phase 4

and so starts the final run to the finish. :-)

was just about a year ago now that we decided to run the ironman in canada.

i feel i might be able to finish it now. unlike a year ago. i have learned to swim, if not very far or in a lake yet. my biking has not improved or slipped much - we always thought we could ride the 112 miles anyway. ( still do - as we were only bikers before ) and now i have gone from running about 3 - 5 miles max to up to 20s before trouble starts. ( usually! )

so ahead of last year. but still i would say over all i am about half way there. and have used up 2/3 of the time from the start point.

so we are going to up the intensity - i never did get burned out doing the marathon training. had some tough weeks in there - especially when we went over 50 miles a week.

the last month has been a slacker month for us, nothing really going on physically. sat around and cleaned up the house, got a new computer and spent a week setting that up. just doing nothing things. we kinda joked that we would get fat until the super bowl and then start working out again after the goofy race. and thats what we did. probably gained 5 pounds of pure fat! :-)

after the game we kinda looked at each other and nodded. well, time to get it started again. so sunday we biked and swam. last night we biked an hour with our Real Rides Penticton video. got about halfway up the richter pass on the vid. which is a lot easier than doing it in person i can tell you.

monday we did a new workout - something we made up. there is a foot of new snow on the ground and no where to run yet - just in traffic. obviously the biking would be worse - riding not on but through snow would certainly be a workout - but probably not to smart. i have in our house a couple of bike tripod thingies. the two bikes are on that. also we have a treadmill. but not two. we wanted to run and bike monday night. kinda sucks to have each person do an hour and then switch. biking to us is so much easier, the one one the bike first will go strong for an hour and then have to run ( oh so unfair ) while the other person can get the run ground out and then can relax on the bike. so we decided to do the switchy thing. we went 20 minutes and then switched... and did it back and forth really fast for 2 hours. was kinda fun. we put Predator in with arnie punching an alien.

we also signed up for several other events:


trail marathon ( very hilly - hoping for 19 hour finish - well 5:30 would be really good on this course )

4 triathlons in one weekend - including a 1 mile tri to start it. swim 100 ft. bike 1/2 mile and run a quarter. the 4th one of the weekend is a full half. should be farking brutal.

200 mile bike ride in ohio - we have done this a few times already.

met some guys who do lake swims - i guess they do a few miles on a random lake each weekend over the summer - wow - will that do us some serious good.

feel not ready for all of those right now. which is good i think. we need the motivation back. been a lame month. :-)


also, in the back of my head i was planning on writing a book about the whole experience - from fat coucher to ( god hopefully ) ironman complete with tat. with that in mind i pretty much listed every workout we did in the first 3 stages. so i could write about my experiences with a changing body. which i am glad i did as pretty much every workout had something interesting happen in it. be it within me or a big pile of dogshit on the path or some goofy person we met. but... i was thinking of changing the format a bit to more about what i am thinking and not so much that i ran 3 today and 16 yesterday and the bike had a clod of dirt on the fork or something. also the volume of workouts per week is about going to triple so i would probably get in a rut of the same thing over and over as far as posts go. pretty much i plan on a weekly round up of distances and times and concentrate more on the internal things like my thinking and emotional feeling during the days. i am thinking now that the physical part is going to be hard but not nearly has hard as the mental. other than doubling swimming i think we could on a good day bang out the ironman a month from now. but we want to go from *probabably* finishing to *for sure* finishing and then on to getting a time worth all our efforts.

our current stretch goal is under 14 hours:
2 hours swimming and trans
6 hours to get off the bike
6 hours to run to the finish

today i would do it in 16:58 or 16:59. so dont think i am in great shape yet! and thats if i could finish the swim portion.

our book workout starts 3-14 which is a favorite day for me so thats good karma anyway.


*nodding* ok. time to get back at it. i feel great right now. last year my right knee was so weak i couldnt trust it to go up stairs. yesterday on the weight machine i think it was as strong as the left knee. i haven't brought pop into the house in months now. switched to water ( gads i never touch the stuff ) need to lose about 10 pounds, but i think i will. i have my best friend resa working with me everyday, one of us will always talk the other one into working out. i talk her into it for night stuff, she gets me out of bed.

my pants are too big.


ok... here we go.