This week’s Phriday Phun from TriNewbies:

1. Salty or sweet? Which do you crave and how do you indulge that craving?
   Toughy. It really depends on what mood I’m in. I’d say I crave both equally when I do have cravings that come up.
2. Iph you could radically change one body part……..what would you modify? Keep it clean, guys!
   I guess my stomach. I’m pretty much as lean as I think I’m going to get and my abs don’t show as much as I’d like them to. It probably doesn’t help that I don’t do any core work, though.
3. What kind oph vehicle do you currently drive? And how do you pheel about it?
   I drive a silver Subaru WRX Wagon. It’s a great little car. Great for our Minnesota winters!
4. It’s almost Phriday Night………what will you be doing?
   Trying to eat well. Weekends are always the hardest for me when trying to eat right. And of course… watching the Timberwolves beat up on the Nuggets tonight. GO WOLVES!
5. Iph you could pass on one piece oph advice, in 25 words or less, to the next generation, what would it be?
   Don’t let the little things get you down. Always keep the bigger picture in mind.

It’s been a long journey, but I’ve finally made it. I stepped on the scale this morning to the pleasant number of 150. I hit my goal weight! Now granted, I was dehydrated and feeling like my stomach was about to eat itself alive, but it was a good feeling none the less.

A little about my journey to get here… I used to be fairly athletic when I was in high school and during college. I swam on the varsity teams at both. After I started work, though, my fitness level took a big drop. I was pretty burned out from swimming and didn’t really have anything else that I enjoyed doing. Fast forward to oh… seven years later or so. I was feeling fat and out of shape and probably not in the best state of mind (yeah, I still need to write more on that too). My co-workers had been triathletes, so I committed to turning my life and body around and I got into the sport. I started working out last August and was just over 170 pounds. I couldn’t run more than a mile straight. I owned an el’ cheapo bike that I had bought from Target, and while I could swim I had little to no swimming stamina. I was a couch potato that woke up late, had Taco Bell just about everyday for lunch and ate out for dinner almost every night. Basically, I was a heart attack in the making. Not good considering I have some family history of heart disease.

So I started watching what I ate and the first ten pounds came off pretty easily. Well, I suppose I should restate that. The first ten pounds came of easily, mostly in part because I was working out over an hour a day and only consuming about 1500 calories a day. I guess it was easy because it was a new goal and I was extremely motivated at the time. After making the initial progress though, I started eating more again. I was still working out, but wasn’t really losing any weight. By the middle of winter, my hard training for my 1/2 IM hit. I figured since I was working out more, I could indulge a little more. After the first month of hard training, my weight was no lower than when I had started. Somewhat depressing when you’re working out more than you ever had before!

It was during my second month of base training that I really decided to take a hard look at my diet and work hard to eat “right”. I educated myself as much as I could about proper nutrition and learned as much as I could about it. I finally settle down on a diet that falls somewhere between the paleo diet and the South Beach diet. Essentially, lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean cuts of meats. Minimal starches (i.e. rice, pasta, breads, etc.) and ideally only ingested after the longest and hardest of workouts. I also took to using FitDay - a free, online food and activity journal where you can carefully monitor your calorie intake and output. Properly educated and armed with the tools necessary to succeed, ten weeks and three days later I’m at my goal weight of 150.

And what’s probably best about it all is that the cravings that I used to get before I started getting serious about my nutrition have almost disappeared. Sure, I still enjoy those foods, but I rarely ever crave pizza or chicken wings or desserts like I used to. I think I’ve made good progress in making a permanent lifestyle eating habits that hopefully will stick with me throughout my life and that’s really the ultimate goal I think. Anyone can eat well for a week. I read someplace that most people can even typically diet for seven weeks before they really go back to their old eating habits. But if you can make changes in such a fashion that you can eat better for the rest of your life, then you’re really in control of yourself and your body.

Here I sit, almost ashamed of myself, typing this message as I have folks that I’ve hired to clean up my house. My parents, sister and niece are all coming to visit me in a couple weeks and I want to have the place nice and scrubbed clean for them before they get here.

How is it that I’ll train for hours a day but can’t stand to take a few minutes out of my day to mow my lawn, vaccuum and mop my floors, and just pick up my place in general? I guess I’ve always been pretty lazy. And to add to that, I’ve always been at one extreme or another for most things in my life. If I’m not running, I’m sitting. I don’t really like to walk. If I have to be on my feet moving, I’d rather run to my destination because it reduces the overall time that I have to be on my feet. I remember back in college after our morning swim workouts and how I’d drive to the dining hall to eat breakfast despite it being about 200 yards from the athletic center where the pool was.

My friends call me lazy. People who meet me might be fooled for a while when they hear of my typical training weeks, but soon enough they come to realize what others mean when they say it. It’s part of the reason that I’d like to do a full Ironman race this year. I think I’d secretly take joy in being known as a lazy Ironman triathlete. That way, if anyone every gave me too much crap about it, I could just tell them they should go finish a 140 mile race and to come talk to me after they were done. :)

Well, today marks my last “hard” day of training before I head down for the Gulf Coast Triathlon - aka Sufferfest. Word has it that the past two years the heat index has been in excess of 110 degrees. Coming from Minnesota where the average temperature in April is in the 50’s, I’m not going to be acclimated to the heat.

Nevertheless, as is typical for Minnesota springs, we had an psychotic weather day here and the mercury hit in the low 90s. Was it fate that such a day should land on my last hard day of training? It still wasn’t as humid as it will be down in Panama City Beach, but I got a taste of the heat before I head down next week.

The main workout (I’m not counting my swim session this morning) consisted of a 30 mile ride and a 2 mile run. The ride faired ok. Heat generally doesn’t bother me on the bike since there is so much wind (too much wind actually - damn 30+ MPH gusts). I experimented with my salt tablets and those seemed to sit in my stomach just fine. I went through three full bottles of water thinking that was probably too much for the duration of my ride, but as it turns out that was probably just right or perhaps a little to little? I was going to run for 40-50 minutes, but that soon changed after I couldn’t keep my heart rate down after mile two. That’s been pretty typical after my longer rides (30+ miles). Just shuffling my feet at what felt like 10 minute mile pace jacked my heart rate up into the 150 range - definitely not good. So I guess we’ll see what happens. I didn’t feel like I was pushing that hard, but it still doesn’t make me feel great when that pace should generally have my heart rate down in the 120 range.

Could be the heat? Could be that my body still has some fatigue to unload? Could be that I’m just not ready for my race coming up soon? I shouldn’t think the latter. I’ve put in the work. I’ve done the distances all in training before. More importantly, at this point, I’m as ready as I’m going to get. Guess we’ll see what happens in a week and a half!

I ran my very first 10k this morning. I’ve done the distance many times in training, but this was my first race at that distance.

I approached the morning with quite a bit of uncertainty. I had run a 5 mile race last October with intentions of going fast - fast for me at the time being 8 min/mile pace. Yeah. It’s not fast by any means, but running has never been my forte. Anyway, to make a long story short, I tried pushing through on the hilly, rocky course despite my cramps but ended up pretty short of my goal. I ended up running something like 8:20 pace. I remember being pretty disappointed with my time overall. The only thing that gave me any comfort was seeing that I averaged 171 BPM on my heart rate monitor and knowing that I realistically couldn’t have run that much harder (my measured max HR is 189).

So I wasn’t all too thrilled about running the 10k hard the night before the race and into race morning. I don’t really like that feeling that my heart is going to come through my chest. I was scared that I would be very disappointed with my time and that I would not have confidence going into my first half iron-distance race just a couple of weeks away. But I was already signed up and would have felt worse knowing that I paid $30 for a t-shirt that I wouldn’t even be able to wear, so there I was.

I decided at the start line that I was just going to run it. Not race it, but just run it a bit harder than I do during training (I probably run at 9:30ish pace during training, for what it’s worth). My friend is at the start line with me. He had troubles getting his heart rate monitor to show a reading. I was glad that mine was working alright. Someone was making announcements over the PA system, but I couldn’t hear anything in the crowd of almost 4000. Eventually, I could hear the start of the national anthem and soon after that, the horn blew and we were off.

Nobody really seeded themselves appropriately. To their credit, there weren’t any signs signaling where you should be standing based on what pace you wanted to run at. Still, there were many folks way too close to the front than they should have been. So we start off pretty slowly. I can see that my friend is pretty frustrated at this point and that he just wants to unleash (he’s a much faster runner than I). I tell him to have a good race, smile and say that I’ll see him in an hour and a half or so. He replies with something along the lines of that the bus is leaving in an hour. We had carpooled to the race together, so so much for totally loafing. He races ahead and I keep plodding along.

The first mile was really crowded. I ended up weaving between bunches of people. Everyone is kind of shoulder to shoulder and I’m surprised that I didn’t see anyone fall. I felt like I was taking my first mile out pretty easy, all things considered. It was really too crowded to run too hard, which was just fine by me. I glance down at my heart rate monitor which tells me that I’m dead. @%#$! Either I don’t have a good connection on my strap or I was picking up my friend’s HR strap at the start line. Oh well. After a short while, I run up on the first mile marker on the course. I take a look down at my watch and see 8:01. Guess I wasn’t taking it out too easy after all. I was comfortable and decided to just keep that pace going until maybe the 2-3 mile marker. At the half way point, I’d reassess where I was at. It was during mile 2 that I noticed that there were way too many folks going way faster than they should have been. Now, I generally don’t like judging people solely based on looks, but I couldn’t help but think that to myself as I passed tons of people wearing Rocky type sweats with inefficient running gaits and breathing like they were just held underwater for two minutes straight. I imagine telling them that there are still 5 miles in the race and that they might want to save a little for later. But nothing is said and I keep plodding along.

Mile marker 2 come up and I look down to see 15:30. What? Did I read that right? I double check the number and redo the math in my head. Sure enough, I just ran that second mile in 7:30. Woah. Maybe you’re a little too excited there big guy. Maybe you need to save some for the end. But I’m still feeling ok at this point. I have no idea what my heart rate is because my watch is still showing 00. I tell myself to just keep pace, I guess, and we’ll see what happens at the half way mark.

Mile 3 approaches at the top of a slight hill. I have flashbacks to the hills back in the 5 mile race that I did in October and tell myself to go take it easy. People proceeded to pass me going up the hill and I proceeded to pass most of those people shortly after the top of the hill. I skip the aid station and approach the mile 3 marker. 23:00. Still not cramping at this point and feeling pretty good. Ok. I guess all that running from October until now actually did something. But by now, I’m too far into it to have started out any faster. And I still don’t know if I’m going to blow up later, so I just keep on pace.

Miles four and five go by and I’m still clipping off 7:30 miles. Still feeling good and only about a mile to go. I turn it up just a notch. The field has really thinned out at this point. I see a few people on the sides of the road stretching. A few more people on the sides walking. Not sure what happened to them, but I hope that nothing is seriously wrong. I clipped off my last mile at 7:20 and make my “sprint” to the end to see 48 minute and change on the official clock. I was pretty happy. I was thinking that I’d run about 53 minutes, that I would have been really happy with 49:59:59 and here I was almost 2 minute better then that. And to make things better, I remember about 20 minutes later than it took me some time to even get across the start line. So I check my watch (since I started that as I crossed the starting mat) and see that I ran 47:04. I’m beaming at this point (although secretly a little upset that if I had knew that I was that close, I’d have run just a tad faster than 1.2 miles to get into the 46 number).

So all in all, it was a great day. The event was great and well run. The celebratory breakfast of IHOP pancakes and eggs was even better. I’m looking forward to my 1/2 on May 8th.

A fresh start, a clean slate, a new leaf, a new beginning… Whatever you want to call it. This marks the launch of this site. I don’t fully know yet what this site will become. I have a few thoughts but no concrete direction for it at this point. I suppose my main reason for starting this site is because I had once kept an online journal of various things that were going on in my life. It was a way to reflect on things that happened through my days and my interactions with others - a way to give other folks an insight into many of the things that I probably think throughout the day but never really say. At the very least if this gets no readers, it’ll be a time capsule of sorts that I can reflect upon later in life. I stopped writing in my last journal online for a variety of reasons. I had some life drama that needed to sort itself out (more about that later) and needed a break. Over time, my life came back together in an entirely different way and while it seems strange for me to think that all that drama was a good, I do know that I am a better person now because of it.

But I digress. I’m back. More to come.