It's been almost two weeks since race day. I've had very little training on my schedule. First a full week off (wierd!) and this week and next are pretty light. Did 90 minutes the bike today, which was the most work since race day. Man it's nice to go for an easy ride on a sunny day. I was really tired most of the first week and that's gotten better. A few small aches and pains have sprung...

[WARNING: This Got REALLY Long. But, hey, it's got pictures!] The Setup. Prior to May 2004 I'd never actually swam a lap in a pool in my life. Triathlons sounded fun, and that July I signed up for and raced in the SeaFair Sprint Triathlon (see picture taken from plane on the way to Tempe below). I never thought I'd do an Ironman. In fact, there were several times when things like "no way", "hell no", and "never"...

Time has gone by quickly here in Tempe. Wedneday we got into town and wandered around a bit, and go on the bikes for a while. We found a great place about 5 blocks from the race start. Very nice to be able to walk back and forth to the race area. Every morning, they've been opening the lake for athletes to swim in. The swim is straight forward. The "lake" is really a resevoir that's about 400 yards wide by a 1.5 miles long....

Four days to go. The last two weeks have brought the last of the work and the Taper phase. It's very odd to go from 17-20 hours of volume down to 7 or less, but that's how it works. Some people report having "the taper blues" which is a set of things that happen to your body when you do this. Some people feel sluggish and start to freak about their fitness (I haven't had this problem), some people get all kinds...

Race day is just over two weeks away. I'm spending a lot of time thinking forward about the race and the trip - mostly about the details: What am I going to wear on race day? How many spare tires should I take? Should I wear a visor or a hat for the run? What will...

Wow - weeks have been clicking by, can't believe it's been 4 weeks since I posted. Scott has filled out my schedule all the way thorugh race day - 5 weeks from today. Three more weeks of work, then I taper in. I'm feeling ready to race. My fitness is starting to come together, and, well this shit is getting kind of old, really. I've had enough GU's and PowerBars, thanks. Starting to think about specifics around race travel and execution. But there's still some work to be done. In...

This blog exists primarly as a way for me to document this process for myself. I like sharing the experience, but the main idea is to have a permanant record that I can look back upon and remember details that may otherwise get lost in the prism of hindsight. Todd reminded me of this by commenting how much he wishes he had something similar to look back upon for his run up to Ironman Canada last year. If you (the reader) finds something interesting in the process, great. I'm not sure of...

After three very solid build weeks, we ratched it back pretty far this week for a couple of reasons. One is that I was losing steam, both physically and motivation-wise. Last Saturday/Sunday was tough. The other is that the calf/achilles issue that cropped up was pretty concerning. So we laid off it for the week which was the right call. It needed all of that time to come around - almost zero running this week. This level of volume was...

Things are starting to come into focus. The race is less than three months away. I kind of wish it was tomorrow. This week had a little less volume but a little more "quality" or intensity work in there. Up until now, most of my work on the run and bike have been steady state. This week some of my workouts had specific intenisty or wattage targets. Workload on the bike is measured in watts. Unlike running, pace (speed) is a bad measurement for effort...

It's amazing how new challenges seem in retrospect versus before you've been through them. My coach fills out my schedule about two weeks at a time these days. He's pretty active in managing my workload, so he'll put together a block of work, see how I'm doing, then adjust from there. Just before I went to Mt. Bachelor for New Year's, my schedule for these two weeks came up. When I saw it for the first time, I just kind of stared in disbelief. 5,000y swims. 2 hour runs. Multiple 2+ hour...

Well, I'm about half way there. IMAZ is three and a half months away. Now it's getting a little more serious. Up until now I've been in what's called "base" training. Base training is completely about increasing your aerobic abilities. You're trying to get your body to be able to move blood and oxygen around as effeciently as possible. For you biology majors out there, you're trying to do three principle things: ...

A few weeks ago I had a great week 10/11 summary typed up, then managed to lose it. I've been bitter about that, and busy, hence the pause. But things have been interesting. I've actually been doing a little lower volume for the few weeks around the holidays. I've been hard at it since September and during the week of the 11th I started really feeling it. I had a talk with my coach and he dialed me back a bit. So I took a...

Oh man, what have I gotten myself into? The dial has definitely gotten turned up over the last two weeks, especially this one. Two weeks ago was Thanksgiving week. Unfortunately, it was only a week and a half after we got back from Europe so it was another challenge to work around training-wise. Worked out okay. With some creative scheduling, and going to the 24-Hour Fitness in Spokane with Deb, I was able to get all my workouts in....

Okay, combined summary. The last three weeks were a little goofy and I didn't get a chance to pull the data together. The main driver was a trip to Spain for TechEd Europe (more on that later). I managed to get a fair amount of training in over there, so I don't think it had a real impact fitness-wise. We swam in the Olympic pools in Barcelona (site of 1992 Summer Games), which was very cool, and we...

Schedule-wise, this week was a carbon copy of last week. Same workouts, same durations. I've had a little concern about my intensity levels. I've been reading more out of Going Long, along with this timely post from Gordo on his blog. Gordo has become the philosopher-king of long-course triathlon and is always interesting to read but passages like these got me thinking: "You need to trust this protocol as you will be able to easily exceed. I'm...

This was a harder week. My volume was a bit higher (not sure if it it was supposed to be), and work has be ridiculous for for about 2 1/2 weeks. That should be settled down now, which helps. One of the things I've been focusing on has been getting more sleep, which shortens the day. Adding a bunch of extra time in the office makes that even worse. Every day, except for Saturdays, has looked about like this: Wake up: 6:30-7 ...

One more week down. Had a great swim workout today. I had 2000y on the schedule, broken up as 6x300y with every other being a kick set (with fins). The kick sets sucked but I made it through them (300 yards is a long way to kick). What was cool was the swim sets. I did my 3rd 300 in 4:40 which is about 25 seconds better than I've ever clocked before. I didn't really intend it to be that fast, but after my...

Alright, one week completed. I got set up with a coach and I think it's going to work out well. Yesterday was my first day working off of his plan. It's really easy to forget how this stuff adds up. I was going to ride over to University Zoka for the team ride (it's a little more than an hour over there). My plan only called for 90 minutes on the bike, so that extra hour was a lot. Plus...