For those looking for their daily dose of inspiration and motivation, this isn’t the post for you. If you want to continue, be my guest but don’t say I didn’t warn you…

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So… I weighed myself this morning - 168.2. Not terrible for a little over a week. I have the feeling that I was a little more dehydrated than normal when I weighed in, but it should be close. I had a decent week last week of eating. I did splurge a little last Saturday utilizing my optional “special occasion” card (if you must know, was my birthday this past weekend. :) ). And I may have eaten slightly more than I was allotted on Easter, although if I did it wasn’t by much.

Three pounds in a week and a half or so is right on target, I’d say. I will say that I don’t strict calorie count so much as I sort of ballpark estimate everything. I think my guesstimates now doing this for a few years are pretty accurate though. And when I watch what I eat, I tend to eat the same things over and over and over again. Lunches are comprised of either a 6″ Subway Club (no cheese or mayo), or maybe a Quiznos small Sierra Smoked Turkey. Fruit I usually classify as 100 calories a piece. And I’m pretty in tune with my portion control. It’s amazing how little 1/2 a cup, or even a whole cup is for that matter! I still get very hungry at times, but this week seems to be better in terms of dealing with cravings and what not. I find that if I can ween myself off foods that I really like, I usually lose the desire to eat them in the second or third week.

I had forgotten how working out feels when you’re trying to lose weight, though. There have been a couple runs these past couple weeks where I just ran out of gas and had to cut my runs to walk/runs. Not so much because I was out of shape (although there is some of that), but more so because I was just completely out of energy. It comes with the territory I suppose. And probably better to have workouts suffer now in the early season than when the brunt of the training is supposed to come.

That’s it on the weight front. Everything else is going well. Training is slow going, but I think I managed 8-9 hours last week? I’m slow as molasses at running, I have no muscular endurance on the bike, and I feel like I’m swimming through jello in the pool. At least I don’t have one glaring weakness - I’m bad in all three! :)

The weather here continues to suck. We have a winter advisory here today until 7 PM and are expecting 3-5 inches of snow. :( Which just strengthens my case that I have to get out of this state sooner than later. I hate the weather here. It drives me absolutely nuts.

So… with race season that’s going to be here before I know it, I’ve decided that it’s about time that I start doing the whole weight loss thang. And as I’ve been in contact with Wil and some others about this, I wonder if starting some kind of virtual “fat camp” wouldn’t be fun. You know… we all sort of keep each other accountable and maybe have a weekly weigh in or something? And a place to bitch about how bad dropping weight sucks. Misery loves company after all, right? :)

Anyway, I’m planning on keeping track of my progress here. I started out this week tipping the scales at 171 and change - about 20 pounds heavier than I really should be. My (drastic) plan is going to be the same as last year. My own personal guidelines are as follows:

• By being a living member of the planet Earth, I am entitled to eating 1,000 calories a day.
• For every hour I workout, I get to eat an extra 500 calories (yeah, I know that’s not exact, but it’s easy math).
• When I reach 1,500 calories in exercise, I’m done - regardless of what I did that day. Meaning my hard cap for caloric intake for a day is 2,500 calories. So a 60 mile ride warrants me the same amount of calories as doing a century.
• The calories that I eat should come primarily from good sources - fruits, vegetables, and lean cuts of meat. I can’t get all my calories from chocolate, for example.
• Training calories (i.e. gels, sports drinks, etc.) count towards the overall daily tally so take them wisely and only as necessary.
• Optional: Special occasions (i.e. birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) are granted some relief from this diet, so long as the occasion is truly special and I’m not gorging myself because it’s Friday or something silly like that.
• Optional: Every five pound milestone, I’ll give myself the option to take one “free” meal as a reward for hitting that next level.

I did this last year and I seem to be able to drop 2+ pounds a week while training. Sometimes the training days are rough and I need to just gut through them on pure will alone. That’s the price I pay for living the good life for eight months - suck it up. :) Caloricly sure, it’s probably on the low side and I’m sure some nutritionist out there will tell me that it’s way too little and that I need to eat more. Starving my body, eating away at muscle mass, slowing down my metabolism and all that stuff. But it’s pretty much the way I’ve done things every time I’ve needed to cut weight and it always works. And the more I read what the diets of elite athletes look like, the more I think that they’re closer to the above than not. Besides, if I were really starving my body that badly, I don’t think it’d allow me to train or anything on top of just existing. So I think it’s enough? Perhaps a topic for discussion, though?

In any case, I’m in. If anyone else wants to join in the fun, the more the merrier. You don’t have to abide by my rules above. I only posted mine so others could see how I would be working towards my goal. Any takers? :)

Inspired by Flatman’s recent Engineering problem, I dug up this image of my own that I meant to posted ages ago.

With 2006 all wrapped up and the results posted, I figured I’d do another run of IMNA statistics for the current year like I did for 2005. Again, this snapshot is just the raw numbers of how things played out this year. Like last year, I left out the swim splits:

“You will notice that I didn’t do swim splits. I chose not to since the swim times should vary the least of the three in all the venues, but mostly because IMNA’s display of swim data sucks. A sub-hour swim time is represented as 59:59:00 while an hour swim time is represented as 1:00:00, which messes up my auto-tabulations and I’m too lazy to go fix the sub-hour entries. :P”

So without further ado:

My observations:

• Arizona folks went 6 minutes slower on average than last year. Folks got around 10 minutes faster on the bike, but 15 minutes slower on the run.
• It looks like Ironman Coeur d’Alene had the biggest change in time from 2005, with its competitors going 37 minutes slower this year than last. Bike times were 11 minutes slower and the run was 23 minutes slower on average! The finisher percentage also decreased by 7%. Seemingly, the conditions were harder for athletes this year than last.
• Placid again surprises me with a very high 92.74% finisher rate. I hear that the course is supposed to be one of the harder ones, but folks that do the course seem to have a good chance of finishing. Does LP just attract a more fit crowd of athletes who prepare better during the season? Overall times this year were about 12 minutes faster than last.
• Canada gets the consistency award by having the average finisher time differ from last year by only 18 seconds. :)
• Wisconsin… the only one that I’m personally familiar with. It looks like 95 degrees or 55 degrees, folks seem to bike the same on that course with bike splits differing by less than 1 minute. Run splits were substantially faster though with an average decrease in time of 36 minutes over last year. Times were only 24 minutes faster overall, though which leads me to believe that either people swam WAY slower this year. Or more likely, people were spending a lot more time in the transition area changing clothes and trying to get warm between events.
• Florida gets the speed crown again this year. While it did once again post the fastest bike splits of any other IMNA event, it wasn’t by much - only 4 minutes faster than Canada. And the average run splits in Florida were actually 3 minutes slower in Placid. Again making me wonder what’s up with these Placid athletes and why are they all on the juice? :)

It’s about that time. That time where I wake up from hibernation and say, “Oh crap! The race season is going to be here before you know it!” It’s been weighing on me (quite literally as far as my knee joints are concerned) these past couple of weeks that I should probably start doing something other than being glued to my couch. These days, I’m pretty much disgusted with how far I’ve actually let myself go.

So for the first time in a long time, I ran. Well, I did something that resembled putting on running shoes and going outside. I wouldn’t so much say that I ran as I’d say I sort of shuffled along wondering if and when I’d go into cardiac arrest. And wondering if it was safe to run considering all the sludge that probably built up over the winter and if a big chunk of cholesterol was going to break off one of my arteries and end up lodged in my brain. But I went out and did something, and as much as the run itself sucked it reminded me that I actually like being outside and exercising. Sure, it was gorgeous out this weekend which totally helped. But it was actually a fresh change from being cooped up inside the house watching me have to go down yet another notch on my belt.

So this is it. Yeah, I think it’s it? OK, it’s it. Stamped on my blog and for you all to call me out on it if you don’t hear from me regularly. The season starts NOW!

Twenty pounds heavier than I should be and my HR was somewhere close to infinity just by standing up. But this is the bitter sweet part of the season. Every workout I do sucks, but almost every workout that I do brings me noticeable changes in weight, HR, and RPE of my workouts. It doesn’t feel like I’ll ever get back to where I was, but I’ll have to trust that I’ve done it in years past and that I’ll get there again. It’s good to be “back”.

See you all out there!

I’m out for Wildflower.  Sorry for the false alarm.

… forget the fact that I can’t run more than 2-3 miles right now and that I haven’t sat on my bike since October. Hypothetically if I were interested in signing up for Wildflower, is it still possible to arrange for lodging and transportation this late in the game? Will it be a logistical nightmare trying to arrange to do this race this late or will it still be possible? I know a ton of you guys are heading out there to do the race, so I figured I’d ask the masses. My friend is wanting something on the calendar to kick start the race season. And seeing that I’ve got a 20 pound blanket of fat surrounding my mid-section that wasn’t there last fall, I probably should do the same.

Twenty pounds and trying to get enough base to do a 1/2 in seven weeks? It sounds pretty stupid, but it might just be the kick in the ass that I need to get going.

If you Wildflower goers can provide any details and/or comments on your experiences signing up and planning out this race, I’d appreciate any comments/thoughts that you might have. :)

Rebates have such a way of making things look like such a great deal. And usually the worst of it is having to figure out how you’re going to cut the UPC code out of something. But I’m sure more people than not have run into something like this:

Seven months and eleven days later (and a half dozen or so emails in between), I finally got my rebate. I suppose I should feel lucky that I got anything at all. A simple Google search shows that I’m not the only person that has had an issue trying to get rebates from that company. I’ll never buy from TigerDirect again.

Now back to our blizzard that we’re having over here…

So… tonight was the first time in a long time that I’ve done anything “tri” related. My LBS (LTS?) was hosting it’s annual “VIP Sale” and it looks like I’ve once again managed to do enough damage there that they invite me back to spend even more! After all, you’ve got to spend money to save money, right? … or something like that.

Anyway, I got there just a few minutes before they were ready to open and there was already a line at the door and around the corner of the entrance. In line were a ton of people from the tri club, including the likes of Trimama and the Soapinator, Ironmom Jenny, the man who brought you TriMapper, and a whole bunch of others (who I didn’t put here only because I don’t have nifty links to include for you - sorry!). It was a little surreal seeing everyone there. It made me feel a little guilty, actually. These are people that I saw pretty regularly this past summer and who after IMWI, I haven’t seen since.

It’s something built into my system, I suppose. Every fall, I feel the need to take a little break and recover from IM and the long season of training that preceded it. But soon after that, it starts getting colder out and I lose any kind of desire to do anything active. The idea of there being snow on the ground and having the sun go down earlier and earlier just gets me more and more depressed as the days go by. I hate being outside when it’s cold and I absolutely despise winter. And really the only thing that seems to keep me happy is junk food. That’s quite the killer combination - not working out a lick and eating everything in sight. I was actually matching kwokette’s weight gain during her last trimester of her pregnancy until she had her baby!

All of this probably has you wondering, “Why in the world do you live in Minnesota of all places then?!” I’ve been asking myself that question a whole lot this winter. More than in previous winters in the past. I really do enjoy my job and my best friend is here. But even those two things, as great as they are, has me wondering if it’s really worth it? Is it really enough?

Anyway, I just felt like I should say something. Some explanation of, “Where has Chris been?” And to address the questions that have come in if everything is alright. Some of you that have been reading for a while already know to expect that I’ll be gone pretty much from October and to reemerge sometime around April or May. But for those that don’t already know… well, now you do.

So… sorry to my merry band of tri clubbers, bloggers, and blog lurkers that I’ve abandoned this winter. It is the middle of February so we’re right in the middle of this thing and there’s no where to go but up. Much like long rides and long runs go - getting to the 1/2 way mark is the hard part. It’s mostly gravy after that. :)

I hope you’ll take this prodigal son back in a few months!

(P.S. No major purchases this year (yet). Off the top of my head, I got some full fingered gloves, knee warmers, toe booties, a new chain, some handlebar tape, and a big TYR backpack.)