Base 1 training has begun!  I completed my first week this past week and am into my second day on the second week.  It has been a huge jump in intensity from my prep stages.  I'm noticing a significant tightness behind my knees and into my calves.  I've been skimping quite a bit on stretching and rolling and keep telling myself that I need to take time out to do it but avoid it when the opportunity arises.  Perhaps writing this down will do a more effective job of guilting me into doing it. We will see though.

My base 1 training will be focusing on building up my mileage for both the bike and the run where I can fit it in.  Along with increasing mileage, I have added a rep to my weight program for all exercises and notice a difference in the work load just by adding 1 rep.  I decided to maintain the :15 rest between each set of lifts and anticipate that :15 will be the norm for me going forward.  I have also begun to reintroduce core work as it will be an integral part of my fitness and health.  With that said though, I only reintroduced core work yesterday.  I have also begun using Trainingpeaks to track my progress and am entirely in love with the program.  I don't plan on paying for a subscription but see myself caving in eventually.

People around me continue to be supportive.  Elizabeth has been so willing to pick up the slack at home and push me during times where I didn't want to put in the work.  She has certainly been my rock the past few weeks and I will definitely need her in the coming weeks and months when things get really tough.  My family is supportive as well but more from a distance.  I think my Mom is still fearful of what will happen and that concern has slowly slipped into my sister and Elizabeth's psyche. I know I have what it takes and will listen when things go seriously wrong, if they do.  Well back to training, time for a fartlek run.

Recovery week has begun!  My first one of my training season.  The plan this week is to slightly back down on the weights that I'm using for strength training while maintaing the same amount of reps for each exercise.  I'm hesitant to back completely off of weights this week as it may cause me to regress in any of the strength I have built up over the last 3 weeks.  Doing my first workout like this a a couple hours ago felt really easy and really enjoyable.  Workouts will not be nearly as long this week as they were in the past 3 weeks.  Next week I'll begin my base training which will really start making things real for me.

I'm looking forward to begin my first round of base training but am also nervous about getting the amount of free time to devote to training.  I'm also incredibly excited to get to this next stage to feel like I'm really building toward Madison.  I understand the value of the Prep stage but it gets incredibly stagnant and boring.  So this week will be all about stretching and staying active, and also saying goodbye to the relaxed life for 9 months.

So I'm now three weeks into training and am feeling really motivated and determined.  It's a far cry from how I was when I restarted.  The new trainer has definitely been a boost in my training morale. Training loads have slowly begun to change as well.

This past week I had to make some changes.  My last swim was last Monday for the foreseeable future as gym classes have raided the pool during my lunch hour.  So, in place of swimming, I'm going to move my leg strength workouts to Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays with uppper body strength work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  With this new plan, I can better address a lot of my leg strength concerns for Madison.  Along with this shift, I'm focusing core strength work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Hopefully this will address my weight and stability concerns.  With these shifts, I'll be placing my rest day on Fridays to help care for the dogs, saving my long workouts for Saturdays and Sundays.  It will be a work in progress for sure and most likely need to be adding AM workouts, possibly during winter break.

Outside of training, things are definitely stressful.  Prepping for this race has become a bit of a financial strain and logistics nightmare.  I fear that I have promised too many financial commitments and may not deliver.  These thoughts have weighed heavily in my mind as training begins to increase.  With the holidays and all the repairs/upgrades my bike needs, I just don't know what I'm going to do.  I'm losing sleep which doesn't help training and is keeping my mind drawn away from work, training, and my love.  I don't see things improving anytime soon.  I just don't know...

So I'm "back in the saddle" again, both literally and figuratively.  This is the week that I restarted my training for Madison.  The past few weeks nursing my ribs gave me an opporutniy to tweak my training plan and get the first few weeks of my training planned out.  The biggest change I made to my original training plan was the weight training.  My hope is that the program I have set up will pay off hugely on the bike and swim course of Madison.

My ribs feel significantly better although lifting seems to irritate them ever so slightly.  The biggest discomfort that I feel occurs on days when I'm doing the Lat pulls.  I also may need to look into the possibility of reworking my leg strength work as Wednesdays are way too short to get an effective lift in.  An option I may have is to get up early on Wednesday mornings, head to the weight room at the apartment and lift there then head into work for the day.  I'll toy with it some more and see what may work best.

Riding, running, and cycling have been really great so far.  I'm very sore from the first real bike workout I had yesterday so it will be interesting to see how my run goes for me later this afternoon.  The soreness feels great but we will see if I'm still singing this same tune after a few weeks of these sensations.  So there you have it, just a small update on what I'm up to, more to come in the coming days!

Well I managed to get my bike workout in yesterday after all.  I did 3 x 20 min pace work holding my heart rate between 140-160bpm with a cadence of 80-85rpm with 4 x 1:00 iso leg drills in between each pace round.  It was a solid workout but it was definitely hampered by my rib injury.  I could only hold a certain position on the handlebars for so long before needing to switch due to the discomfort.  After the ride, I struggled with a lot of pain, to the point that during coaching I could hardly talk above a casual voice which made it a challenge to work with the swimmers.

This morning I feel a little bit better and I'm definitely favoring that side a lot more to keep from aggravating the injury any further.  I think I have learned my lesson that I can't be so reckless over the course of the next year.  With that said, I am now being forced to stall my training and just waiting for my ribs to heal enough to resume all my training.  On the bright side, it will give me the opportunity to re-evaluate my training plan and improve it with more knowledge and information that I am gaining from my research.  I'm still going to conquer and become and Ironman!

So training last week became a derailed mess.  The plan was to get some nice long workouts in on the weekend and also knuckle down with my run training and get my legs back.  Neither of these plans panned out.  The first issue I had to address was the pain I was dealing with in both legs.  My every day shoes were well beyond their lifespan and causing a lot of discomfort in my Plantar Fascia and ankles making running for me incredibly difficult and painful.  So, to combat this I went out and bought myself a new pair of shoes and what a difference!  The pain and discomfort has already subsided after only wearing the shoes a couple days!  I still plan to take a few more days of recovery before I start running back up again.

The weekend was an even bigger mess.  On Friday morning I went to play floor hockey with co-workers before classes started and was having a great time.  Near the end of the game there was a loose puck that me and another player went for and collided.  I got the brunt of the impact right up in my ribs.  The pain was instantaneous and sharp.  For an instant I thought a rib had been cracked but was quickly relieved of this fear when I could still breath comfortably.  All weekend though I couldn't do anything due to the soreness and discomfort I was getting whether I was lifting something heavy or took in a very deep breath.  It is now Monday and the discomfort is still there.  While in class I did take a stretch and heard a pop with a sudden rush of stabbing pain back through the right side of my rib cage where I got hit.  Now I'm sitting hear in more discomfort than I was before and its frustrating!

My goal today is to try and get about an hour in a half bike workout in on the trainer.  My hope is that my ribs won't bother me during the ride and since I'm working on keeping my heartrate lower, I won't have to worry about taking deep breaths.  We will see how it goes.

Yesterday marked the first full day of training on my training calendar.  It was exhilerating to be working out again!  But, I must admit, I am utterly shocked at how out of shape I have become since my race at Steelhead.  As I write, I realize, I don't think I was as ready as I could have been for Steelhead.  I got too soft and lost focus more often then not.  

This time around I feel as though I'm more dedicated.  Getting back to yesterday's training, I started off with getting up earlier than I'm used to (5:00am) and got in a morning ab workout with my new stability ball.  Saying that it was an adventure is an understatement!  I managed to get regular crunches down pat, but when I attempted stability crunch combos, I kept falling off the ball much to the dismay of my neighbors beneath.  To simplify the situation and to stave off getting frustrated so early in the morning I resorted to doing 3 sets of standing russian twists and 3 sets of bent knee v-ups and called it a morning.  

During lunch, I have figured out that on Mondays and Fridays I can squeeze in a quick swim at the high school at which I work at.  The swim, as much as I dread the first shocking moments of cold, felt strong.  I cranked out 1500yds with most of the yardage coming from warm up and drill work.  I definitely need to put more emphasis on my core as my stabilization in the water was not where it could be.  The only crummy part about swimming during this time is how rushed I am to get dressed and grab a quick bite to eat before finishing up the work day.

After school, I went ahead and set the bike and trainer up in the cardio room of the high school.  I got a bit of a boost with having the HS swim team in their working out and blasting the music.  With all the bodies in their though, the heat definitely spiked.  I haven't sweat that much in almost a year!  The bike workout was good overall, but I pushed it too much in the beginning.  The workout mainly consisted of a 10 minut warm up and rolling hills for 45 minutes.  I finished up with 5 isolated leg spins for each leg and a nice 5 min warm down.  With all the sweat I started freezing and fortunately had a spare shirt in the car (what a livesaver that shirt was!)  Time to go and finish work and get my next workout in tonight.....boo for running!

This blog was originally created to chronicle my journey to becoming and ironman.  A journey I began two years ago to honor my late father and to prove to myself that I could do something so physically and psychologically demanding that only 1% of the population would dare try it.  Although I have not posted in a while, the final chapter of my journey begins now.

On September 14th, 2015 I awoke at 5:30am in Madison, WI and joined a quietly growing line of individuals who, just the previous day, took part in the 2015 Ironman as volunteers.  We represented a large chunk of what will be the participants in the 2016 Ironman on September 11th.  At 7:30am, the doors for registration opened and before I knew it, I was standing at a table providing my regristration information and handing over my credit card.  After only a few minutes, it was done.  As of this post I am 350 days away from competing in my first full Ironman.

Since registering, I have been experiencing a flury of emotions.  Everything from excitement, to fear, I plan on being prepared for this race more so then I had been for my previous half-iron distances.  This coming Monday is when I begin to hit my training again with an emphasis on strength work and core work to help in prepping my body for the toll that a full Ironman will take on me.  It will be a long journey, full of twists and all the highs and lows that one would experience, but I am ready.  I am ready for this.  I WILL BE AN IRONMAN.