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!
