So, the title of this post was supposed to be “Training Begins”.  At least that is what the title was when I sat down to start this post at the beginning of the week.  As you can probably guess, I never got around to finishing that post and now my official training is a week in the bag.

Monday was the first day of training for my first 2010 half Ironman (Racing for Recovery in June).  I’m doing a modified level 6 program from Matt Fitzgerald’s book.  On top of HIM training beginning, my training of a new employee started this week too.  Besides adding something else to my every growing plate of responsibilities, the training went very well. 

Monday

I started off the morning with a quick weights session.  My work training didn’t start until 10:00 and I needed to get some sort of exercise in to prep for sitting for hours.

Because I had to do training for work, I didn’t get to swim until the evening.  I found that really dislike swimming in the evening.  There is something about leaving the pool in the dark that is disappointing.  At least with my lunch time swim, I get that feeling of accomplishment know that there is still half of the day to go.

Tuesday

I had a second day off from running according to my marathon training plan.  However, I still had to do 70 minutes on the bike.  My workout was 7×20 seconds with 2 minute active recovery.  I also added in a few one leg drills at the end of the ride for good measure.

Wednesday

Wednesday was back to a relatively normal schedule so I had time to a lunch time swim as well as a 6 mile run.  It felt great to run again after 2 days off.  I finished the 6 miles in 46:29 (7:44 pace).  I was happy with this run because all of my splits came in under 8 minutes.

Thursday

Another busy work day.  I had to do some more work with my trainee as well as do a email migration for the entire company which meant lots of time on the phone and lots of GoToMeeting sessions to make sure everyone was setup correctly.  This meant I had to be at my desk all day.  When I finally finished up, I got in a 4 mile run.  I knew that I was going to have to follow up the run with an 1:45 on the trainer so I wanted to get the run does as fast as possible.  So, I basically treated the 4 miles as a speed workout.  I averaged 7:29 for the run and even hit 7:10 for mile 2.

As soon as I got home, I changed and hopped on the bike.  I had to do 1:45 at Z2.  Thankfully I had a copy of Terminator Salvation from Netflix which was 1:54 long.  It worked out perfect.  It was actually a pretty good movie too.  Not as good as T2 (side note: which was the first R rated movie I saw – just don’t tell my parents because I was only 12), but entertaining enough to keep me from getting bored.

Friday

Another run & swim day.  I switched things up and did my run before my swim rather than running later in the afternoon.  I took it nice and easy for the 7 miles and finished with an 8:00 pace.  I took it easy at the pool as well and only did 1800 yards instead of my usual 2500 yards.

Saturday

Today was an off day.  Completely, entirely, sit on my butt and do nothing off day.  Ok, well I wasn’t that lazy, but I did to quite a bit of sitting around.  When I wasn’t sitting around, Jennie and walked up to Reeds Lake for the annual kite festival.  They had free hot dogs, and hot chocolate too!!

I had a pretty good weekend to wrap up January. 

I started the weekend with my weekly Friday long run.  It was a light-ish week this week with a long run of 14 miles.  After 20 last week, 14 miles seemed like a dream.  If you remember my post about the 20 miler, I felt great for the first 14 miles and it went downhill from there.  So, I figured that 14 would be a breeze.  The funny thing is that this time, I felt great for the first 8 miles and it hurt for the final 6 miles.  I guess it is always the last 6 that are the hardest even if it isn’t a marathon.  I ended up finishing better than I thought I would in 1:57:59 for an 8:25 pace.

I took all of Saturday off to rest.  While I may not have run, biked, or swam, it was hardly a rest day.  There was no kicking up the feet and sitting on the couch.  Jennie and I spent the day cleaning the house from top to bottom.  At the end of the day we ended up with a sparkling clean house and a pile of stuff to take to Goodwill.  It was a very satisfying feeling.

Today, I got back to action and actually did a mini triathlon throughout the day.  I started this morning with an hour on the trainer.  I did some one leg drills (my new evil friend) at the end of the ride for good measure.  After lunch, I headed up to the pool and did 1800 yards in the pool with 8×100yds as the core set.  I actually hit 1:28 for my first 100 – first time under 1:30!  Unfortunately, I didn’t get under 1:30 again.  The rest were in the 1:34 – 1:36 range.

Later in the day, after getting a few more things done around that house, I headed out on my run.  It was pretty windy, but other than that the weather was a bit warmer than it has been.  I finished the run really strong with the last two miles coming in at 7:34 and 7:37.

In case you weren’t keeping track, that is an hour bike ride (19.6 miles), 1800 yard swim (1 mile), and 6 mile run for a total 26.6 miles in 2:28:57.  Too bad my T1 and T2 times were horrible otherwise it would have made for a good “race” .

Here are my totals for January:

Running was obviously the focus for January (and will continue to the focus until my April marathon). I’d like to get a few more bike rides in February than I did this month, but it is so hard to get motivated to ride on the trainer.  I’d actually even settle for the same number of rides, but for longer rides.

On the work front, things are settling down a bit.  I have put out most of the fires that January brought and things are starting to get cleaned up.  I will be spending the next couple weeks training a new hire, so I’ll have to reschedule my some of workouts because my schedule won’t be as flexible.  Nevertheless, I think I should have more time for training.

Maria over at 2010 Brings Racine recently tagged me to list 10 things that make me happy.  So, here goes

New Socks

I love the feel of a brand new pair of socks.  In fact, I just found a virgin pair in the bottom of my sock drawer today.  It made for a happy day for my feet.

Pizza, A Cold Beer & College Football

Technically, any one of these three things makes me happy.  But all of them at the same time is just heaven.  Given a choice, I’d go for Buddy’s Pizza, Guinness, and a ND game (in person if possible).

Woodworking

Whether it is a smaller project like a desk for the Mrs or a larger project like finishing the basement, I am a Do-It-Yourselfer to the core.  Why pay someone else to do it when I could do it for free and gain some life experience.

Programming

I don’t know if I am allowed to list work as one of my 10 things, but I am going to any ways.  I love the accomplishment that comes along with writing a program from scratch that makes a given task easier.  Yes, I am a nerd.  I know it.

Movies & TV

I don’t want to come off sounding like a bum, but I don’t think I could live without movies and TV.  I have the TV (or computer with TV shows) on almost all day long.  I work better when I have background noise, so there are times where I have show on in the background but am only half paying attention.  Likewise, we have a Netflix subscription and I will watch pretty much anything – even my fair share of chick flicks.  My guilty pleasures are repeats of The Office, Law & Order, NCIS, and 24 among others.

Blogging and My Blogging Buddies

Not only to I enjoy blogging about my adventures, but I have also learned so much from other bloggers.  When I first started reading tri/running blogs, I had about 5 in my Google Reader.  I now have over 30 (and growing) that I follow on a regular basis.

Not Driving

I really dislike driving.  I used to enjoy it.  But now that I don’t do it on a regular basis and can run a lot of my errands on the bike, I get irritated when I do have drive around: the traffic, the stupid drivers, it all bugs me now.  And yes, I realize that saying this makes me sound like an old man – I accept that.

Running After a Fresh Snow Fall

There is something really peaceful and calming about running through fresh powder.  Unfortunately, this usually means getting up early which I don’t like to do.  Sort of a Catch-22.

My Woodcock Ladies

The greatest group of ladies in the world.  I met them all while in college when they lived together in the on-campus Woodcock house.  Sadly, we are scattered all over the Midwest now.  We still try and keep in touch through email and Facebook though.  It is these lovely ladies that were responsible for setting me up on a blind date back in 2003 leading us to our final item on the list…

My Beautiful Bride

My cheerleader, support staff, photographer, and a whole lot more during this crazy journey I have embarked on.  Love you babe!  I couldn’t do it without you!

Now, technically I am supposed to tag more people to continue this on.  However, looking through the blogs I follow, pretty much everyone has been tagged already.  However, if you are reading this and have not yet been tag, consider yourself tagged!

Over the weekend we had weather in the low 40’s which not only melted most of the snow left on the ground, but also let me break out shorts for my run on Sunday.  It was actually pleasant enough out that Jennie and I were able to walk up to Big Bob’s Pizza in Gaslight Village to have lunch with her brother, his fiancé, and his room mate.

So much for our heat wave.  Today was back down in the 20’s with a single digit feels like temperature.  As I sat in my office, I was dreading my run as I watched the wind blow the snow all over the place.  I sucked it up and headed out around 4:00.  Even though it was still light out, I decided to go with the reflective gear because the blowing snow as reducing visibility and I didn’t want to become someone’s hood ornament.

It was slow going – especially into the wind – but it was a relatively good run. 

On top of running, I did a long swim today.  For my workout, I did:

800 yard warm up
3×300 yards (30 second rest)
200 yard kick
3×200 yards (30 second rest)
200 yard kick
3×100 yards pull (20 second rest)
100 yard cool down
3100 yards total

I stayed almost perfectly consistent on all of the intervals (5:10 for the 300’s, 3:30 for the 200’s, and 1:40 for the 100’s)which was the goal. 

Also, at the pool, I had a “small world” moment.  I found out that the husband of one of the women I swim with works at the same company as Jennie.  We are both regulars and see each other two to three times a week and chat while we wait for the lifeguards to get ready and didn’t realize it until today.  It is amazing how we are all connected in some way or anther.

As for my strength training, it is progressing nicely.  I absolutely love my new weights.  I am still hoping to find some good strength routines to mix things up though.  For now, I have just been doing a set from the 12 Week Triathlete book.  It takes me about 25-30 minutes to go through and I feel so good after doing it.

On the non running front, Jennie and I cleaned and repopulated our aquarium.  It turned out to be a pretty big project because I neglected cleaning it for so long.  We still need to get some new plants to replace ones that didn’t make it through the cleaning and I have to build a new hood because the old one finally bit the dust, but here it is.

Kind of hard to see all the fish, but there are: 4 Giant Danios, 4 Red Velvet Swordtails, 5 Tiger Barbs, and 1 Pelco (Algae Eater).  I will hopefully do a better job at preventive maintenance so it doesn’t get so bad this time.

Today was my first 20 miler of my training program.  I was dreading it all week despite the fact that all my runs were going well – better than expected in fact.

I prepped for my run with a great pre run dinner last night prepared by the lovely Jennifer.  Pasta, breadsticks, broccoli, salad, and chocolate milk.  It was delicious. 

This morning, I got up around 8:00 and ate an energy packed breakfast.  While I digested a bit, I got some work done before heading out around 9:30.  I wanted to get started earlier than I have for my past couple of long runs so that I wasn’t running into the lunch hour and getting ravenously hungry. 

I started out headed west because it felt like that was the direction the wind was coming from and I wanted to get that out of the way so I wasn’t running into the wind at the end.  However, it seemed no matter which way I turned, I was running into the wind.  Not sure how that is possible – must be global warming or something.  I stopped by my dad’s house along the way to say hello and refill my water bottle.  That was 9 miles in and I was still feeling pretty good.  After that, I headed back east. 

The next time I looked at my watch, I was at 14 miles.  I was ecstatic.  I still felt great.  And only 6 miles to go.  That meant less than an hour of running left.  I had one more stop at the library to refill my water bottle again.  I brought a single serving of Gatorade powder along with me and used that for the refill.  After that, it was just a lap around Reeds Lake and I would be done.  I’ve done that a million times.  No big deal.

Then I got 16 miles in.  That is when I really started to hurt.  I think part of it was mental because up until the 14 mile mark, I was really running blind on what my distance was.  I avoided looking at my watch because I didn’t want to look down and only see 11 miles when I thought it should have been more.  But now that I was at the 16 mile mark, I knew exactly where mile 17, 18, and 19 were going to be.  Nevertheless, I pushed through it and only stopped when getting a drink at each mile mark.

I made it home in 2:51 for an 8:35 pace.  I am very pleased with my time.  It is right where I wanted to be.  My last three marathons had final paces of (8:32, 8:38, and 8:52).  So, I am hoping that by already being in that range with my first 20 miler, I’ll be able to bring that down before race day.

After my run, I took my ice bath.  I had to use ice this time because most of the snow has melted.  I followed that up with my favorite post long run meal of a Red Baron supreme pizza and Coke.  Dessert was a tall glass of chocolate milk.

Unfortunately, I must have been a bit dehydrated because a couple hours after the run, I got a splitting headache.  I took some Advil and laid down in a dark room for a bit and it seemed to clear up thankfully.

And before I go, I’d like you to meet the newest member of my training team – a set of Bowflex dumbbells!!  I have been scouring Craigslist for months since deciding I needed to add more strength training to my weekly workouts back in August.  I have had a couple of hits, but they were gone by the time I called. I got lucky yesterday though.  I met the seller at a parking lot nearby and bought them (over half off the price of a new set!!!).  The only thing wrong with them is that one of the dumbbells doesn’t work if you set it to 20 pounds.  Not a big deal though as there are settings for 17.5 and 22.5 and they work fine.

I actually broke them in last night with a quick session to try them out.  I didn’t want to do too much because of my run today though.  I am going to try and at least do two workouts a week on Tuesdays and Saturdays and possibly Thursdays on light running weeks.  I’m super excited!  Tickets to the gun show will be available soon.