Staying the course

Busy laying the foundation these days ... This week was over 14 hours training (LOVE IT!!) and brings us another week closer to the 2009 triathlon season.

Am I freak? Why does triathlon dominate my thoughts??? All I can say is that I love the sport and everything about it. Okay, well, that's just the way I am I guess.

Jonathan is kicking my butt into shape in the pool, although my workouts seem meager compared to some. For me they are good. This week was four 3km workouts for 12,000 meters total. There were some mentally challenging sets in there. I feel myself getting fitter and I can tell that I am getting faster. I had a goal to get faster in the water this winter and I think this is happening. Paris Island will be the first true test.

Running is still coming back slowly. It's two steps forward one step back with this IT band injury. I had a question posted in the comments of my last post about my claim to beating ITBS. Unfortunately I don't have a definite answer just yet. I'm getting better but it's a slow process. As soon as I know I'm over it for sure I'll post a list of everything I tried and what worked and what didn't. Jonathan is sending over some core work for me to do that he describes as "a challenging stability workout...very annoying and painful" - I'm looking forward to it!! On the positive front I managed to get through a 5 1/2 mile run in 40 minutes today without resorting to a run/walk mix, although I did have to stop and stretch 4 or 5 times. I think that put me over 20 miles for the week! :-) I used to say that I didn't like running. I'll never say that again ... I guess sometimes you don't know how blessed you are to be able to do something until that thing is taken away!

On the bike front the 09 Scotts have been delayed until February so I'll be hanging onto the 08 Plasma for a while longer as I don't like to be reduced to just a road bike. I'm looking forward to the ride around the lake on Jan 4th.

The family is doing well. The kids are getting AMPED for Christmas. Speaking of amps, that is something my son wants for Christmas so he can really crank up his electric guitar - lucky us :-) The girls want an assortment of horse related stuff including large stuffed horses and My Little Pony stables, the Bratz horse, etc, etc, etc. If it's horse or dance related, they'll take it! I'm thinking about letting my son take karate lessons. He and I watch a little Van Dam classic last night and before long he was down to his Sponge Bob boxers doing flying karate kicks to the couches and pillows at 90 miles per hour.

Anyone know why old people whistle so much in the locker room? If your old and are heading to the water aerobics class (redundant??) then chances are when you hit the locker room you're going to rip off whatever golden oldy is floating around in your head. This totally kills my pre-swim mental build up and post-swim mental cool down. Would you mind people?????

Work is crazy as always. We will be pushing the final iteration of a major release of our software (Harmony version 7.0) this week to QA. This may mean some nights working until 7:00pm if necessary. I'm proud of the work my team and I did for this release!

My goal for next week ... stay the course - put in another solid week of training and continue to get back to health with my running.