Back at it

It has been a while since I have really kept up with this blog (well, have I ever really kept up with it?).  But now that I am back from the honeymoon and have the wedding done I have just a little bit more freetime on my hands!  So now, I can actually get some stuff out to ya'll in the next few weeks! 

A couple of other notes:

My Hooker Counter had been up for only about 2 weeks when the fine city of Prichard decided to round them all up.  So the counter has been stuck at 7 for while, but there were 2 back out today!  Hopefully there will be more fun to come.

 My weight had been doing good.  Albert was dwindling, but during the honeymoon, I managed to gain 11 pounds in 11 days (don't act like you're not impressed).  So now it is really time to get serious about this whole weight thing.  Only 48 more days until the Miami Man half!

Ok, bedtime!

All that Prichard has to offer

I have heard many people in the Mobile, Alabama area talk bad about the city of Prichard, which is located just north of Mobile.  But many of the negatives I have heard about this city are just simply untrue.  I work in Chickasaw and every time I go to or leave work, I have the pleasure of driving through Prichard.  So why does Prichard get a bad reputation around the Mobile area?  Well, yes, it is true that corruption in the government has sapped the city fund dry and they no longer pay out pensions and sometimes can't pay the police or fire fighters (wait, do they have fire fighters?).  But is that really such a big price to pay when you have the pleasure of driving past more abandoned buildings then operable ones??  I don't think so.  Plus, where else can you say that the favorite restaurant in town had the ceiling fall in and then had the building condemned?  R.I.P. Tice Cream.  One cool thing about working in Chickasaw is that we are a part of the Prichard water system, which means it comes out of the faucet looking like tea.  You just have to add sugar, and instant sweet tea!  Then who can forget the two Country Bears homes on the main drag.  That's right, these old style shacks are lacking running water and electrity and you can watch as the crackhead residents scavenge the streets for wood to burn.  Don't forget that most of the neighborhoods are project housing.  That means that the sidewalks running through them actually make for really good lunch runs.  But be careful of the occasional hypodermic needle that is laying on the sidewalk, excellent agility training!

But, I have to say, my favorite part of Prichard is the hookers.  Yes, now that the police are not always getting paid, they don't seem to mind the hookers running the street.  So you can spot this odd form of wildlife near where the Tice Cream used to stand.  It is usually the same two or three, but sometimes you see a new one.  The new ones are sometimes hard to distinguish from normal crackheads.  Yesterday, I actually saw one wearing a livestrong bracelet.  That's right, a crackhead, possibly even a hooker, standing on the corner with a livestrong bracelet to complete the outfit.  Ahhhh, crazy characters!  So to celebrate these denizens of the dark (well, not just the dark in Prichard), I have now added a Hooker Tracker to my side bar!  Yep, you can now count hookers along with me every day of the week!  Enjoy!

One tubby, tubby, tubby!

I have never been a skinny person.  I am the oldest of 5 and the only one that is not a stick.  I'm also the fastest eater out of all of us.  I think I learned early on that if I was not the first one done eating, I didn't get seconds!  When I was little (like 5) my mom told me that I should play soccer because when I run around so much, I'm not as fat.  And then on my first day at a new school she told me I should suck my stomach in when I walked around so I didn't look so chubby and the kids wouldn't make fun of me.  I think I actually managed to hold my breath that entire day at school.

Well, with my frame size, genetics and eating capabilities, gaining weight has never been a problem for me.  I used to spend ALL of my spare time either on the baseball field or lifting weights, so I got pretty big while playing through college.  I was a catcher, and at 6' tall, I topped out at 225 and found my best playing weight to be 212-216.  When I graduated college and was no longer playing at an extremely competitive level, I switched to something else that I could excel at. Drinking.  I was damn good at it but found that my playing weight rose a little bit with this new sport...

It wasn't long before I had grown bored with this new challenge and moved on to triathlon.  I never raced as a clydesdale (200+) although, for my first few races, I definitely could have.  My first real year in triathlon, I took off training like a mad man and my weight plummeted.  I bottomed out at 168 and was lighter than my brother for the first time ever!  Over the offseason however my weight rose again and I have been struggling to get down to the 169-172 range, where I feel most comfortable racing.  But now, my stomach, which I have named Albert, must die.  If I am going to step my racing up, I need to not be carrying around all of this extra weight.  So I'm going to list my weight on the sidebar every day so that Matt and Marcia and anybody else that might happen to read this blog can give me grief.  Maybe this will be the last bit of motivation I need to get to the weight I should have been at in March.

How bad can you be??

Well, when it comes to blogging, the answer is pretty bad.  With the triathlon team that I am on, good ol' Gear and Training, I am supposed to be posting race reports after each race.  Yeah, that hasn't happened.  I think I'm three races behind.  We'll call that a no bueno!

So, I am going to get back on this thing and just pretend that somebody reads what I write here!  Also, I think I need to change up the design and add some stuff, but I'm not quite sure how to do all of that, so if anyone (actually reads this and) has any ideas or suggestions, than message me!

Also, I want to keep a running total of 2 or 3 different numbers on the side bar, any idea how to do that?

How about a contest?

Everybody likes free stuff, right?  Well, how about this:  the person that comes the closest to guessing my finishing time at Ironman Texas on Saturday, wins an Ironman Texas t-shirt!

Just post your guess at my finishing time as a comment along with your t-shirt size.  Closest guess wins!

Contest ends when I hit the water on Saturday.

Hint: read my previous post for goal times and check out other race results here: http://www.athlinks.com/myResultsAdv.aspx?rid=78667688

But, I will be an Ironman

It has been nearly 10 months since I signed up for the first ever Ironman Texas. I cannot say that I have stayed absolutely focused this entire time, but I can say that I have worked my butt off. For those of you that don’t know (assuming that more than one person reads this thing), an Ironman is a triathlon consisting of a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike and a 26.2 mile run, all back to back to back. In training for my first Ironman, I have learned a lot of lessons. Here are just a couple:

1. Lose the weight before you get to the hard training! I have found that it is just about impossible to properly fuel your body for the next workout while trying to lose weight. So I had to make a choice, lose the rest of the weight I wanted to lose, or stay strong and get in all of my training. In the end, I went with the latter. As my old boss used to say "Fat is strong, my friend. Fat is strong."
2. Have a plan and stick to it! I had found a 20 week Ironman training plan and was determined to rip through it. But once I started the first week, I realized that I was WAY beyond where this plan was starting me in my training. So I started to add workouts, and change workouts, and leave certain workouts completely out. By week 2, the plan was about one third my own creation, and two thirds original plan. By week 3 the plan was about two thirds my own creation, and one third original plan (do you see where this is going?). And by week 4, the plan was completely thrown out. That went well for a few weeks until I started to second guess my planning and changing things up like crazy, then it just became "eh, I’ll do this today." Probably not the best way to train for a race of this distance. In the end, I would probably be stronger if I had stuck with the original plan even though it started so slow.

My original time goal for this race was 10:59:59. We will now call that my best case scenario race. It is still possible, but it will take a perfect race. My B goal is 11:29:59 and my C goal is 11:59:59. Really, if I can finish the swim in 1:10 (this will be my first mass start, which means I will be starting at the same time as the other 2750 competitors… in what looks like a very small lake… This might slow me down), finish the bike with a 20mph average, and finish the marathon in under 5 hours, I will be happy. 

As a comparison, the winning pro at an Ironman will finish anywhere between 8:00 and 8:40 depending on the conditions and difficulty of the course. Some pros could still be finishing as far back as 10:20. A time of 9:30-10:15 could qualify me for the World Championships in Kona, HI. The median finisher at Ironman Florida last year finished in 12:41:21. And people will be finishing all the way up until the 17 hour cut off time. So even my C goal won’t be a horrible time.

No matter what happens with this race, I can say that I would never have been able to make it this far without the help of my family and friends and especially Anna (everything else aside, how many times has she brought me my spare key when I lost my truck key on a long run or ride??). So thank you everybody for your help and support.

Well, as they say, the hay is in the barn. Come Saturday, it is time to burn that sucker down!

EDIT TO ORIGINAL POST:

If anyone wants to follow my race on Saturday, you can go to http://ironmanlive.com/ then scroll down and click on "Ironman Texas" then click "Tracking" then enter in my bib number 861 to see what I have completed as the day progresses.  Gregg Johnson (my boss) is bib number 2421 and Gus Fontenot (another guy from Mobile) is 2120.

Also, I may not be able to finish my race, because some crazy guy is predicting that the world will end at 5:00 pm central time on Saturday.  That would be a 10 hour finish for me, I don't know if I can run that fast!

All or Nothing

Last year, a week after I bought my first tri bike, I competed in a local 21 mile bike race called the Tour de LADR.  This event isn't sanctioned by any governing bodies, so you can use a tri bike as long as you are willing to listen to the roadies tell you every 5 seconds to not use your aerobars. 

So last year, having just begun my cycling career, I started in the back so I wouldn't slow anybody down.  The next thing I know, I'm surrounded by moms on mountain bikes with their 6 year olds in training wheels.  The gun went off and I had no chance of catching up to the peloton.  I don't think I even knew what a peloton was at the time or how to draft in it without crashing if I had made it that far.  But I did alright, finishing in 56 or 58 minutes, I can't really remember.

Fast forward to this year, and now I am determined to win the race.  So Saturday I left my house and decided to ride to the race for a little 10 mile warm up ride.  I paid my money, stripped the commuter lights off of my bike and got ready to roll.  THIS year I lined up on the front line.  The course is described as "mostly flat" but the only part of it that is not completely flat is where the road banks just a slight bit going around a shallow turn.  Other than that it is flatter than a pancake, so I knew it would take a good pace to break up the group.  Unfortunately, my training partner, Trifossil, decided the day before that he wasn't going to do the race and I was left without anybody to team up with. 

The course is an out and back and on the way out I ended up pulling way more than I needed to.  I was trying to pull hard enough to break the pack apart and prevent a group sprint at the end, but only a couple of other people had the same idea.  Everyone else apparently wanted the group sprint.  So after I would pull, there would be another hard pull or two then the next person would sit back and let the group catch back up.  About mile 5 I had already had enough of this and tried to grab a couple of guys to break off.  I kicked it up to about 29 and was able to get close enough to the cop car to catch a draft, but the cop realized what i was doing and put a gap on me so I lost my draft, then I turned around and saw only one person had gone with me so I sat up and let the group suck us back in.  I continued taking my pulls like I had before, but I let off a little to save my legs for the back half. 

As we neared the turnaround, another triathlete, Gus, told me to take off from the turnaround and 5 other guys were going to follow me, so at the turn around I took off! But again, only one guy caught my wheel so we sat up and let the group suck us in.

With 6 miles to go, the guy that was pulling at the time pulled off like normal.  There were 3 kids directly in line behind him that had not taken a pull yet and when all of a sudden the lead man pulled off, leaving them at the front, they panicked.  They swerved out of the pace line and almost caused a pile up.  This was all Gus and I needed to make a break.  We took off and before the group realized we had left, we had a 200 yard gap.  Gus and I worked pretty well together but the head wind started to wear on us and about 2.5 miles out they were starting to close in on us.  Then as Gus is pulling he looked back and said "they've caught us" and sat up.  Turns out the group hadn't caught us, it was just one man, A guy from Denmark that was so big, when Gus looked back he thought it was the whole peloton.  So now with Gus dropping off, instead of a now three man break, I am now in a two man break with the Great Dane.  However he only held on for about a mile and I was left solo. 

At this point, I didn't even want to look back to see how close the group was.  I knew I was close to the finish line and I was going for it!  At this point my lungs were burning and my legs were dead but I was going to win the ra- "oh *#%, they caught me!"

I almost made it, I had less than 3/4 of a mile to go before they got to me.  But then they wouldn't pass me, they sat on my wheel and let my legs burn.  Then when they jumped out to the sprint all I could do was spin in for 10th overall in 50:55.

I almost had it!  I held a 25.2 mph average for the race.  Not bad, but next year, I just need to be strong enough to time trial the whole thing for the win!