 

As a former cross-country kid, any distance shorter than 3K makes dungeon sound effects start playing in my head, so the phrase “ten by 400-meter sprints” is never one I’m thrilled to hear. Add that to a determination to establish an athletic reputation, and I haven’t had a workout pound me into the ground that hard since my first day running stairs at the Harvard Stadium. The freezing rain, driving wind, and truly epic mud puddles were pretty reminiscent of high school track and field in Oregon. Running with a pack of Irish boys, not quite as reminiscent of my all-girls school. It was the most fun I’ve had so far in Ireland, and I paid for it with 24 hours of sneezing and the most painful stretching session I’ve had in months. But when the tours and the nights out are done, it’s nice to find something that feels like home.

I have no pictures of this, a little bit because my phone would’ve fried after ten seconds in that rain, and a lot because by the end of the tenth lap I looked like a drowned raccoon. It’s nothing you’d want to see.