Monthly Archives: May 2007

I’m going to try and get this thing started again. It’s not that I haven’t been working out, in fact, if anything, I’ve been working harder now than ever. So we’ll start over from this weekend, and you can catch up on what I had been doing. Anyhow, Saturday and Sunday I biked pretty much the same 40-45 mile path. Had to dismount and walk up one hill – but that’s to be expected because I suck at hill climbing, and it’s not easy when you weigh 185.

An interesting thing that I battle with is trying to convince myself that I can’t go any faster than I already am. That it’s just physically out of my control.Of course, I get to the end point, and even though it appears as uphill as anywhere else, I’m cruising along 4-5mph faster… maybe it’s just the cars passing by, but whatever it is, I wish I could bottle it up.

Also, orange clif shot blocks are the super awesome.

Swam for the first time in 2.5 years today – did 10 100′s and 2 50′s (trying to figure out how to look forward and breath). Felt good, but I look forward to doing it more.

So the posting here is a bit more lax than I’d prefer, at least from my side. It’s not that I haven’t been training, it’s that I just don’t find that I have the energy for this or the desire to write about each run all the time. The fact of the matter is that I have been training, and I think it’s been going pretty well. I’ve been focusing mainly on getting my strength up and getting comfortable on the bike again.

If I had to say I had three weeknesses, here they be:
1. Swimming in a straight line in open water. This I am going to try and work on over the summer.
2. Climbing on the bike. I’m not sure why this is, though I’m sure my weight (~185) has something to do with it. On flats and shallow climbs, I can maintain ~20mph. But for some reason climbs just kill me. I’m sure this has a lot to do with technique as well. So that’ll be a focus throughout the whole thing. There are some good hills around, and I’ll do some repeats up and down them.
3. Not feeling ill on my runs. Lately, my stomach has felt like hell on the runs — threatening, and sometimes following through, with the irreversible urge to take a dump. Needless to say, this is unacceptable. I’ll have to resolve it somehow.

Other than that, I think the key focus will be endurance. To that end, it’ll require running, biking and swimming, and waking up for those, even when I don’t want to. Like Monday, I ran 5.6 miles, even though I didn’t feel like I was going fast at all and the first 5 miles were uphill.