Success…small but good.

So I finally got my butt out of bed, two days in a row, and went to the gym before work to run! Major success for this girl who likes her 9 hours of sleep each night.

So why do I go to the gym to run and not just go outside in my very safe (low crime) neighborhood? Coyotes! And not like the sweet, dumb Wiley Coyote type, mean ones that eat “purse dogs” and kitty cats. We have tons of them around us. I know the majority are scared of humans and will run away but I don’t really feel up to taking that risk…alone….in the dark. I would consider taking Ty (the dog) but he’d probably run away too, that or try to make friends with the darn thing, thus to the gym I go.

I have to admit, I do love running on the treadmill, and I never have an easy day on it. I love being able to keep track of my pace, time, distance, and heart rate throughout the whole run. Being able to see my pace just keeps making me push that speed up just a little bit more every few minutes. By the end of any treadmill workout I’m sweating like a piggy and seriously out of breath, I love it! I love running outside too, especially for the hills, but sometimes the weather just doesn’t cooperate and there’s my trusty friend…the gym!

Speaking of the gym and running on treadmills, I have a rant that is dying to be typed out… I HATE treadmill peepers, ya know those people who run next to you and are constantly looking over to see what speed you’re at and your time/distance, just so they can bump up their speed to make sure they are going faster than you. This guy next to me this morning kept looking over and he didn’t make any attempt to hide his nosiness. He would look over at my speed and then bump it up by one every time I bumped mine up… poor fool I was doing intervals and was only half way through my workout when he stopped, gasping for air, and left. UGH! I usually bring a towel to cover the machine so I can’t see the time but none of my towels can cover the digital speed reading, but why should I have to cover anything? ‘MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS! I’m here for me, not to compete with you.’ How annoying. Oh well just gotta ignore them and continue doing my own thing I suppose.

At any rate, hopefully I can keep this routine of going to the gym every morning and of course, continue to get in my other workouts, swimming and biking, as well. I think this weekend will be a big run and bike weekend and surprisingly I’m looking forward to it!

See, he’s too sweet to fight off a big bad coyote, he gives Kona kisses!

Weekend whirlwind!

Last weekend we traveled back to da burgh to get some wedding details figured out and all that stuff out of the way. Well I am happy to report we were quite successful. We got to visit the church, meet with the priest, eat at the restaurant where the rehearsal dinner is, pick flowers, taste food for the reception, and most importantly I was able to find a dress! Whew! What a week/weekend!

As exciting as getting wedding stuff completed there was another much more exciting event that took place while I was at home; the birth of my first niece Meghan Elizabeth! Meghan was quite a surprise to my brother and his wife Erin (and the rest of the family) as they were full heartedly expecting a boy, but much to the dismay of all our predictions a beautiful baby girl was born. Meghan was a whopping 8lbs 3oz and 20.25 inches long. She was so healthy and big that she didn’t even look like a newborn, she looked like she was already 2 months old…she was perfect!

The minute I found out that it was a girl my mom and I ran out to Kohl’s to buy as much baby girl (aka pink) clothes we could find. It was so fun buying clothes for a baby and I can’t wait until I can buy her more and spoil her like good aunts should. My other brother, Shane and his wife, Nadine are expecting in September and considering I probably won’t be able to be there for the birth of my second niece or nephew, I was overjoyed to be there for Meghan’s entrance into the world. Come September I will have two babies to spoil and I couldn’t be happier!

The proud parents!

Meghan Elizabeth

Proud Grandparents

Meghan and me.

This is my favorite photo! Starting the girl early, she will be a triathlete!

Weekend of Races…

Wow what a weekend in the running world! Tons of people that I know were racing in Pittsburgh, Lincoln, or NJ and whoa, everyone did so well, I am so impressed. Whether my friends were racing for the first time , doing it just to finish, doing it for a cause, or doing it to win, they all did so SO well. This is why I love the sport of running (or Tri for that matter) anyone can do any race if they push themselves just a little bit, and what’s even better, the support and encouragement all runners give to other runners it’s just amazing! Yea if you run, or do tris, you are in a fantastic community of people, a community of constant support, whether you know it or not. This great support in itself should be enough motivation to go out and run that extra mile.


I can honestly say at this point in my life I get as much satisfaction as watching a friend do a race as when I do one myself. Yea when I’m watching I want to be out there racing too but I love to see someone cross that finish line that would have never dreamed it possible until they tried. The long and short of it, I’m very proud of my friends and their accomplishments this weekend! You motivate me to go the extra mile! Thanks! : )

Shower, shower, shower...

Wake up, shower, work, train at lunch, shower, back to work, train, shower…see the pattern. That’s a lot of showers. I take, at absolute minimum, three showers a day! I don’t know if my hair or skin can take it anymore. My skin is always dry, but I have lotion so no big deal, but my poor hair; it’s starting to get all dry and brittle and fall out! YIKES! I’m going bald because of exercise…interesting. And the damage that chlorine does to hair alone is just cruel but add on three showers, yea I repeat, my poor hair. There must be a solution that will not compromise working out but doesn’t cause immeasurable harm to my hair. I know there are tons of you out there with the same problem, so what’s the solution? I was told that if I didn’t shampoo in all three showers that would improve the health of my hair, but is that true? Or will I just have to live with the fact that my hair will be crap for entire seasons’ worth of training? Ideas?

Swim! Run! Bike?

Good Lord I’m bad at writing on this thing. It’s funny because I always have tons of ideas what I want to write but just never get around to writing them. Ok I’m going to try SO hard to write more often on this thing, as it gives me inspiration to get farther and faster and better than I was from the previous entry.

So the training is coming along rather nicely but of course there are the ups and downs of training for any long race such as an IM. The ups are I’m starting to workout more often and more consistently, during the week, and the downs are I’m sucking at working out on the weekends and getting those long rides/runs in...a change that must be made ASAP!

Every week day at lunch I am going to the gym and getting in either a run or a swim. In the last 3 weeks alone I have swum more times than I did all last season, and keep in mind last season I did an IM! Yea, can you tell swimming is not my favorite of the three? My swimming is probably where I’m seeing the most improvement…going from doing a 2 min to 2:10min /100m at a comfortable pace to doing a 1:40/ 100m pace is a big deal in my book. I know the time still sucks but I never, nor will I ever, claim to be a great, or even good swimmer. However, now I’m more excited to get in the pool and see how much faster I can go! I love to push myself and when I can see improvement it gives me that much more of a reason to push harder and harder. Then there’s running…

This last year being out in CO, running has been my biggest heart break. In DC I was running, easily, a 7:30/mile pace and once I moved out here I could NOT get below a 9/mile pace, it was AWFUL!!! I started to absolutely hate running and definitely wanted to give up, but after my somewhat decent marathon at the IM, I figured I should push through, what everyone was telling me was a high altitude adjustment, and strive to be that 7/mile runner I once was. Well I’m back on the road and improving everyday! I can now do an easy 8:20/mile pace, still sucky but definitely improving, and that’s after only running for 2 weeks consistently. So it’s a small feat but an optimistic one for me.

And as for biking, I haven’t been doing much of that. I would like to blame my little time in the saddle on just buying and moving into a new house but really, that’s no excuse. I’ve been on the bike once this week and plan on riding tonight, tomorrow, and, hopefully, Saturday….we’ll see how it goes.

Thus, more biking and more weekend rides/runs is really what I’m striving for now. I figure if I suck it up and become a little more disciplined that as I put more time into everything, eventually the improvement in times will come naturally. Here’s hoping!

So it’s been like three months since I wrote on this thing but I have finally been inspired to write something, thanks to my friend Chad’s tri blog. I look at his blog and he inspires me so much, I mean look at this: http://www.chadholderbaum.com/, he is such a dedicated, phenominal athlete and a fantastic person to look to for inspiration. Even though I’ve probably done over a hundred tris, ranging from a sprint to an IM distance race, I find I don’t have the discipline to be as good as I can be. When comparing myself to other tri geeks, I find that they put so much more effort into this sport than I do; and what’s worse is I live in one of the best training venues in the country, Denver! So I’m thinkin’ its about time I stop slacking. I love this sport and I’m tired of being mediochre.

I currently only have one triathlon on my schedule this year and that is IM Wisconsin, although the Pittsburgh marathon and few running races are spattered throughout my schedule as well. Apparently getting married takes all my money away and I don’t have the funds to do all the tris I want. Although, perhaps this no funds is a good thing (only with respect to tris of course), maybe I can take this year as a good training year and really build my base. Now let’s see if I can stick with it.

On a different note, Ironman training started this week for Ryan and I and so far so good. Monday was an hour bike (felt great!), Tuesday was a bike and run, which amazingly I did both and felt good , and today is a 1800 meter swim. I am anxious to see how I fare in the water considering I haven’t been in the pool since the Great Floridian in October. Here’s hoping I don’t drown.

Ironman

So it’s been almost three weeks since I did the ironman and I just figured I’d give a run down on the race and the amazing weekend I had, before I forget the details. Well to start, I am the luckiest girl in the world have the family, boyfriend, and friends I do. They were all so supportive of me and I’m so blessed to have such a great group of people in my life.
As most know, or could guess, I was so frickin’ nervous about the ironman….would I finish, would I make all the cut offs, would I fuel myself properly, etc… Oh and I also had a very strange fear of actually dying doing this thing…I don’t know, with all these young people that I know recently dying of heart attacks, I was freaked. Really, I just think I was worrying about anything there could be to worry about.

At any rate, we got into Florida on Thursday around 5pm and my parents were at the airport to pick Ryan and me up. I hadn’t seen them since Labor Day so it was nice to have them greet us right off the plane. After arriving at my parent’s house in the Villages we went for dinner with my brother and his wife, Nadine, who had been down in Florida since Tuesday. Dinner was great but this is when I started getting nervous. My brother, Shane, was also doing the race but he was doing the half ironman. Well he must have been excited because that’s all he talked about! Talking about all the training and races was starting to make me really nervous, but I kept trying to push it out of my head.

That night I slept on the couch and didn’t sleep that well and actually made Ryan switch with me (he had the air mattress, I had the couch) in the middle of the night…what a nice boy! Friday was a just a series of stops to get those last minute details done, including packet pick up, putting my bike back together after it had been the bike box, etc... Surprisingly, going to the race site for packet pickup made me feel a lot calmer and more relaxed about the race; the water looked calm (dramatic irony here) and the transition was set up. A side note on this race, the IM was held at the same location as my very first triathlon, the Great Clermont triathlon, which was an Olympic distance. Actually, some parts of the course were the same as the Great Clermont tri. After I had racked my bike (which you had to do the night before) and finished some last minute details we decided to head back to the house for some food.

After some pasta and good conversation with the family I headed bed, fully expecting not to be able to fall asleep and boy was I right. The race just kept popping in my head fueling my nerves and impeding my ability to sleep. However, alas, I was able to sleep for about 3 hours, not a lot but enough.

I got up at 4:30am with a brick in my stomach and nerves that made me insane. Around 5 am we headed to the race start…which was 45 minutes away. Upon arrival at the race site I finished setting in place my transition stuff, readying my bike, and special needs bag. Of course I also had to do my last minute “duty” that all triathletes and runners hope for before a race. As I got into line for the potties Ryan told me to hurry up as the race was to start in 15 mins…yea about 13 mins later I was out of the bathroom….damn girls and their really long bathroom lines! At this point I started freaking out….I didn’t have my wet suite on and people were lining up at the start! I rushed to get my wet suite on with Ryan’s help and a few curse words and literally ran to the start as the gun was going off. I guess looking back it was a good thing I didn’t stand at the starting line waiting/ panicking about the impending start of the swim, where it is inevitable to be pummeled by other triathletes.

Well into the swim I went. The swim is notoriously the portion that I like the least and the conditions didn’t make this any better. The previous day’s calm water had turned into a very choppy mess. The waves in the lake were hard to swim against and continually pushed me off course…I bet you that in the end I did about a 2.6 mile swim instead of a 2.4 mile swim just due to the choppiness of the lake. Although , I felt absolutely fine in the swim and wasn’t tired in the least when I came out in an hour and thirty six minutes….absolutely horrible swim but eh, what did I care, I was just glad to be done with the swim.

My transition wasn’t too bad but I wasn’t in any rush to get onto the bike. Throughout this whole race I wasn’t too concerned with my time, I just wanted to finish. So onto the 112 mile bike I went. I’m not a terribly good cyclist and that’s mainly due to laziness and not pushing it on the bike, thus this was the portion of the race I was most worried about. During training I had only done one century and maybe two rides that were over 60 miles….ya see, laziness. Obviously I had a good reason to worry about finishing the 112 miles…but I kept that thought out of mind and just kept pedaling. The first 40 miles of the bike course was uphill and not just rolling little hills but pretty decent climbs, although I just kept saying to myself “each pedal stroke the closer I am to the finish”. Around mile 50 I started getting pretty lonely and thus my mental status declined. There were only 300 people doing this race, thus there was a lot of time I spent alone without a person in sight. I knew that around mile 60 I would be arriving at the special needs station for some food and more importantly Ryan would be there waiting to cheer me on. I have never had such a boost in energy and moral in a race as I did when I saw Ryan. I was just overjoyed to see him and with a little encouragement I was ready to keep pedaling and finish the bike. After seeing Ryan my pace increased dramatically from about 14.5 mph for the first half of the bike (keep in mind a lot of challenging hills though) to about 17 mph for the second half, I started passing person after person and each time I passed someone I was that much more charged to finish the bike strong…and that I did. I finished the bike in about seven and half hours, maintaining that 17mph and the best part was my legs didn’t even seem tired. At this point I was just SO happy to be off the bike and happy that all I had left was the marathon.

My second transition was really slow, as I talked to my family and ate a little bit of a smashed PB & J, but soon enough I started the run.

The run was three 8.5 mile loops that were pretty flat for the most part and there were aid stations every mile. For the first 3 miles of the run I felt fine, I started out conservatively and hoped to pick up my pace later on, which was in the end a good plan. However, around mile three I didn’t really feel that great and slowed my pace down drastically…I did the first 8.5 miles in an hour and twenty five minutes…an awful time. Right around the end of the first lap I saw Ryan again and expressed, not so nicely, my discomfort and desire to kill myself. Ryan was great! He comforted me and told me I would be fine and just to keep going.

Well damn, did I go. Somehow from somewhere my legs decided that they wanted to run and run fast! For the second and most of the third loop I average about a 9 min per mile pace. This was crazy fast within consideration of the 112 mile bike ride I just had. I just kept pushing myself mile after mile hoping that my luck with my legs wouldn’t run out, but of course it did. As all marathon runners experience and loathe I hit “the wall” around mile 22. My legs decided they were done for the day and they forced me to walk. I only walked for about 10 mins when I realized that my legs might be done but my heart and desire to finish were not. I pushed myself as hard as I could (13 min miles hahaha) for the remaining four miles and finished, what I considered, strong. Crossing the finish line was the best feeling I’ve ever had. I actually started to cry but my lungs weren’t up for that so I started to hyperventilate instead. Haha! Although that didn’t last long, as soon as I saw my family at the finish a sense of calm and pride came over me and all I could think was “I’m done, no more long workouts” haha.

I finished in 14hrs and 23 mins….what I considered a respectable time for my first IM. I was very happy with my race and my time. The day after the race I was quite sore and surprisingly, depressed. All this hard work for one day’s glory and it was just done, no more working out, no more eating like a pig, no more having nightmares about the race…it was done. Apparently this is a very common feeling among IM finishers…I’m still a little depressed that it’s all over but I’m SO excited to do this kind of race again!

The next IM on my list is IM WI in September 2009. I’m even more excited about this one, as Ryan and I will be doing it together. But until training starts for that I’m going to be running my ass off and enjoying what I truly love. Perhaps a few marathons in the coming months….I wonder if they’ll seem easier now that I’ve done an IM :)

Thank you so much Ryan and fam for your support! <3