Summer catchup

So it's been awhile since I've reported anything and I'm guessing you've moved on to better things. Well, I'm back. Can't say with a vengeance, but I'm back.

Spring time turned out to be a challenge for me w/ training. In February I managed to separate the AC joint in my shoulder while skiing, which was totally stupid. I'm a fairly good skier, but I had no business being out there the night of the accident. After five good falls I should have known better to half-ass a 360 off some foriegn jump and wind up throwing my shoulder into a cement-like landing. It wasn't good, but I got plenty of laughs from my PA-to-be friends and some good whisky in the chalet from a couple guys who have felt my pain. I was just happy to not have to drive down the mountain that night. It could have gotten worse. With it being nearly June now I have full mobility in the shoulder, but I lost a lot of strength in these already fairly wimpy shoulders. I also have one kickass of a notch/lump near my clavicle. Such as life.

The shoulder injury set me back for marathon training then I somehow pulled my left calf muscle while out on a 10-mile run. It took weeks to recover from it and I thought the marathon would never happen. While up in Coeur d'Alene I managed to throw a few good weeks of longer runs in so I had some confidence back. but the body felt like a rock. It really showed how inconsiderate I was towards my body during the winter/spring months after the shoulder incident. One thing led to another and the body was just clunky. The right knee started giving me problems and I can pretty much attribute it to a lack of flexibility. When my quads get tight they pull on my lower back. When my lower back is sore I try to compensate then things like my calves go to hell. Then the IT bands start to act up, which then farts w/ my knee. I have been an endurance athlete now for quite some time, but I swear there's times I act like I know jack squat. And since I'm not exactly a spring chicken some philosophies needed adjusting and that has begun again.

Ogden Marathon
Ogden Utah is a beautiful mountain town, and it was Kate and I along with my brother and his youngest daughter, my niece, Britney there to enjoy it. They drove from Wisconsin since Brit is staying with us for the summer. We had a lot of fun checking out the sites and catching up and I would head back to Ogden anytime. I'm a sucker for scenery, it never gets old.

Getting ready for this race I took a look at what I could hold on a good day and trained my paces based on that. The course itself has a lot of downhill with an overall elevation loss of around 1000 feet (starts at 5400ft). You'd think it would be a fast course, but there's also plenty of rollers for a good 10-miles that'll make or break you. The elevation alone may also mess w/ you though it's not too bad at that height.

The start of the race is pretty cool where they bus us to the starting line. We then hang out w/ everyone at the fire barrels to keep warm while the sun works its way up. When we got up there it was around 28F at 5500ft elevation. Pretty chilly, but those barrels were toasty and once the sun came up it warmed up fairly quickly. Kate moved herself to her pace zone and I got to mine then the gun goes off.

The first five or six miles are a pretty good shot downhill and I stayed conservative and hit my paces on each mile. At mile eight the rollers start with some longer grinds until you get to mile 14 which is the significant hill. Miles 13 to 15 I slowed some, but life was still going good and I made it back until mile 18. The flats felt fine and going up was no problem. I trained on a lot of hills so going up is never a problem for me these days. At mile 18 the big downhill starts. It's about 4-miles downhill at around 5-7% and though you might think "sweet", it requires some pretty fresh legs.

Once I hit that downhill at 18 the IT band in my left leg just locked up. There were times I was skipping downhill just to keep momentum. Then the stopping started. For the next five miles I sucked it up and just dealt with what I had to do. By mile-23 and a half I mentally couldn't hurdle the pain and pulled over and sat n this park kind of pissed. If I would have walked 12-min miles the last 2+ miles I would have PRd, but it was so short of what I wanted I didn't care. So for the next 90-mins I sat in the park, massaging the legs, waiting for Kate to make it through. I didn't care about a marathon time, I didn't care about what people might think of me running a 5hr marathon, I just wanted to get over myself and try to turn this into something positive. So for those 90mins I thought about my attitude over the winter, the mishaps, the missed opportunities and found once again you get out of it what you put into it. And what I put into this race didn't jive with what I was trying to get out of it. You don't HOPE for things to happen you MAKE them happen.

After those 90mins I see my wife and she's in a lot of pain as well. When she saw me she figured I was already done, but I let her know I'm still at it and it made her happy we could do this together. Her and I ran the last couple miles together, encouraging each other, finding reference points to run to before having to walk it. It was a hell of grind to get to the finish line, but we did it and we finished together, hands together, arms up up high, big smiles. Now the funny thing is Kate crossed the starting line after me and since this is all chip timed she actually beat me by a couple mins. She has yet to let me forget that!!! :)

Kate was happy w/ her marathon experience despite the very minimal time she had to prepare for it. School for her is at the top of the list so it leaves very little time for anything else. My brother ran the 5K race and did quite well. Britney ran the half marathon and of the 60 women in her age group she took 1st with a 1:37 run. Very impressive. We're proud of ya, chica!

Now that the marathon is done and I think I'm near full recovery I've got my sights on the Boise 70.3 in a couple weeks. Then I'll get into full endurance mode for the Newton 24 race in September. I've got a few races in between like the Bogus Time Trial on Labor Day and a couple Olympic distance triathlons. The Bogus TT is a 15-mile mountain climb TT, which I'm very excited about though it will require to go deep into the well, which is nice. I need it.

That's all for now.

Train smart (and smarter than my Spring training) !!! :)
Drew.

In with the New Year

Hey all, hope everyone is finding 2009 to be a good year so far.

January is nearly complete and my body is finally starting to get over the "I've taken time off" fitness hump. Mentally I'm completely refreshed from the 2008 Ironman year (hey, I only did one this time, right?) and starting to get some good miles into my legs. Most of the miles these days are coming in the form of running and last week alone I think I put more running miles in than my heaviest week last summer. That's from a pure quantity standpoint though, I think most of my running miles logged last year had some serious quality, but just making the point that I'm going all "Gump" on my ass! I'm also getting a fair share of biking in, which equates to about 4+hrs/week on the CompuTrainer. My Saturday trips over to the RHOP (Rob's House of Pain) began last week and it left me realizing I've got some work to do to get my high-end fitness back in gear. Saturday's workout consisted of mostly 90-110% efforts for two hours followed w/ a nice 40-min run afterwords. I'll be doing those types of workouts until March then getting outside on the bike to get some longer endurance in. I'm feeling very focused at this point, which feels great since I tend to slack when I don't have goals.


A couple weeks back before all the consistent training begun we had the Frozen Dog triathlon, which was a 1st annual race put on by our local Boise Aeros tri-club. The race consisted of a 500yard swim at the pool on Friday then a 10-mile bike / 3.4mile run the next day at the House of Pain. The 10-mile bike was on a rolling CompuTrainer course while the run was outside on our local Green Belt. On Friday I got into the pool in the morning, got a good warm-up in then pushed out my 500 yards. I thought if I could be under 7:20 I'd be happy since I'm not swimming much these days. When it was done I hit the wall in 6:42 so that wasn't all bad. On Saturday I knew there would be plenty of people to keep it interesting. I was in the 2nd group of 8-people and there were a couple people with faster swim times than me. Basically, the clock started at 0:00 and when it hit your swim time you started pedaling. Within a mile of the ride I was leading the race, but it was hurting so I was somewhat banking on that fact that those guys were hurting too and they'd have to suffer on the run as well. I knew the guy next to me, Josh, could outrun me so there was no point in backing off too much. Off the bike I had about a 40 to 60-second cushion so I tried to push what I could, but the pace was brutally slow. I also thought the race was supposed to be three miles and not 3.4 so I found myself worrying that I missed the "X" out on the course to turn-around. So just before the turn-around I hear footsteps and it's Josh just motoring along. I had to ask him if he knew where he was going and he knew the "X" was coming up. I was thinking, "Damn, that is the longest 1.5 miles ever...I must be WAY out of shape.". Anyways, I kept him in my sites for awhile, but he eventually disappeared and I hung on for 2nd place overall. Not exactly a bad way to start your season, but it was definitely an indicator that it's time to put my head down and train.

From a non-training side of things, everything is going pretty well. My wife continues to chip away at her clinical rotations and she's about half done at this point. In six months she'll be completely done and for the first time as a couple she'll have one job and no school. At one time she had her full time gig at State Farm, part time (15hrs) as an CNA on the weekends along w/ at least one night class during the week. Talk about mental endurance, she's a fricken neuro-Kenyan! Anyways, we're both anxious to turn the page at this point so we can start doing some of the things we were used to doing (like travel) before school started.

Over the holidays we managed to put new ceramic in the last two bathrooms floors and completely changed out the floor in the kitchen. Apparently, we have a thing for floors. Tiling the bathrooms is actually kind of fun, but changing out the floor in the Kitchen sucked like nothing has ever sucked before. Talk about your well planned fustercluck! My God Mon! We consider ourselves fairly savvy in the home repair department, but this little project swept in and kicked our butts. Basically the big problem was part of the floor wasn't level in our brand new home. We needed to level it, but made a bit of a purchasing mistake by buying floor patch rather than the thinner floor leveling compound. This made the job a bit long and exhausting. After three days of hair-pulling life is once again grand. The kitchen floor looks nice and the dogs love making it dirty.

Well, that's all for now. In February the training steps up a bit more and hopefully I'll have something more interesting to report.

Peath out!