Losing It

I'm losing it, seriously. Last week it was the following series of posts from a discussion at beginner triathlete that had me laughing until I cried.

I wanted to bump that. Too many people train (for almost anything) by what Pro _____ does, or AG Guy #3, or their neighbors cat, etc. They figure it works for them, so it'll work for me. Doesn't always happen that way.
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I tried training the way the neighbor's cat did in my first year of triathlon, and it was an unmitigated disaster. I'd stand there for 5 minutes, wait until something scared me, go into an all-out sprint for 30 seconds, stand there, lick off the sweat, get spooked again, sprint, lick, stand, repeat. Eff that.
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I bet the swim was a nightmare for you - truly scary.
Did you feel compelled to take a dump every time you got on the beach and bury it?

Then this morning on our internal bulletin board at work I come across the following which almost brought me to tears laughing again. These reactions are not typical of me at all.

I am looking to buy a riding lawn mower in good condition. Respond to this ad or call xxx-xxxx.
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Do you care whether or not it has been taken off of any sweet jumps?

And therein lies the problem with anonymous message boards. We get responses like this to legitimate posts all the time.

Four weeks in and I guess I'm tired. And hungry, I'm always hungry, lunch at the Eagle Crest last week actually got me through an afternoon. Nothing else has. I am trying to eat better. I've pretty much eliminated soda and fast food, but when I do go out I try to make it worthwhile, opting for local haunts instead of chains.

Overall I'm feeling pretty good. Running feels like it is starting to come around, biking is hard to tell, being stuck in the basement still sucks, first day I see 50 degrees and I'm coming out (of the basement). Swimming is swimming, I really want to get back into open water, I don't like pool swimming. Three more months?

Three Down

Thirty-two to go, I think. Weeks that is. Training is coming along well, as far as I can tell anyway.

Swimming - I haven't been putting in nearly the yardage that I should be, at least according to the training plan. See, there is this point in every one of my swim workouts where I can feel my stroke completely fall apart. Now I'm no expert, but from everything I've read, swimming is much more about form then anything else. So when the forms goes, so do I. At this point I feel that continuing to swim with shitty form will do no good. I'm working on it and slowly building up the yardage.

Biking - The trainer still sucks. We have no tv in our basement so I'm limited to the laptop for entertainment. I've started watching season 1 of Weeds on Netflix. Netflix makes it bearable, but only barely, since I can only watch about 10-minutes at a time before it needs to reload. Most of my rides, with the exception of the first, have gone well. Yesterday was 1:45, which was really tough. I hope spring comes early, within the next 5 or six weeks I think my long ride is supposed to reach the 3-hour mark. Ouch.

Running - Still slow as dirt but the endurance is building. On a good day I can make it through a 45-minute run without a walk break. Today I was able to run on a balmy 30+ degree sunny morning. Not exactly shorts weather, but still a good 15 to 20 degrees warmer than anything I've run in recently. Could it be spring? One can only hope.

This week is a recovery week, which basically means my long run/bike doesn't get any longer. The oz-man is doing well. It'd be nice if he would figure out where to pee and what he can chew on, but it's only been a week. I forgot how much energy puppies can have.

What have I done?

It wasn't supposed to go down like this, really. I actually had it all worked out. But let's set the stage.

For those of you that may not know, earlier this month we made the extremely difficult decision to have our dog put down. He had some aggression issues, and we just couldn't risk (another) serious incident. Our kids don't know where he went, we simply told them that he went someplace safe, somewhere he couldn't hurt anybody else. I'm not prepared to explain the harsh reality of the situation, so please, if you do happen to cross their path or ours, please be mindful of this.

That left us dogless for the first time in just over 8-years, which frankly, kind of sucks. There was a sudden realization that with two kids, and incredible amount of food actually reaches the floor. No wonder so many family pets are fat. Our vacuum cleaner was gone.

But with ironman training, I knew that this summer was no time to be training a new puppy, a new hunting buddy. The plan, get through summer, through ironman, then bring a new puppy into the house to fill the void left from ironman training. The perfect plan.

Our first vizsla purchase was done on a whim. We knew what breed we wanted, but we grabbed up the first puppy from the first litter we saw. Besides the aggression, he was a great dog and a true friend. I still miss him.

This time I was determined to get a dog out of some truly great bloodlines with the intention getting a great hunting dog and chasing as many AKC and NAVHDA titles as we could. This demanded research, so I started looking at different breeders and pedigrees, emailing some, and on monday I put a deposit down on a puppy for this fall. The plan was coming into place nicely.

But I still had my doubts about this breeder, so I kept looking and I ended up contacting a kennel I've had dealings with in the past and was very familiar with our situation and my wants.

Long story short(er), Ozzie, a 12-week old male vizsla pup, came home with me this afternoon. He's sleeping on my lap right now.

Ozzie and P

Ozzie and G

A busy summer just got a whole lot busier.

On a sidenote, trainings going well. I'm still slow as dirt, but it's going well.

Numbers

I'm an engineer.  Work related, virtually every thing I do comes down to numbers.  More so in previous jobs where I did more design work, but still, enough of my day and my decisions revolve around numbers.  And it's really hard not to let that mindset carry over, especially into the triathlon world.

Last night was a prime example.  Short run, 30 minutes, out and back while P is at basketball.  Ran the whole thing (30-minutes is about my limit right now), and I managed to cut 20 seconds or so off on the return leg. 

Good run.

Felt good about it. 

Until I realized how far I ran, or didn't run.  It was only then, when I calculated my pace, my painfully slow pace, that I began feeling shitty about the run.  The damn numbers, all was well until I looked at the numbers.

It's one of the many little mental hurdles I'll be jumping over the next 8 months.

Today I'd be thrilled to break the 11 minute/mile mark.  Last year at the Point Bock Run in early March my pace was 9:42/mile.  Seems like a long way off, but I hope to break that pace when I run it again.

Is it really only 8 months?  Shit.