I guess it really has been quite a while since my last post.  As an update:

• The Holidays were very low key this year, which is fine by me.  I didn’t do anything for Thanksgiving and was on-call during Christmas so was home for that as well.  Still, I feel very blessed and 2008 was a great year.
• Caitlin is growing up so fast. :(  She’s always doing something new and is very attentive and likes to learn new things.  For example (and to her mother’s dismay), I’ve taught her now to give a nice refreshing sigh after taking a drink.  Only it’s not so much of a sigh as it is a grunt.  It’s cute none the less. :)  She can walk now too if she wants to.  Let the chasing begin!
• Training is still purely swimming at this point.  I’m in decent enough swim shape, but had a stress fracture (I think?) in my right foot a few months ago, and was out with the flu for a week.  I’ll probably start running and biking again soon?  My thoughts on Ironman for this year are… very mixed.
• Facebook has killed my desire to blog.  It’s not as in-depth or personal, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to catch up with all of you on there.

I guess that’s all for now.  More… later. :)

After nearly three weeks of constant dieting, I finally cracked last weekend.  We’ve been blessed here with a pretty warm fall with temperatures just a few weeks ago in the 70s, but the combination of recent lower temperatures and three weeks of feeling like my stomach was going to eat itself was too much.  I engorged myself with pizza and wings on Saturday evening and it was goooood.

I’m still early into the 2009 season (if you can even call it that, yet), but I’m remembering why I hate winters here so much as a triathlete.  I don’t think my bike tires will be on pavement here for the next few months.  So I’m relegated to the trainer which I hate, running which I generally dislike, and swimming which has me up at 5 AM and leaving my wife to get my daughter ready for the day by herself.  It’s lose, lose, lose.

I was doing pretty well with my diet up to last weekend.  I had lost something around six to seven solid pounds in the past three weeks which is as good as I can hope for.  But with winter here and dieting getting old, I’m wondering if it’s better to revise my weight loss strategy from maximal loss in minimal time to something a little more tolerable.  Having to tolerate winter and dieting may be a little too much stress this early in the season.

A photo from IMFL (congrats to all you legitimate finishers, BTW!) this past weekend.  Wow… just… wow.

Some random Halloween pictures for the day:

And for those of you who are offended by the last image, I present to you my daughter campaigning with Barack Obama:

She wouldn’t keep her hat on at the time, but I got one with her hat on right before the sun had set:

Happy Halloween everyone!

A good friend of mine were having a discussion yesterday about dieting.  Another one of our co-workers is wanting to shed a few pounds and was making some good progress until he got injured.  I think that sort of sent him into a downward kind of funk, and he started regaining all the weight that he lost.  But it got us talking about food and debating how food affects different people in different ways.

My friend was making the argument that certain people really struggle with watching what they eat more than others do.  And even now, I’m not sure I can fully comprehend or understand what that means?  I’ve certainly heard and read that some people are “emotional” eaters and how their food intake is directly affected by their mood.  Sure, I can fully relate to the fact that eating makes me feel good.  And sure, I certainly can get very cranky and such when I’m hungry.  But is that to say that there was someone else out there that feels hunger more than I do?  Perhaps physically, or maybe emotionally?  Or is it strictly a difference of will power and dedication of the individual?  And that we’re all equal, but that some just find it easier to cave in or give up than others?

I hear folks all the time say, “You’re so lucky that you can lose weight so easily.”  Or, “I wish I could watch my diet like you do.”  Both statements very much rub me the wrong way.  They seem to discard my daily struggle with food and dealing with hunger and completely throw it out the window.  If I’m motivated, I can watch my diet and lose weight, but it’s anything but easy.  I’m eleven days into my diet.  That’s eleven days of 1,500 calories a day plus doing an hour of working out.  There hasn’t been anything enjoyable about dieting itself.  It sucks and I hate doing it.  The only joy that I can hope to get is stepping on the scale from week to week and hopefully seeing decreasing numbers as the weeks go by.  Or perhaps the feeling of being able to move down a notch on my belt, or fit into some “skinny pants”.  I’ve said many times before that dieting, for me, is the hardest thing that I have to commit to doing as part of my training.  Swimming, biking, and running are all temporary workouts throughout the week.  Counting calories and teetering on the edge of being hungry vs. satiated is with me all the time, from when I wake up to when I sleep, and even occasionally in the middle of the night when my body needs a snack.

But I digress.  I’m wondering if there really is a difference in each individual’s ability to diet?  I know that people have different metabolic rates and certainly there are people that have the capacity to train at higher volumes – I get that.  But at a mental and emotional level, is dieting any easier or harder from one person to the next?  Or is having the will power to diet and forbidding yourself of certain foods no different than having the dedication to go and work out even when you don’t want to?  It makes me wonder.

So it’s a week and some days later since the whole back in motion thing began, and I’m still moving.  It’s very slow progress, but it’s progress none the less!

I still haven’t done any running and I probably won’t until another month or so at least.  But I did three swim and three bike sessions last week.  And I’m on pace to do the same this week.  It’s not much at maybe an hour or so a day, but coming from zero it seems relevant.

All is still good on the eating front.  I weight myself yesterday and was 178.  So, that’s six pounds from the previous Monday, but in all honesty, I was down to around 180 the day after my last monster meal.  It might not be an actual six pounds lost after losing all the food bloat, but I feel comfortable saying that I think I shed an honest two pounds last week.  So, I’m happy with that.

Swimming is getting slightly easier and biking… well, I’m biking in Minnesota in late October.  I’ll let you know how the biking is going as soon as I can feel my legs and my nether-regions again.

So last night, I had what was my “last supper” (not to be confused to blasphemize the actual Last Supper).  It was a big plate of chimichangas with Spanish rice and smothered with cheese sauce goodness, all washed down with a very big (and shockingly expensive) margerhita.  If all goes according to plan, that’ll be my last “good” meal for some time to come.

My alarm rang at 5:30 AM this morning to wake me up for masters swimming.  I stepped on the scale today at a whopping 184 pounds – 32 pounds over what I consider my race weight!  I’m guessing that at least two of those pounds are a result of last nights dinner, but I’m taking them at face value.  It gives me more motivation when I get to add those two pounds to the overall weight loss. :)

The actual masters swim session was a harsh dose of reality.  What is supposed to be my strength certainly didn’t feel like it.  The lactic acid started building in my upper body after just 150 meters (LCM sucks, btw!).  150 meters, people! That’s under 4% of what the swim portion of the IM distance is!  I totaled 1,200 slow, painful meters for the day before calling it quits.  I knew I was out of shape, but today I had a good taste of exactly how out of shape I have become.

But it was movement.  And you have to start from somewhere, right?!  So, this morning it has officially begun.  The road back is going to be very, very long and very much uphill, especially for the first few months.  Gone are the days of pizza and beer and it’s back to apples, oatmeal, and cottage cheese.  But I’ve always enjoyed the journey and seeing the gains that can be made with a little discipline and hard work.  So it’s back to the grind stone and hoping that I end up someplace close to where I’ve been before.  It doesn’t really matter that much if it’s faster or slower than previous years, but just that I arrive happy, healthy, and in one piece.  Let the 2009 season begin!

So, I treated myself to the TP Total Body Package from TP Therapy this week.

In a word – “OUCH“!

In two words – “!@#$ing OUCH“!

But hopefully it keeps my legs healthy this season.

So IM looms far on the horizon next year.  Normally, I wouldn’t be too concerned about it but I’m very much starting from ground zero this time.  I haven’t swam nor run since IMWI ‘06, I haven’t biked in any kind of training fashion since the Spring of 2007.  I’m thirty pounds over race weight and horribly out of shape.  I was playing with the neighbor kids just yesterday and they had me huffing and puffing just running around the back yard.  It’s a sad shape of affairs, lemme tell ya!

But for the first time in a long time, I’m excited to start training again.  I’m still going to be taking these next few weeks very easy/off as my parents will be in town for the next few weeks.  There is just no way that any kind of dieting is happening while my mom is here cooking various yummy things for me.  But when they’re gone, I plan on hitting the diet fairly hard and working out consistently.

My loose plans are:

• Lose weight.  I’m still debating how I want to approach this.  I could either tackle this one really hard and shed most of the weight off in a couple months.  Or do this slowly over the winter.  Each has its pros and cons, but I’m probably leaning more towards the prior.  I think I can drop twenty pounds by New Years?
• Swim and spin.  I hope to get most of my cardio done in the pool and on the bike which aren’t so bone jarring and hopefully will ease my body back into action more so than running.  Nothing too strenuous right off the bat.  I think I could probably handle an hour of very easy swimming or biking a day off the bat.  It’s far easier for me to coast through these two activites than it is to do so running.
• Address potential running issues before starting to run.  I have “glass legs” and tend to develop achilles problems easily, especially when starting out.  I’ve also had a pretty consistent history of IT band problems.  I plan on strengthening and stretching my calves to hopefully address any achilles issues.  I’m also planning a regimine of IT band stretching and massage along with trying to strengthen my gluteus medius, which I think has been helpful for me in the past.

Once I have a few weeks of the above under my belt, I think I’ll be able to add running into the mix.  Hopefully, I’ll be up to doing somewhere between 8-10 hours a week by mid-Winter.  Then slowly ramp up that volume as Spring comes.  If all goes well, I hope to be in 1/2 IM shape by early Spring.

So that’s the plan.  I have a few more weeks of the good life (although honestly, the novelty of being able to eat whatever I want lost its charm long time ago – now I do it mostly out of laziness) and then it’s back to it.  Seriously, this time… No really!  Seriously. :)

From nine months in the womb to nine months beside us.  The time has gone by so quickly!

Happy nine months, pumkin!!