I did my second of long runs today. I planned on 1:45 which should have put me just under 12 miles. I actually felt pretty good all the way through but my left ankle around my achilles started aching around 1:15 or so. It didn’t hurt that bad, but I eased up on my pace and started walking the remainder of the hills as to not aggravate it any further. I was good and iced it for 15 minutes after I got home. I think I’ll go ice after I’m done posting here too.

I really hope this isn’t something that’s going to stick around for a while. It’s been a rough early season so far. Battling ITB, shin splints, some weird pain in my left foot around my small toe (I think it’s my sural nerve, but don’t know what’s wrong with it), and now this. I am running faster than I was last season, but these nagging injuries are pretty annoying. I wonder how much fast I could be if I could train without them all.

Not much else is new. I picked up the new Profile Design Tri-Stryke today. I have it all mounted on my bike, but haven’t ridden it yet. With thunderstorms forcasted for tomorrow, I should have a lovely two hour trainer ride to give it a try. I’ll try and post a review of it here sometime in the near future.

There are certain unmentionables that are aching after my ride today. I’m definitely not used to sitting in the saddle for long periods of time. I ended up riding just under four hours today and went for a quick 20 minute transition run afterwards. Towards the end of my ride, I’d alternate between standing to give the boys a rest and sitting to give my aching legs a rest. Great fun. :P I took the ride really easy for the first two hours and pushed harder coming back. I always tend to ride conservatively on the way out just to make sure I don’t blow up. I’m pretty out of shape, but I’m not as wiped as I was after my first long ride last year. Although I did take it quite a bit slower today than last year looking at my training log. I guess it balances out.

Only eight more hard rides and runs until Wisconsin. That really isn’t that much. I hope I’ll be ready by then.

I didn’t quite make it four hours on the trainer this morning. It was more like 2:20. I rode for the first hour inside on the trainer and was so bored, I decided to brave the elements and just go outside. I was planning to just ride around my house in case the torrential downpour started, so I could just quickly head back home. But it was pretty cold outside and still sprinkling rain and it just wasn’t any fun at all. I don’t really have the proper gear to be riding in the colder weather, which doesn’t help. I stopped at home to get something to eat quick and didn’t end up back on my bike again.

I feel bad not toughing out my workout. It just wasn’t fun anymore and I didn’t see any point to sitting for another 1:40 upset and angry. I’m so damn sick of this weather. It’s almost the beginning of June and I still need to wear long sleeves because it’s too cold outside in the middle of the day. And would it really hurt to have the sun make a guest appearance every once in a while?

There’s a chance of decent weather it looks like tomorrow morning. Weather.com seems to think so, although wunderground.com begs to differ. Maybe I’ll try and do 80 again tomorrow…

I’m feeling slightly better now than this morning. I went and had myself an appropriate lunch of all you can eat Mexican food. The quality of the food wasn’t that great, but the quantity was just right to leave me feeling fat and happy. I needed that.

I think I’m going to take the afternoon off from working out too. I ran yesterday and I think my shoes are still drying out from that. If indeed I’m going to be on my bike tomorrow for four hours, inside or out, I don’t really have any desire to sit on it this evening.

Eating lots and sitting around being lazy. Ahh, the good old life. :)

I’m just in the crappiest of moods right now. The weather here is really, really getting to me. Would it be so bad to get some sunshine here? Yesterday on my run, I get to the half way mark and just like clockwork it starts raining. Well that’s somewhat of an understatement. Really, it felt like I was standing under my shower head in the tub at home. I got soaked all the way through. My shoes were like sponges. I was freezing cold and ended up running pretty hard just to stay warm and keep my hands from going completely numb. It doesn’t look like we’re going to get much relief from the weather here any time soon.

I’m supposed to do a long ride this weekend. Looks like that might have to be on the trainer. Four hours of spinning on the trainer isn’t my idea of fun.

I haven’t seen the numbers on the scale budge all week. I’ve had a very good week of eating this week - no huge, bad meals, always maintaining a good 1,000 calorie deficit for the day. It’s kind of disheartening not to see the scale reflect my efforts for the week. I know it’s pointless to watch daily and that it’s longer term trends that I’m graphing here. But still… it’d be nice if it could throw me a bone.

So that’s about it. I’m just in a very blah mood right now. Dieting sucks. Training is going well, although I wish I could do more of it outside. I really want to move, but am worried about everything that goes with it. My friends are here, I own a home, my fiance has a good job that she likes here… I wish I could like it here. I just don’t.

I should have posted this months ago when this latest season of American Idol started. I totally called Carrie Underwood as my favorite girl to win the whole thing while they were still doing auditions and before they started eliminating people (my choice for a guy winner did end up being sent home quite early in the competition, though). Bo did a really good job. He had me worried that my prediction was going to be wrong and honestly, I think he had the better performance on Tuesday. Either person would have been deserving, though.

I can’t believe I stuck it through the whole season. This is the first season that I watched in its entirety. And I’m not really proud of that, actually. On the contrary, I feel rather embarassed.

Seriously, did I ever tell you how much I hate it here?

Time to go ride for two hours on the trainer. *sigh* Hopefully, I don’t contimplate killing myself more than a few times while I’m on there…

Maybe I’m not as close as I thought I was. I had my first “long” run today which was just under 10 miles. It was harder than I thought it was going to be. I don’t think I ate enough yesterday, which didn’t help things. That and I am trying to train harder than I did last year; I probably ran about 30-40 seconds faster per mile than I did last year during my long runs. Maybe next week’s run will be better?

One of nine scheduled long runs is now officially out of the way. Looking at my calendar and seeing that I really only have nine hard training weeks before Ironman is kind of frightening.

Yesterday, I started my first base period in pushing towards IM Wisconsin. I ended up with an hour of swimming, a hour of running, and about 1:40 of riding. That’s a pretty solid first day for me. Hell, that’s a pretty solid day during the middle of the season when I’m in shape. I’m still not there, but I guess I’m not as bad off as I thought I was. The workout really took its toll on me last night though. I was dead tired and dinner and started falling asleep watching TV around 8:30 pm. I slept a solid nine hours last night and was dead to the world. It was nice. :)

I’m sure many folks have been receiving a bunch of German spam messages thinking why the hell is all this coming into my inbox. Sadly, despite working in the computer industry and getting a ton of these daily (mostly to random administrative addresses that I’m a part of), I didn’t even look into why this is happening until tonight after reading about it on a friend’s blog.

If you’re looking to find out what’s behind this operation, follow this link. If you’re running SpamAssassin and you’re looking to stop these messages, put me into your /etc/mail/spamassassin directory. You’ll need to restart spamd if you’re running it.

In other news, I went with another friend to a local church carnival. I’m pretty sure none of the folks that were attending the carnival also attend the church. Lord help the next generation of youth coming into this world. They’re a scary bunch. Anyway, in celebration of losing weight, I cowed out tonight carnival style. Cheese curds, corn dogs, donuts, french fries, chicken nuggets… and then I went home and ate a full dinner of two plates of spaghetti and garlic bread. Ahhh, the good old days. Now you know why I gain 20 pounds in just a few months time if I don’t watch what I eat.