Week Off

After my private 70.3 last Sunday I vowed to take a whole week off.  It was great at the beginning of the week, but by the weekend, I was ready to get back at it.  We had absolutely perfect weather this week and weekend and I decided to stick with my plan anyway.  It was tough, but I'm glad I did since it gave me an even bigger urge to get back to working out.  For fun, I looked back through my logs for the last two years and this was the third week in two years that I had zero exercise.  The other two were the guys fishing trip the last two years.

I haven't decided exactly what I'm doing next year, but I have decided I would continue with triathlons.    The swimming is still scary and the pain is uncomfortable, but the challenge is invigorating.  If I get accepted to the Rev3 tri team, I'll do a couple of their races.  The chances of me being accepting are slim, but might as well try. You can apply here.

One problem with working out a lot is that I don't have energy to do chores and other things.  So I got a few chores done this weekend and it felt pretty good.  I also got some cooking in though I forgot to take pictures.

Oh yeah, wear your helmet, it's dangerous out there.

Private HIM is in the books

 Well my private HIM is in the books.  It turns out only two of us did the "race".  SuperKate was crazy enough to give it a go as her first HIM.  She did great!  I'll let her post her pics.  We should have gotten post race pics with our race shirts on, but neither of us felt like spending any more energy.

The weather was absolutely perfect for the event.  Cool and sunny with the high reaching about 70.  We started off at 11 and ran to the Y for a 2100 yard swim.  I haven't been swimming much so I wasn't really looking forward to this part.  I felt amazingly good.  Maybe there is something to be said for being well rested and hydrated.  I changed before and after the swim do there were two extra transitions.

Coming in from the swim

Heading out on the bike

My friends Ryan and Annie came out to cheer and ring cow bells in my driveway.  It was awesome!  Kate's husband and son also came out for the run portion.  I set everyone up in the garage and had burgers and brats for them as well as football on TV.

Ryan and Annie ringing cow bells.

The bike was good once I got my hr under control.  For the first 15 minutes, my hr was in zone 4 which is unsustainable.  I slowed down until it was upper zone 2/lower zone 3 and did a pretty good job keeping it there.  I was able to drink some Infinite ride formula every 10 minutes with no trouble.  Once two bottles were gone, I switch to water and had half a GU.  Total calories in ~600 with about 32 ounces of water.

Coming in from the bike

I felt pretty good coming off the bike, but knew the run was going to be rough.  My jacket had salt stains all over it so I planned to take one salt capsule every loop and a half a GU every other loop along with some water.

Getting ready to run

On the first loop my stomach started feeling a little bloated and full.  Not as bad as it did at NOLA, but not good either.  My hr was in lower zone 3 for the first loop and I decided to slow down to get it into upper zone 2 to see if that would help my stomach.  Within 20 minutes I started farting.  What a great feeling :-).  I started to feel less full and more confident I would have a death march.  Lap 3 was a little slower than lap 2 but it was nice to know I only had 5 miles left.  Then I made a mistake between lap 3 and 4.

starting lap 3 or 4

For some reason an orange slice sounded good to me.  As soon as I ate it I almost threw up but held it together.  I walked over to the bike trail and started running and not more than 10 seconds later I was hurling in the grass on the side of the bike trail.  Thoughts of DNF came into my mind.  Luckily I brought a bottle of water with me on this loop so I rinsed out my mouth and started walking.  I felt much better after that and decided I would run/walk my way in.  No more salt or GU, just water.  The rest of the death march was uneventful.

The finish

Overall, I would say my fitness just isn't there yet to have a great race.  Maybe I skipped too many workouts.  Maybe I didn't go hard enough in some of the workouts.  Maybe it's time to follow a different plan.  Lots of maybes.  I did decide that I won't decide on the season next year for at least a week.  With all that said, I didn't have any bad aches or pains during the race and I felt well enough after the race to cook for a bunch of people.  The next day I wasn't overly tired or sore either.  I's say I was in good enough shape for a good race.  I just need to figure out what it will take for a great race.

I weighed myself before and after the race and I lost 9 pounds or about 5.6% of my body weight.  That seems a little high, but I'm not sure what I can do about it.


The numbers
Total = 7:03:58 - 156
10:21:08 - run 0.5 mile to Y, check in and change
10:13:18 - 500 yards
1:00:48 - rest (wimp)
11:02:66 - 500 yards
1:00:44 - rest
13:45:25 - 600 yards
11:42:37 - 500 yards
12:58:93 - change and run 0.5 miles home
3:12:37 - bike 55.7 - ave hr 157
2:04:32 - bike-run transition - ave hr 142
24:25:55 - 2.5 mile loop 1 - ave hr 168
1:33:47 - chat with spectators
28:25:86 - 2.5 mile loop 2 - ave hr 162
4:01:90 - chat and put bandaids on nipples - ave hr 149
29:20:65 - 2.5 mile loop 3 - ave 159
1:44:23 - chat - ave hr 148
34:15:61 - 2.5 mile loop 4 - puked at the start of this lap and walked/runned it - ave hr 147
1:31:13 - chatted - ave hr 150
31:54:14 - 2.5 mile loop 5 - ave hr 148

Overall it was great to have a goal to keep training for.  It was tougher to keep going without people lining the course than I thought it would be, but we got it done.

Additional Private HIM details

Well, it's getting close now.  The course maps remain the same and can be found here.  Ryan is still planning on cheering for us (drinking beer and watching football) and I told him transition opens at the same time as the bar, 10 am.  Race starts at 11.  If you need a Y day pass, let me know and I'll take care of it (my wife works there).

Transitions will be in my garage.  Remind me to give everyone the door code in the event Ryan isn't there yet and someone accidentally closes the door.  That would make for a funny DNF story, but wouldn't be too funny at the time :-).  BTW, my house is your house for the race.  With that said, I'm not cleaning or doing anything special :-).

I'll provide water, ice, (and any nutrition I happen to have), orange slices, and pretzels (and any thing in my pantry if you get desperate).  I meant to order some Ironman Perform drink, but never got around to it so if you want a sports drink, the race will be BYOSD.

For dinner, I'm still looking at bacon wrapped fillets, spicy red potatoes and probably stuffed peppers.  If you have any requests let me know.  I could use a dinner count (so I know whether to trim one or two beef tenderloins), so if you plan on making it, please let me know (that includes the non-racers I invited and racer families off course).

If you have any requests or questions, let me know.  If it goes well, maybe we can make it a little bigger event next year.  If not, maybe we'll turn it in to a barbecue instead.

One week until my private 70.3

Things are coming together for my private HIM, though I still need to clean the transition area.  The shirts arrived last week and look ok.  The line between the black ink and white shirt seems a little fuzzy, hopefully that is just loose material that will fall away after the first washing.  I'm ready to do this race and start the off season.

Starting the taper.  Today's brick was a little rough.  I had aches and pains on all three sports including two where I said, "that has never hurt before" which got me thinking that I've said that more in the last two years than I have my whole life.  I suspect many endurance athletes experience the same thing, specially when they reach middle age.

Good weekend of s/b/r/c (swim/bike/run/cook). My parents and MIL visited this weekend.  It's always nice to have them visit and gives me an extra excuse to cook.  It ended up being a triple cookout weekend including firing up the smoker.  I don't smoke meat often because it is an event between the prep, and the length of time it takes to smoke meat, but the outcome is usually fantastic.  Cheryl told me I was smoking chicken to have pulled chicken, so four chickens were the first batch of meat smoked.  Then I smoked six pounds of salmon (2/3's of that was for neighbor's).  As long as I have the smoker going, we might as well fill it up.

The smoker doing its thing

Makes me hungry just looking at it!

I put the foil down so the fish didn't pick up any chicken flavor

Have a great week everyone!

KBF 2011

I made a tough choice a couple months ago.  Race Branson 70.3 or go to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival this weekend.  They are opposite extremes of two things I like to do.  I chose "anti-training" and had an absolute blast.  I went with a friend from work (Larry), his friend Bill and one of my college roommates, also Bill.

Larry is a real student of bourbon.  He studies every thing about different bourbons, distilleries, master distillers, etc.  It was really fun watching someone passionate about something be in the holy land.  Larry struck up conversations about bourbon with lots of total strangers and had a blast.

One of the cool buildings on the grounds Maker's Mark

The weekend consisted of walking around the festival grounds, sampling bourbon, touring distilleries and playing poker.  Perfect for a group of middle aged guys!  We toured three distilleries, Heaven Hills, Maker's Mark, and Jim Beam.  Each tour was interesting and we learned something new each time.  The smell of evaporating bourbon in the rick houses was pleasant.  Each rick house holds 20,000+ barrels of bourbon where the barrels will sit for between two and 17+ years while they age.  Each barrel weighs 500 pounds so the wood structures are pretty sturdy.  Interesting engineering info is that the rick houses have plumb bobs in the corners which the workers use to make sure the weight in the rick house is distributing evenly.

One of the rick houses at Heaven Hills

Another rick house

A couple stills at Maker's Mark

We had a great weekend of teasing each other which made for a really funny trip.  It's not often I laugh as hard as I did on this trip.  Besides the ribbing, we also did random funny stuff.  How random?  We'll be chuckling about this one for a long time and every time we play cards for the rest of our lives.  While walking around town we walked past a dirty, old little girls shoe sitting at the bottom of a light post.  After walking by it countless times on Friday, I picked it up without the guys noticing.  Then on Saturday night there was a big hand between me and Larry.  After he raised me I said "I call" and with a perfect delivery "and re-raise one small child's shoe".  I'm crying giggling just typing this.  Priceless.  Oh, and I still have the shoe.  I predict it will be bet again in the future......

The shoe

9/11 ride

My ride today started off much like all my other rides.  The weather was a little better than normal and being at the end of a recovery week I was feeling a little stronger than normal.  It was nice to only run for an hour yesterday instead on two.  The wind wasn't in a good direction to PR the loop but I decided I would ride a little harder than normal.  Once I got going, all the random stuff started going through my mind like usual.  If you've ever run or rode for more than an hour, you know what I'm talking about.  Today was no different.  I ran sound at church today, so the songs were going through my head, then I started thinking about what I was going to cook, then about the week ahead at work, then 9/11.

No big deal at first.  I remembered where I was, what I was thinking, etc.  Then I started thinking more about it. I was thinking the firefighters had a hard day ahead of them, but they are studs and that's what they do.  Instead of going into a burning house and saving people, they first had to climb 90 flights of steps carrying a hundred pounds of gear, then start saving people.  It was going to be a long hard day for them, but at the end of the day, they would be home having a nice meal with their family before going to sleep exhausted.  I never once thought the towers would collapse.  I never once thought people would start jumping out of the buildings.

The firefighters were going up while everyone else that could was going down.

The more I thought about 9/11, the sadder I became and the harder I pedaled.  I was thinking to myself that I really don't know what hard is.  What the emergency personnel did on 9/11 was hard.  Riding my bike is not hard.  I am so fortunate to be free and about half way through the ride I decided to dedicate the ride to the emergency personnel that responded on 9/11.

Despite multiple traffic stops and unfavorable wind, I did PR the ride....

4 Weeks Until The Private HIM

Things are coming together for the private HIM October 2nd.  It looks like we'll have four racers.  Cheryl asked how many people were racing and I said four, me, Kate, and a couple guys I met on the Internet :-).

I have some work to do getting the transition area/aid station area together.  It's a bit of a mess right now.

needs a little work

Training has been going fairly well.  I had an 11 mile hot run Saturday and felt strong for most of it.  I did start running out of gas at the end and actually started to walk at at about mile 10.  The mental challenge began.  Funny things go through your mind after running an hour and 45 minutes in 95 degree heat.  Lots of mental games.  A million reasons why to stop, very few why to keep going.  When I get to this place, I sometimes think about a story I've shared before.  Sometime about 10 years ago a neighbor kid was walking by pushing a tractor and talking to himself.  I don't remember exactly what he was saying anymore except for the punch line.  He said, "c'mon Mr. Rabbit it's just me and you and you push".  Cracks me up every time :-).  BTW, that kid now runs an 18 minute 5k in high school.  Back to my run, I won.....

On to some cooking news.  I had a couple friends at work tell me about a couple simple recipes this week so I figured I would try them.  The first was grilled tomatoes.  Cut the tomatoes in half, brush on some olive oil, put on some cracked pepper then five minutes per side with the last couple covered in cheese.  I used an Italian blend of Mozzarella, Parmesan, Provolone and spices.  It was simple to make and tasted fantastic!

yum, tomatoes!

The second recipe was grilled peaches.  Cut the peaches in half and pit them.  Grill them open side down for a couple minutes then skin side down for a couple minutes.  Then drizzle some honey and coat with granola.  These turned out pretty good too.

Peaches!