Catching Up

Okay, so quite a bit has happened since the last time I blogged.

While I did get over the initial death plague, I think Brandon's flu triggered a repeat performance (that, or it was a really weird extended case of food poisoning). In any case, I feel like I haven't done anything this month. I feel weak and out of shape and blah.

But! I did not come here to post about depressing things. I came here to talk about the good that's happened recently.

- Way earlier this month, we went snowshoeing.

What what. No, I don't know what I'm doing here.

- On Valentine's Day, we went for a nice bike ride outside as it was the first day in a while I didn't feel like death. However, I don't have pictures of that (even though I did stash the camera in the bento). So, instead, you get pictures of us all dressed up and not in workout crap!

Snazzy. We gorged ourselves on French food and ice cream that night. Tasty.

- Thanks to Kris and Mark, we have been initiated into the Pain Cave. I survived my first go around ... although I didn't quite complete it to 100% of satisfaction. Let's put it this way - Coach Troy would have been yelling at me for slacking at one point. :( Still, Pain Cave on Skippy while sick is better than nothing. Plus it got me on the damn bike (and actually on the same day I posted this).

Brandon tried out the Pain Cave a few days later ... right at the start of what would be his death plague (or the flu. either way). This was the result (and the picture he was talking about):

Aww.

A few things of note in this picture:
1.) Brandon's shirt. Woo Vegas half!
2.) Brandon's bike (and Skippy). The two of them look so smug, don't they?

- We learned that Kris and Mark may be joining us for IM Boulder 70.3 ... which would be SO FREAKING AWESOME OMG.

- We have a wedding registry now. Yay. Now we need another one ... and need to do more wedding-y crap (seven months!).

- Lastly, I FINALLY RAN AGAIN TODAY! For the first time in like three weeks (... the 4th or 6th i want to say). It was hard and I felt like I walked half of it, but I managed a whole three miles. Go me. On the plus side, my time still wasn't all that bad, comparatively, so yay.

Since I think I'm finally back to relative normal health *crosses fingers*, I hope to finish out this month strong so I can start March on a good note. Today was a good start.

I'm Dead

:-(

Flu has caught me.

Entering the Pain Cave

Our friends Kris and Mark sent us (and Skippy) a gift a few weeks ago. It was a Spinerval DVD, number 33, titled Entering the Pain Cave. For those of you who don't know what Spinervals are, it's a training program that you can do on your trainer or a spin bike. My friend Steve, who at one point was an accomplished triathlete himself who was on Team Gear West, told me the day I got my trainer to invest in some of these DVD's.

Thankfully, our trainer came with one, which was Number 27, Threshold Test and Suffer Fest. We hadn't tried it yet though. Basically, we spent January just getting on the bikes, getting used to the trainer, and getting our cycling legs back.

Then T decided to be bold and enter the Pain Cave herself.

She described it to me as one of the worst feelings in the world. Brutal. Naturally, I was intimidated; yet I was interested. So yesterday, I decided to hop on the trainer for 45 minutes of pain.

And I was in pain.

I quickly realized that workout, only 45 minutes long, was one of the toughest I have ever done. Equivalent to the ride to Maroon Bells we did in the summer of 2009. It was hard, tested me in ways I've never been tested, and yet I rose up to the occasion.

Then I laid on the ground for a few minutes.

T took a picture of that and we'll have it up later today.

Gotta love the challenges of this year. :-)

Ugh

Can February just be over already?

Kthx.

Seriously though. I think I'm pretty much over whatever death plague I had ... with the exception of the random headaches (okay, i think they're due to sinus pressure) I seemingly have ALL THE TIME. However, my motivation to work out? Non-existant.

Me: Self, you need to work out today.
Brain: *does not compute*
Me: Seriously, go run or something. I mean it.
Brain: *does not compute*
Body: *flop on bed*

That's been the dialogue for the last several days. Since death plague, I've gotten out on my bike once and did a room lift. I was in theory going to cycle today, but with the crazy winds, that's not happening. Which means ... Skippy calls. But I have a feeling that's not going to happen either.

Something within my body chemistry is still all messed up; I can feel it. My appetite has either been huge or nothing, I'm not eating well at all and my sleep cycle/schedule is also all sorts of screwed up. Something needs to change so I can get back on track, but I'm not sure what all I can do to make that happen.

Therefore, my only solution right now is February needs to just end.

FINALLY my January recap

Sorry this took me so long. No intro needed at this point.

Here we go.

3 Lifting Session
4 Trainer
9 Running
2 Swimming
2 Yoga
8 Off
1 Cycling
1 Wii Fit
1 Hockey
1 Snowshoe Day
1 FitDeck
1 Recumbent Bike

What I liked about January was the variety of workouts done that month. In addition to simple things like Yoga, Wii Fit, and Snowshoeing, I did well on the trainer as well as in the running department. Too little swimming for my taste though and too many off days. Granted, the off days were necessary for the most case, but still...too many.

Death Plague

All I want to say is that being sick sucks. And sucks hard.

Okay, slightly more than that. Today is Saturday. The last time I worked out was Wednesday (another SwimLabs session). Since then?

Thursday: Off, due to the first signs of the death plague.
Friday: Off. Had the day off from work; spent it entirely in bed due to death plague.
Saturday: Off. Tried to go to work. Made it in for about 30 minutes before I got sent home due to blacking out (not passing out). Granted, that was probably due to lack of food/hydration for the past few days, but y'know.

I've slept most of today, but luckily I've been able to drag myself up and out of bed to do normal people things (like shower!) so hopefully I'll be okay for a.) work tomorrow and b.) running. Even if it's two miles.



P.S. - Kris, I know I don't have the death plague that befell you, but ugh, I feel your sickness pain.

I'm Still Here!

Yes, I know it's been forever since I have done a blog entry. I can explain. My laptop, over the past couple months, has been on the fritz for awhile. I had been getting the BSOD (blue screen of death) quite a bit and discovered through research and asking around that my hard drive was simply failing. I called up Dell to ask them to fix it, but it turned out my warranty expired on the 4th of December, and therefore I was not covered. :-(

So throughout the entire month of December, January, and early part of February, using my laptop was an adventure. It would involve turning it at weird angles to make it turn on, sometimes getting to use it for hours, other times turning it on and off repeatedly for an hour, to get all of 5 minutes of the internet. Yeah, it was a gigantor pain in the ass.

So in late January, I was in Greensboro, and when I tried turning it on, it would just cycle through the starting up point over and over, never officially booting up. My laptop was officially dead. Sad day. 5 years of a laptop that a computer guy told me was not designed to last more then two years. Thank you Dell for designing a disposable product at 1000 dollars. *end rant*

My parents agreed to get me a laptop for Christmas, provided I get it from their computer guy, who basically takes old IBM ThinkPads and restores them with the latest and greatest drivers. He built me an IBM ThinkPad T60, which in his words, is basically the most unattractive computer on the planet, but the true workhorse of the laptop industry. Based on the reviews I read of this computer, I think he's telling the truth.

Anyway, so I have a new lappy, and I'm back up and running with blogging! Yay! So let's see...you're probably looking for a January recap, right? I will get you that as soon as possible, like later today. I left my workout log at home, and I'm blogging at Starbucks right now (sorry Kris).

There was something else I wanted to talk about though, and this was what I discovered on a recent workout in Cleveland. I wanted to go for a run, but thanks to the ridiculous snow the midwest had recently received, that was not going to be possible, since Cleveland decided to not shovel their sidewalks. So I elected to hit the treadmill for the good ol' 45 MINUTE TREADMILL WORKOUT OF DEATH!!! For those unfamiliar with this workout, it's 2 minutes walking at a pace roughly about 3.5, 3 minutes of running at a pace around 6.0. Repeat 9 times. It's a tough interval workout shown to me back in my fat days by my personal trainer, Gray.

I started off with intervals of 3.5 and 6.5, which has in recent years become my standard. After 15 minutes, I was feeling really good, and was sweating pretty good. I decided to crank it up on the next interval to 6.8 and was able to hold that, so I went even higher on the next interval to 7.2. I was flying through this workout! I hadn't done the TWOD for a long time and it was like I hadn't even missed a beat. Is it possible my lifting/running over the past was making me stronger?

When the workout was all said and done, I had done 4.21 miles in 45 minutes. To put that in perspective, usually when I do it I cover 3.6 miles or so. That's an extra .6 miles, and I was feeling wonderful! The rush was something I haven't felt in awhile and was just a great, wonderful feeling.

The interesting thing right now, is that even though T and I haven't done a ridiculous amount of tri-specific workouts (i.e. swim, bike, or run), we've been mixing it up with a healthy dose of other workouts. The variety is keeping me on my toes, and for whatever reason, my hammies are screaming at me, which is good! The tri specific workouts will come in huge doses soon enough, so we might as well have some fun now, right?

January Round-Up

So, I'm a bit late with this. Stupid work. Stupid snow. Stupid ... February.

But we're not here to talk about the armpit of months. We're here to talk about January ... a month that felt kind of craptastic and appears to be so in regards to the numbers, but actually wasn't really.

Let's move onward to the numbers to see what I'm talking about, shall we?

Running: 32.89 mi
Swimming: negatory on the mileage, but did swim three times. Just doing drills and crap that I'm not tracking in terms of speed/distance.
Cycling (outside): 10.21 mi (LOVE how i can have this here)
Cycling (Skippy): 40.11 mi
Lifting: six sessions
Other: one erg (rowing machine) session, one yoga, one Wii Fit, one pond hockey, one snowshoeing.

The following is what I got out of the crap when reviewing my workout log:

- I ran more in January than I did in six months of last year.
- I was on a bike six times last month and did 50 miles. 10 outside. That's how much Skippy sucks.
- Swimming is so hard right now that as much as I know I need to hit the pool it's so incredibly difficult because I am just that frustrated. Luckily, I'm going back to SwimLabs on Wednesday (and dragging brandon with).
- Lifting actually hasn't gone all that bad, considering.
- LOVE that I did a lot of random other crap last month ... especially because I'm technically in the offseason.

So, what's for February? Survival*. As I think the great scholar Garfield the Cat once said, February is the Monday of months. The only good thing about it is it's short and therefore will be gone soon.

It just sucks right now because this entire month (short as that may be) has been a snowy pile of crap. I'm looking out the window at tree branches with an inch or so of snow on them. I think I've managed to run ONCE so far this month when the sidewalks cleared off enough to run on. Yes, I could treadmill it, but I'm stubborn and refuse.

Right now, as far as I'm concerned, I can limp through this month of crappiness and then start March with new hope, new focus and new plans**.

In the meantime, I really hope the stupid weather gets better. This much snow for us (without random melt days) is actually kind of bizarre.



* So, since we want to survive the month, our theme is "Burning Heart (and lungs)." Blame me for this one. "Survival" seemed like a ... well, not motivational theme, so I went from "Survival" to "Survivor" and therefore "Burning Heart." The "(and lungs)" got added on because it's just been that ass-cold out lately.

** Like a new lifting plan found on the interwebs. Will eventually blog about that. Maybe. Hopefully.