• 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. :)

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.

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!

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.

In a word – “OUCH“!

In two words – “!@#$ing OUCH“!

But hopefully it keeps my legs healthy this season.

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. :)

Happy nine months, pumkin!!

“The Americans? We’re going to smash them. That’s what we came here for.”

- Some French swimmer nobody will remember

Mmmm hmmm.  Eat it, Frenchies.  See you in 4 years. :)