Adjusted Reality

“Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.” – Mark Twain

Month: April 2014

By The Feels

This is the week – 6 days from now, I’ll be done with my first triathlon of the year.  I’m targeting this one as my A race for the first half of the year because the weather is perfect, I’m pretty specifically trained for it, and I feel primed and ready.  It’s weird doing that with a few other races on the horizon before I go gently into the good summer off-season, but whatevs.  This year is an experiment.

I’ve definitely beaten the dead horse about talking about my training accomplishments, but I do well drawing from recent past successes.  So, I’m going to list them here for myself to remember.

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Swim:

  • Biggest volume week (over 10km), and largest pool swim ever (over 4k yards)
  • Longer swims.  1 hour+ and 2500m+ became the norm, not the exception.
  • Three wetsuit swims in the lake within the last week and a half
  • Have swam in the chop and the cold this year – so I can handle if the day throws me that.

Expectations: I’m looking at the swim as a warmup.  Of course I’d like to do well but this is definitely my least improved section of the tri in 2014 – I just haven’t focused on it.  I have zero expectations beyond keeping my effort honest.

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Bike:

  • Besides last weekend’s ride of blergh, I’ve had some pretty decent outdoor riding.  Most notably 16.3 mph for a fairly easy-pace metric in March (the same one that I rode at 13.6 mph last year), and a 25 miler two weekends ago that was close to 17 mph in traffic.
  • Actually making an effort to ride hard on the trainer.  Endurance Ride videos, Sufferfests, just pushing myself on my own – I feel better prepared only having done a handful of rides outdoors.
  • My triple brick bike pace from last year improved by 1.5 – 2 mph.  Love that – I can see straight improvement there – doing the same workout on the same settings at the same time of day as last year.
  • On top of this I’ve maintained a better bike volume for the race miles I’m doing (about 80% of the time I trained on average from the 5 months before Kerrville, and 40 miles is about 70% of 56 miles).  I considered last year a BIG bike build year, so this is pretty good.  I also counted the time, not miles, because trainer miles lie.

Expectations: This is a big question mark.  I’ve done exactly zero outdoor rides really pushing myself in any significant way, so we’ll see.  Also, the course is always going up or down.  Nothing looks super bad, just “Texas hills” (which outside of Austin means speed bumps, usually), but we’ll see if those “hills” equate to the feeling of false flats that I’m really good at, or feel like actual climbing which I’m not.

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Run:

  • Night and day, this went from my weakest link to my strongest link in the tri.  My attitude has changed from feeling weaker as the tri goes on to feeling stronger.
  • I run like a rockstar off the bike lately – two 7:43 miles after triple bricks.  My absolute best triple brick 3-mile average was 8:45 per mile.  This year, it was 7:53 for the 3 miles.  Almost a full minute better.
  • Looks like everything’s about 1 minute per mile better as well.  Last year I had a few runs in the 10s, most runs in the 11s, and some in the 12s.  This year, I physically cannot run in the 12s.  It pains me.  My feet no longer are willing to go that slow.  11s are reserved for recovery runs.  A lot of times my first mile or so will be there but it’s hard for me to stay there unless we’re truly prancing and chatting and frolicking.  10s are my homies.  9s are good days.
  • I ran 3 double digit races this year sub-10 min miles.  One with a pretty hilly profile.  I came within 45 seconds of my 13.1 PR and smashed my 10 mile by almost 3 minutes.
  • 12 out of the first 16 weeks of the year, I ran 20-25 miles.  Hells yeah, consistency.  It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s helping me stay injury free, I think, and improving my pace.

Expectations: I am going to dominate this run.  I’ve run in the cold, I’ve run in the heat, I’ve run hills, I’ve run on flats, I’ve run on trails, I’ve run on concrete, I’ve ran off hard bikes, I’ve ran after swims.  I do like my run this year, I do, I do, Quix I am.  Fuck yeah!

And, a less type-A approach…

Overall, the last month, I’ve been working on a little more of an intrinsic, intuitive approach to everything.  I seem to be a little burned out on being so type A with the food tracking and the diet quality and the stats and reports and quantification.  I typically love that shit, so when it started being a chore instead of a challenge, I kinda decided to pitch it for a while.

I haven’t tracked my food quality or my calories in weeks.  I’m tracking my workouts, because I still enjoy that, but some have been sans garmin, or at least without a care to what it says (just using it for mileage tracking).  Last week, I weighed in at 175.2, which matches my low weight for the year, and my workouts still seem to be quality, so I’m just going to go with it.

I guess, what I’m trying to say, is I’m working on reaching inside, and really asking myself things like:

1. What level of effort am I at right now?  Where should I be?

2. Is what you really need a bag of pretzels? (post workout Saturday, the answer was 10000 times yes)

And let the scale, the metrics, and the paces sort themselves out.

And… I have written… and rewritten… and rewritten this post.  For some reason, this one is difficult.  I put on time goals, and removed time goals.  I talked a lot about process, then deleted it.  I tried to justify why I will go garminless, then decided to wear it, and now I’m not sure.

However, at the end of the day, while I have tapered for this race, and more importantly, I’ll be giving myself a light week next week to recover so I can really break myself out there if I want, I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done all year.

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1. Show up.

2. See what happens.

That’s all you can really do, right?

I Can’t Even

I started this post with all the nerd numbers for March.  I got a few lines into it and just didn’t wanna.  I just do not have the level of attention right now to dedicate to stats and graphs and such.  I’m sure part of it was that I didn’t do well, but that usually makes me want to quantify and figure out what happened, and fix it.  Right now, I am just in survival mode.  Long month has been long.  I can’t even.  Kinda like my poor cat there… (believe it or not, she wasn’t terribly unhappy about that)

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This past weekend, we had a “people-cation”.  Since Sunday was Easter we spent some time with my fam, but on Friday and Saturday we had no plans besides training (though everyone and their mother TRIED to get us out).  We pretty much slept.  Sometimes 10+ hours per night, and a nap or two in there.  Hi there, exhaustion.  Nice to see you again (not really).  I feel more rested, but plunging directly back into stress at work doesn’t make me feel much better.  I still feel cranky, stabby, and about one step away from crawling under my desk and rocking back and forth when someone comes into my office with bad news.

Sadly, I still feel like I need about 4 more of these types of weekends before I’m recovered.  I have been wavering back and forth whether I need the day off after Texasman, and I just decided today that YEAH, yeah I do.  There is no way I could hang today that exhausted, and I don’t want to inflict that on my coworkers.

I’m hoping that things settle a little bit later in the week, but it’s been up to 11 since I returned from vacation in March, and I’ll be lucky if it goes back below 7-8 for quite a while.

So, I haven’t tracked my food for the last 5 days.  I may or may not start tracking again until after the race.  I kind of don’t give a fuck right now.

I haven’t made April goals or updated about my March ones.  I probably didn’t get very far because I don’t remember what they were.  I kind of don’t give a fuck about them.

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I was going to give up beer for a month in lieu of smaller amounts of liqueur or wine (I’m not going THAT far) to try to reduce calories a bit.  Then my favorite seasonal beer came out.  The beer-bargo might have to wait until after season ends because there’s nothing like a cold beer after 4 hours of training at the lake or a hard race and I kind of don’t give a fuck.

There are plenty of things I should probably be doing around the house.  I kind of don’t give a fuck because I’m full up.

I have room for a few things in my life right now:

1. Work.  And it’s even encroaching on the amount of mindshare it should have.  I keep having dreams about being at my co-workers in weird situations, like summer camp.  But, it pays the bills, so I can’t be mad at it.

2. Training.  I’ve been maintaining a decent 8-10 hours per week, which includes 20-25 miles of running, and a decent amount of biking and swimming, and weights sometimes.  Oddly enough this consistency has netted some pretty solid race results and I feel pretty prepared to rock my first A race of the year, Texasman x-50.

3. Sleep and rest.  I can’t sacrifice this.  Doing that makes me even more cranky.

4. Small amounts of socialization and fun.  I did finally finish what I needed to run my story (and have probably said NEVER AGAIN because it took WAYYYY too much effort, or maybe just keeping it simple instead of trying to make the BESTEST STORY EVER).  I plan to hang out with friends for a bit next weekend instead of being a shut in.  But it has to be small, measured doses that doesn’t interfere with numbers 1, 2, or 3.

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5. Eat good food.  Try to eat not so much bad food.  Even if I have to succumb to the takeout monster because there is like less than zero time to cook, try to stay away from the trifecta of evil – fried, simple carbs, and sweets, and pick places that I know I can get some good, solid fuel.  I also have to remember it doesn’t have to be gourmet.  Above, I opened up some beans, and added some salsa, guac, olives, onions, cilantro, cheese, lettuce, and put it in whole wheat tortillas.  Perfect meal to fuel a 90 min bike ride later, and took me five minutes.

That’s it.  No feeling shitty because I didn’t organize my vanity, no feeling guilty because there’s something awesome out there I’m not doing, no feeling like a jerk because I ate food I didn’t cook 5 times last week.  I can’t even deal with that right now, I can’t even.  I am in survival mode to get through the next two weeks without sobbing under my desk, murdering people, and getting through all this with my sanity in tact.  I let go of all these things, all these extraneous things, which means you’ll probably not see much here for a week or two unless I get inspired to ramble.

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To end this post on a happy note, I’d like to call out some of the good training things I did last week:

  • I rode outside once.  I fell twice, which is not awesome, but at least I’m getting it out of my system early in the year.  I also rode pretty steady at 16.8 mph in traffic, and could have ridden faster if the cars would just bugger off already.  We also did not shy away from the hills, so that was hills and wind and all of it.  This is my biggest question mark for the race, but that was a good sign going into it.
  • I swam outside twice.  I felt crappy at the beginning of both getting used to the cold water (68 degrees – I don’t even understand how y’all can get down in those cold lakes), but at the end of my mile I felt pretty awesome and 38 mins is not bad at all for a training swim of 1 mile not really pushing it.  I will just know I need a decently long warmup swim – or at the very least to get my face wet for a while so I don’t flip out.
  • I ran 21.25 miles even though I had a Sunday race which I pushed really hard and PR’d.  Six of those miles were off the bike Saturday in the heat, and they were at 10:30s and I had at least two more gears.  Good show.
  • I’m not sure exactly where weights went, but we’ll pick those back up after May 4th.

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Just like I’ll pick a lot of stuff up again after Texasman concludes, I drink a beer or 4, and get a damn rest week under my belt.

Question of the week: What is extraneous to you right now?  Can you let it go and not worry about it for the next week or two?

Austin 10/20 – Consistent Pain Cave Sludge

Consistent running 20-25 miles a week produces results.  Who knew?

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Quick pre-race mojo check:

After last week’s race, my legs felt sludgy.  My easy runs were slower than normal.  However, I know that my body doesn’t respond that well to a full week of complete rest, so I tried to just take everything easy pace (75 miles of bike, 5.5k of swimming, 17 miles of running) and not reduce overall volume, and hope for the best.  Well, I did one dose of swim speedwork, but that almost doesn’t count.

I had some twinges in my heel and ankle, and a little weird pain in my hip Friday after my last run and they maintained into Saturday, but I tried to just not acknowledge them – they weren’t bad, but a bit of a bummer after being completely healthy for a month.

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Day before – we ate a sandwich and soup for lunch (I am part of the fast eaters club, Zliten is not), watched Captain America 2 (really great), and had a slice of pizza for dinner.  Then, our next door neighbors were having a party, so we stopped by (nommed on some veggies, meatballs, and rice krispie treats), but the people partying and champagne cocktails were too tempting, so we went home and tried to go to bed.

Our bedroom is really near the fence to their yard, so when the TV got quiet we heard them.  No ill will, if it wasn’t for the race we would have been over there partying it up, but it kind of made us sad.  I tossed and turned for a bit and then finally got up, went to the guest room on the other side of the house and read until I got sleepy.

Zliten woke me up – and I got about 5 hours of sleep total.  At least it was 5 hours of SOLID sleep.  I got a cliff bar and some purple stuff in me, and did my normal morning stuff.  I wasn’t PUMPED but was awake and good to go by the time we got there.

The race is right next to our work, so we took our badges and used the super nice bathrooms there, got a little half mile jog warmup, and then got in the corral and it was GO TIME.

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Mile 1-4

The plan was to stick with Zliten, who had a garmin.  I had mine this time too (charged – natch), but put a bit of athletic tape on it so I could start it, but not see anything until I wanted to.  However, he got antsy at the start and did some parkour to get ahead of the people in front of us, and I wasn’t willing to do that (re: niggles that I didn’t want to aggravate) so I let him go and decided this was a good test of my own internal pacing.

I was feeling sludgy. I’ve felt sludgy all week, I didn’t get quite enough warmup (probably half a mile), I slept crappy, and no taper, so I just took what I had and kept myself honest. Every so often, I’d check in and ask myself if I was hurting enough, and if I was hurting too much. Depending on the answer I’d adjust my pace, but most often, I found I kept myself in the right effort zone naturally. Not that it felt natural, it hurt, but it was the right hurt, if that makes sense.

I thought I remembered they had a clock at 5k and 10k last year, but they didn’t, so I resisted the urge to peek at my timepiece and just kept running.  Downhill felt less good than normal, but I know lately I’ve been feeling my best mid-race, so I was hoping for some love there.

Looking at my splits after the fact, I’m really happy with how consistent and on goal pace for a 1:35 they were.  I didn’t bomb the downhill portion, which meant I saved a little more for the uphill.  Consistency.  Yeah.

I saw Zliten on the first turnaround.  He was significantly ahead of me.  I was NOT ready to try and make up that ground yet, so I just went on with my steppin’.

Mile 1: 9:32
Mile 2: 9:24
Mile 3: 9:21
Mile 4: 9:33

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This is kinda how I felt…

Mile 5-8

Around mile 4.5, it starts going back up. I threw down my visor so I couldn’t see much but feet and just focus and could just go make camp in my own little pain cave.  The uphill didn’t feel nearly as uphill as it has in the past (yay lots of false flat training) and I rounded the corner for the little loop and was actually feeling… kind of decent?

And then there were cold towels.  Ahhhh.  Did I mention it was 70 degrees and 90% texas humidity? Bahhhh.  NOT MY WEATHER.  45 degrees, please.

I hit 10k and peeked at my average pace – it was 9:34. Ok, great, on pace for a PR, just about what I expected/hoped, and I was starting to feel a little more decent. Let’s do this… and then another uphill, a pretty big one.  Visor back down, and push push push.

Mile 5: 9:46
Mile 6: 9:39
Mile 7: 9:51

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Back to focused.

Mile 8-10

The rest of the race was on a) home turf (this is part of my work loop I run weekly) and b) the most hills of the course. I chugged the uphill out of the Domain as fast as I could, visor down, flag in the cave, and then hit the nice long flat frontage road strip.

After mile 8, I ripped the tape off – and hey – 9:35 average.  I had only slowed 1 second per mile.  Cool.  Let’s try to see what I can do the last two miles.  I gave it my all at that hill, and while I saw my pace slow a bit (low 10s), it didn’t slow much.

Sadly, once I came off the hill, I didn’t have much left in my legs, but it was the last mile so I just gave it what I could. I could have definitely used some nutrition there (probably about mile 6-7 to kick in there), but it was so close to the finish and I don’t tolerate solids that well running in hot soup, so I just willed my legs to keep it up.

The last uphill to the finished surprised me like it does every year, but I sprinted the best I could and crossed the finish.

Mile 8: 9:34
Mile 9: 9:47
Mile 10: 9:28
.13 and change: 8:54

1:37:08. A 2:49 PR from last year.  Racing 8 days ago hard, with zero taper, in terribly hot and humid weather with sludgy legs. Last year I had probably the race of my life here.  This race was simply a good representation of my mental and physical training in the weather and the circumstance of the day.  With amazingly consistent splits.  As expected.  I will so take it.

I’ll also take my results in the field: overall place 1005/3415 (top 27%), gender place 435/2437 (top 18%) , AG place: 87/434 (top 20%).

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Let me also note that Zliten ran a 1:33:59.  Over a 10 minute PR, and he beat me again.  He rocked the shit out of this race.  He must have an AWESOME coach.

A year ago, after I had the race of my life here, I got really, really hurt a week later, ruining the run leg of most of the rest of my triathlon season.  It’s taken the greater part of a year to claw my way back, but I’m not only back now, but in the best run shape of my life.  Feels good, man.

The swim and bike training has not gone too shabbily either, but another “feels good, man”?  I’m not going to be dreading the run this year.  All signs point to me having a pretty strong swim and bike leg, and then getting off the bike and DESTROYING the run in a way I haven’t been able to in my triathlon years.

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Three weeks to the first triathlon of the year. Bring. it. on.

 

Fairview Half Marathon – Chasing the Orange Socks

As with Woodlands, I really wasn’t like super jazzed for this one.  I had been coming off some pretty solid run training in March with a pretty healthy body, so there was that, but this course is pretty hilly and April weather can be variable (so either 30 and rainy, or 75 and humid), so I had no idea what I’d be working with.  Add to that it’s a ~4-ish hour drive from Austin to Allen and we’d be doing it straight after work, after the week from hell, and I had zero expectations.

The plan was just this: show up, and run (and eat In-N-Out).  Nothing more.

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If you asked me to predict my time, I’d say 2:10 on a great day, 2:15 on a decent day, and 2:20+ if shit went bad, due to all those factors above.

We got up there without much incident (a little traffic, but that’s to be expected on a Friday night).  This time, we brought sandwiches with instead of waiting to get there, which meant we ate earlier instead of trying to stuff dinner in our bellies late.  We got a little snack (I had a salad) right before bed, took a shower, relaxed in the room, and got off to sleep around 10:30pm.

Lucky us, our hotel was right across the street from the race, so we slept in until about 6am, did our normal pre-race stuff: poop, purple stuff, half a cliff bar, and then we walked across the street to get our shirts and bibs… and it was further than we thought.  So we hightailed it back to the hotel (warmup run), dropped our shirt, grabbed the rest of our gear, and actually took the car over since we were running super late.

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Pictures care of me being silly…

We parked, and then realized the race was starting without us, so we picked it up to a jog, and then heard “are there any more half marathoners?” to which we screamed “yes” and broke into a sprint and were two of the last people across the line.  Not the finest start to a race ever, and very reminiscent of my first half marathon ever.  At least I got to see Libby and say hi as I booked it past the arch.

I looked down at my garmin, and 8’s were not what I wanted to be running, so I settled down, and soon Zliten did too.  We were in the back, so we spent the first half mile dodging walkers and slower runners (not that we’re fast, but slower than us).  We passed the 3 hour pacer, then the 2:50…

…and then my garmin died.  Yep, I have been talking all big lately about trying a race without mine, and joking that I didn’t care if my garmin was dead for the race, but when it actually happened without me planning for it, it bummed me out a little bit, being that I didn’t have a pacer to latch onto, or really, ANY IDEA of what pace I was running.

However, I know how to run a half marathon, it’s a distance I’m comfortable with, and I know the pacing strategy – hurt a little at first, hurt a little more in the middle miles, then hurt a lot in the last few miles.  I told Zliten about my garmin and ended up sticking with him because that’s what “hurt a little” felt like.  He tried to tell me splits a few times but I shushed him.  If I was going to sans-garmin this thing, I wanted to totally try “run by feels”.

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The first half of this course was rolling hills, but generally downhill.  Not good for the last half, which meant rolling hills, mostly UPHILL, but I tried to keep myself in the moment.  We passed 2:45, and the next one I noticed was 2:30, then 2:25, then 2:20.  Nice.  Around mile 5, I finally got curious and asked Zliten if we were under 10s, and he nodded his head.  Solid.  I think that motivated me to push the flats in the middle hard to try and gain some time, and apparently, I dragged Zliten a lot through here and we were running in the low 9s.  We passed the 2:15 pacer around mile 6.5.  Cool.

Around 7-8, he pulled in beside me and said “how good do you feel?” and I said “pretty good”. He asked if I wanted to shoot for a PR, I asked mine or his (2:08 vs 2:11) and he said mine. I asked if we were close to on pace, he said yup, and I said, let’s give it a try. However, I knew the last 4 miles had some pretty decent hills, so I told him he’d probably have to drag me and I’d try and keep up.

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I did my best, but he pulled away around mile 9-10, because he has this superhuman ability that hills don’t faze him (he actually prefers hills to flats or downhills – that JERK) and my glutes started cramping after really hammering up one hill, so I backed off ever so slightly on the inclines and with each one, he got further away. Once it flattened out, I tried to push it to catch up, but those friggin orange compression socks kept going further away because there was too much UP and not enough FLAT to gain ground.

I made a turn, and saw the road flatten out, and thought we had about half a mile left and was going to turn it on and kick, but then there was the mile 13 marker and the finish.

Official time: 2:08:50. Zliten’s official time: 2:07:02.  Yep, he now owns the official house record for the half marathon (besting my 2:08:07).  He totally earned it though, he ran a GREAT race.

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I am pretty dang happy with mine too.  This is 43 seconds slower than my PR from 4 years ago.  This is on a much harder course than the pancake flat RnR San Antonio where that happened.  I’m 15 lbs heavier now.  I didn’t taper.  I had no garmin.  I also placed in the top 1/3rd of my new age group and top 1/3rd of my gender.  Can’t sneeze at that.

I actually loved running without the garmin – I think the faster paces I was pushing in the middle of the race would have scared me, and I don’t think I would have been able to fight the slowing on the hills even by being more conservative.  That’s just how I run. I know how to run a race effort, and I think it may pay dividends to run how I’m feeling right then at a certain effort, rather than trying to hit a pace.

I do think it might have made *some* difference in the later miles knowing how close I was to PR, but maybe it wouldn’t have.  Maybe I would have been disheartened about being so close but not making it I would have let off the gas and been more like 2:10-2:12.  Who knows?

I race this weekend (Austin 10/20) and that’s the one I really want to hammer, so bring it on! This pace will PR me easily, and the run is shorter (10 miles) and significantly flatter, though the weather is looking to be hotter.  I am a little sludgy in the legs right now, but the order of the week is recovery work, so hopefully I’ll have another great tale of awesomeness to tell next week!

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Big shoutout to Libby, aka The Active Joe, who puts on amazing races where I always have a good day.  She does this one, Showdown (which I did 1.5 years ago), and The New Years Double.  If you ever get a chance to participate in one of her races, you ABSOLUTELY should. I mean, look at that sweet medal – the windmill spins (I verified that by spinning it about eleventy billion times that day)!  Good times.

Cool Stuff March

Wow.  Much activity.  So stuff.  Yeah.

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This month was jam packed with lots of activity and fun and parties and work deadlines and races and training and trips and OMG.  I am actually in better shape than I thought I would be, but that doesn’t mean it’s not time to get real in the whole foods parking lot in April to try and start the approach to Tri Season #1 and have a body a little more like an athlete than a frat boy.

In terms of run/bike/swim, the ol’ bod held up rather well.  I think the week of vacation with activity, but not formal training really helped me.  I stayed injury-free all month and my heel seems to be in recovery.  Still not sure what happened, but a steady diet of shoe rotation and massage seems to have fixed the issue.

I ran a not-so-good race, but I was pretty happy with my not-so-good race time considering the trauma.  I had a great… bike race?  outdoor timed venture with other people?  supported ride? where I confirmed that my bike and brick fitness is coming along pretty nicely.

Training hours were lower than February, but I knew that would be the case.  They were 7, 10, and 8 respectively since vacation, and while I’d like to be doing a little more sometimes, I feel like I’m doing ok.  I have been working on doing QUALITY riding instead of just getting on the bike and pedaling, I’ve incorporated run speedwork back in my life and done 25 miles per week of running, and though I’ve completely let swimming take a backseat, I don’t feel like it’s hurt me (much).  The weights – well, I’ve done them, but I’ve been inconsistent.

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My eating went to shit.  Let’s just be honest.  I probably had more sweets this month than I normally eat in all the other months of the year.  For birthday things and party things and outing things and everyone just really wanted to shove cupcakes in my mouth this month and frankly, I didn’t argue.  They were delicious.

I also spent quite a few late nights up drinking more than I should.  I have a tolerance for some alcohol in my life as a treat, but this got beyond ridiculous with some 12+ hour days of partying on the weekends.

I regret nothing.  I had an awesome month, and ate and drank so many fantastic things and had SUCH fun times.  But, truth be told, it’s time to break out of that pleasure haze and get to work.

I’m still trying to figure out what April will be.  I know it will be these things:

1. Sugar Detox.  No sugar minus a few exceptions: a) getting a small fro yo once every week or two.  I know this sounds like a cop out, but this ONE dessert actually keeps us from a lot of other crap.  b) my dad’s birthday and easter are this month.  I’ll probably have a small bite of some desert here too.  But that is the extent of it.  Also, bike snacks only count if I’m pedaling (eating 15 jellybeans before I get on the bike is NOT OK).

2.  20 out of 21 meals + all snacks = healthy food.  I get to pick one meal a week that has: a) fried food b) refined grains c) other crap that makes me consider it not healthy.  If someone gives me pizza on Monday and I eat it, that’s my meal for the week.

3.  Taking care of myself to not get stressed/burnt.  I have two back to back races (a half this weekend and a 10 miler next), and I don’t plan on jogging either of them.  I’ll show up to each and see how I feel, but if I feel good, I’m going to race.

4.  Figuring out what needs attention in the next 5 weeks before Texasman X-50.  So far, that list has open water swimming and outdoor riding/hill work on it.  Implied is maintaining a good volume of running.

And now, let’s move onto COOL STUFF MARCH!  Here are the highlights…

Half Marathon in The Woodlands

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Birthday Diving in Cozumel

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Snorkeling in Roatan

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Ruins Tour in Belize

Wed-3

Wet Lizard and Belikins in Belize

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Playing board games at Emerald Tavern.  Beer + Board Games + Fun = Awesome

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Meatstravaganza! for Zliten’s birthday

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Playing hookey from running for margaritas because it was too pretty…

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Rosedale Ride

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Big BBQ March Birthday Blowout

Our Friend M+C’s baby shower (I do like how showers are now getting co-ed and less girly).

Camping two nights at the Sherwood Forest Faire

Our 11 mile run on country roads

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Feast of Many Beasts and my first real Faire garb/corset

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…and, I’m spent.  April is looking to be super busy too, but I have a planned hermit weekend, so I’m feeling ok about this.

What was your favorite thing about last month?

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