I think that I have my computer problems worked out. I installed a new power supply and my computer booted up right away so I’m hopeful anyway. Sorry that I haven’t been around much. Man, did I have a lot of catch up reading to do. :) You guys need to not post so much while I’m “away”. ;)

Anyway, my first peak week has come and gone. I got my two necessary “breakthrough” workouts in. The first of which was a long (2 hour) run. I was going to post my Polar graph of my run, but it didn’t quite turn out as well as I’d hoped. Oh well. While I was out there plodding along I saw what looked like my good friend on the path just 50 yards ahead of me or so. He must have just turned around and I was coming up behind him from a different route. I didn’t know for sure if that was him as there are plenty of people on the path with shorts, a sleeveless shirt and hat, but it looked like him from his gait. So I started running a little bit faster hoping to gain on him so we could chat for the mile or two section of road that was ahead of us. Now, for those that have been reading for a while, you all know I’m certainly no gazelle. That added to the fact that I’m at about mile 10 of my long run and my friend has run a 3:07 marathon already this year. I don’t know why I decided to even attempt this at all, but I did. I estimate that I started running somewhere between 7:30-7:45 pace in my attempt to catch him and he was still slowly pulling away from me. Try as I might, he just kept getting smaller and smaller as he got further and further away. It was a sad, hopeless feeling, but he’s sure due for a great day in Wisconsin this year. :) All in all, it was a good run. I negative split my second loop by almost five minutes! I’m glad that my running speed hasn’t suffered too much from my injuries this season. Only time will tell where my running endurance stands. I still haven’t run more than 15 miles straight at this point.

I went longer than I probably should have on my second BT workout last week. I ended up doing an 82 mile ride followed by a 3 mile run. The 82 miles seemed harder and more tiring than some of my longer rides this year, but at an average pace of 19.6 MPH, I was fine with that. That’s my fastest average speed for a long ride to date. I clipped off those three miles is just over 8 minute mile pace. If I can hold anything around 10 minute pace come Ironman, I’ll be ecstatic!

Peak week two is here and I’m a little unsure of what I should be doing. It seems hardly worth strapping on my bike shoes if I’m not riding for at least an hour, nor lacing up my running shoes for just 30 minutes of running. My body in still in “Go go go!” mode and not used to all this rest. And certainly my appetite is still in “go” mode! That’s going to be the biggest challenge this next two weeks.

I’ll hopefully be back on-line soon, folks. I’m am experiencing technical difficulties. My main computer’s power supply is dying a slow death. First it had trouble cold booting and now it just makes my computer lock up. At least I think it’s the power supply. I’m going to replace it today and hopefully that cures my problems.

As a quick update, training is still going OK. My last long run (which I’ve been meaning to post about for a laugh) and my last long ride are done! Now, I get to really taper (it’s hard to call something a taper when you’re still doing two hour runs and five hour workouts, but those are done now!).

I went to the Minnesota state fair yesterday. Lets see… I ate cheese curds, a papa pup (a foot long corn dog, basically), a three foot beef stick, a pork chop on a stick, some french fries, a cheeseburger wanton thingie, a deep fried turkey sandwich, an egg roll, a turtle brownie, a large cup of ice cream, and a Corona. And despite my attempt to kill myself with deep fried saturated fat goodness, I also got my cholesterol checked! I don’t think I’ve ever had that done before, and with at least some heart disease in my family as well as some folks with high cholesterol, I was a little bit worried about the results. But it turned out to be for nothing - my numbers were good! My overall cholesterol was 192, my HDL was 54, and my cholesterol ratio was 3.6. The lady who spent time explaining the results to me basically said I was good to go in all three categories.

“I have nothing to lecture you on. Just eat well - lots of fruits and vegetables. And make sure you exercise.”

State Fair Cholesterol Checking Lady

Lady, you have no idea… :)

This site is too cool. I have an Excel based spreadsheet that does something similar, but this one is pretty spiffy too. My hats off to the person that took the time to put that together.

The 2005 Athletes Guide and Spectator Guide are also now on-line (they may have been for sometime, but this is the first time I’ve checked the site in a while). Pretty soon, they’ll be issuing race numbers! The suspense is already getting to me.

And did I tell you how much I enjoy tapering? :)

OK, maybe it’s not quite that cold yet, but I did wish I had a jacket this morning as I was making my way towards the pool this morning. Weather Underground tells me that it was a frigid 50 degrees at 7 AM! This can’t be happening… it’s far too early to be getting this cold. This weather in conjunction with the fact that it’s already dark when I wake up in the morning is a sad reminder that the days of summer are coming to an end and that winter will be here shortly. :( I’m just not ready for that yet.

Anyhow, the weekend was good. I really didn’t do all that much training wise. I think I just swam on Friday. Saturday, I did a 20 mile ride and a 4 mile run, and Sunday I took completely off. It was nice having the time to recovery, but I’m still feeling like it’s too close to the race to be standing still. I’ve got to have faith in the plan, though, and trust that no fitness was lost last week. I just don’t want to be peaking too early…

I had a masters swim workout this morning. It was definitely good to get moving again. I think we did just under 4,000 yards in 1:10 or so. The workout itself felt really easy. There was a set of 75s on the 1:05 that I was uneasy about when it was presented to us, but it really wasn’t that bad at all. My swimming, come 9/11, will be there. Whether I’ll be able to crank out a sub-1 hour swim time has yet to be seen though.

I’ve got a 30 mile ride and another 4-5 mile run planned for tonight. If you haven’t noticed already, that’s pretty much my typical aerobic maintenance workout. Tomorrow is my last long run of the year! It’ll be awesome once that’s all wrapped up. I’m tempted to go out and do all my workouts in long sleeves and tights, though. All this heat acclimation that I’ve built up is going to be for nothing with weather like this for the next couple weeks. And should race day come hot and muggy, it could make for a miserable day. I’d rather be miserable right now…

I’m on a recovery week, but with Wisconsin right around the corner I feel like I shouldn’t have any free time. I realize that the body makes all its gains while its resting and without resting, all the hard work that you put in never gets a chance to manifest itself. But man is it hard for me to sit still assuming that my body is repairing itself in the background and growing strong. It’s hard to think that it’s getting better by just standing still.

It’s times like these that I come to appreciate my training log. It reminds me that just eight days ago, I rode a long 112 miles in a seven hour training day. And just last weekend that I ran 15 miles - my longest run this season. But those workouts seem like they happened ages ago. I’m resisting the temptation to go crush some long workouts this week, but I never thought relaxing would be so hard. My body must be on endorphin withdrawal?

I went on a 35ish mile ride yesterday with a couple of triathlete neighbors. I did my first ride with these guys sometime in either late May or early June? And they really put the hurt on me back then. :(

Fast forward a couple months and a good number of miles. Yesterday, it was the same folks riding. Different route, but same people all of which have been training over the summer for various races. I won’t kid myself. They’re still faster riders than I am if they want to turn on the juice, but they’ve both marked a noticable improvement in my fitness compared to just a few months ago. I felt better too. Unlike my previous ride with them, I was never too out of breath and was never tempted to tell them that I was going to pack it in and head back by myself. That made me feel good. :)

The weather is crappy here and looks like it’ll be crappy until Saturday. Good thing it’s a rest week. I’m hoping the weather will be good next week. Just one big week left.

It appears that late last night, our company and the union have come to an agreement on the terms of the union’s contract for the next three years. It still has to pass a vote by the union employees, but I’m thinking that’s more a technicality than anything else? I’ll feel better once it’s all signed and written in stone, but things are looking good so far!

IMMoo, here I come!

I’m still alive… just haven’t been feeling very posty lately for whatever reason. I was out of town late last weekend for my fianceé’s sister’s wedding (try and say that three times quickly!). The wedding was beautiful and a good time was had by all. The happy couple is vacationing now someplace in Santa Barbara.

All last week, I pretty much ate crappy. But yesterday and today have been good eating days and despite me epic eating last week, my weight hasn’t really budged, so I guess that’s good? I’m going to try and eat clean again though. Only a few weeks left until the big event.

Our company hasn’t gone on strike yet, but they haven’t come to an agreement yet either. For now, the union folks are just working without a contract. The latest word is that they’re close and that progress is being made, but I won’t feel entirely relaxed until a new contract is signed. I’m hoping that all gets squared away real soon now.

I got a good long run in while I was in Chicago for the wedding. Folks over in the western ‘burbs have a really nice thing going with that Illinois Prairie Path. I got a nice long 15 mile run done in just under 2:10 on some beautiful trails. Hopefully I’ll be able to run at least half of this thing in a few weeks.

It’s an easy week for me this week. Next week will be relatively hard, and then it’s all downhill from there.

That’s all.

Sorry for the posting hiatus. And thanks for the emails noting your concern. With a company strike looming, I think I’m subconsciously bracing for its impact. I did strike duty once in 1998. It was pretty much the worst possible job imaginable and for 82 hours a week at that. I’m still really hoping that there isn’t a strike or that it’s really short if there is, otherwise all my work that I’ve put in for Wisconsin this summer will have been for nothing. I have over 200 hours of training logged since April. I’m going to be so disappointed if I have to push my race back to next year.

But I digress. I went out yesterday and got my last official long, long ride in of the year. I say long twice because I still have an 80-90 mile ride planned in two weeks, but that’s not long compared to the 112 I did yesterday! That’s right. I went for it yesterday riding the full IM distance since it would be the last long one of my training. And it went really well! Not only did I ride farther than normal, I think that was my fastest paced long ride to date. It certainly helps that the weather was pretty much perfect with it being in the low 80s with little wind. And it helps that I was properly fueled the previous night by some Chipotle and DQ, and yesterday morning by a McDonalds big breakfast platter (read: 1200 calories!!). OK, perhaps I overdid it… or maybe not? All I know is, I wasn’t going to be under fueled and have a death ride like I did the week before. I also took four water bottles out there with me - two with ~850 calories of CarboPro goodness and the other two for water. It was a great day. Total ride time was 5:45:30 for the 112 miles which equates to 19.45 MPH. Add to that a 50 minute 3,000 yard swim in the morning and a post ride 25 minute three mile transition run and it was a very solid seven hour training day yesterday!

I really hope they don’t strike. What’s the saying? “Can’t we all just get along?” :)