Greetings from the road

We're on our way to the Frozen Four, and we stopped last night in the warm and lovely cold and wet climes of Buffalo New York. Our drive was pleasant enough, and most importantly we we're pretty healthy eaters as well. Coke Zero, dinner at Boston Market and a small snack of potato chips. I avoided all the normal pitfalls encountered when driving past literally 10's if not hundreds of McDonalds, Burger Kings, et al.

This morning, we got up and hit the gym. My legs are a little stiff from the drive, so I opted just to do 20 minutes on the treadmill. Even though it was shorter than the usual workout, I felt far better than I did yesterday morning. I took some allergy medicine yesterday, and I'm not sure if it's that, or just that I had a particularly bad day yesterday. Today went so well in fact, that I ran 2 minutes out of every 5 instead of 1:30. Still a long way to go, but I'm glad for even the littlest progress.

The hotel was kind enough to provide a hot breakfast, gratis. Scrambled eggs, a couple pieces of sausage, yogurt, and a little raisin bran ought to keep the fast food away for much of the day. Our next stop is the Canadian border, on our way to Detroit.

Notes:

- Thanks to the folks leaving comments. It's been tough the past couple weeks, but your kind words of encouragement and understanding have really paid off.
- While I'm not a huge fan of the hotels wi-fi, I am MADLY IN LOVE with the scale. After my workout today it told me I weighed 284 pounds. Far from true, but very funny none the less.

Never put off til tomorrow what you can fail at today...

This weekend, Rachelle and I are headed to Detroit for the NCAA Frozen Four men's hockey championships. I've been putting in extra hours at work this week to get caught up/ahead so that my time away doesn't derail any of my projects. Last night, I took a break to relax and play video games while Rach studied for a mid-term. I was supposed to run last night to stay on schedule for my couch to 5k, but I simply wasn't motivated to get out and run.

This morning, I got up at 7, packed for the trip, and then headed outside for a run. I've been doing 3 1/2 minutes of walking followed by 1 1/2 minutes of running. Normally, I get enough cool down between runs that while I feel like I'm suffering, I'm still able to finish 30 minutes worth of intervals. Today, I did 10 minutes and had to quit. I just couldn't get enough cool down, and I felt like I was completely topped out before I even finished each 90 seconds of running.

I noticed last summer that I seemed to be stuffed up more than normal for longer than normal, and started to wonder if I have allergies. Because of the move, the wedding, and just being lazy, I put off dealing with it last season. My mom has pretty severe allergies and I want to make sure if I need treatment I get it, because I want to be able to perform well this year.

Of course, some of this is still that I'm a fat guy learning to run. I'm hovering about where I was last week in terms of weight (314), and I haven't exactly been killing myself with workouts this past week between Rebecca's passing and work. Friday marks a month til the first race, and there's still a lot of training to do. We're swimming and running this weekend, and I was even tempted to take the bikes along, though I know that's not a good idea. We'll do plenty of riding next week.

 I'll be home with family or alternately on the road, so avoiding the food monster and coming through slimmer on the other side will be the big challenge.

I really hate running

This will probably become a regular theme to the blog over the next few months as the season wears on and I am forced to run on a regular basis; I really hate running.  I ran on Friday and Sunday, 30 minutes of walking and running intervals. This experience helped me to outline the several reasons I hate running, which I will detail here:

1. I have no idea what I'm doing. Yes, man has been running since a caveman was first chased by a dinosaur angry cavewoman. However, it seems as if the rudimentary knowledge of how to run that should be present in the primordial part of my brain was left vacant during my formative period. As such, each time I run, I feel like a newly born giraffe trying to figure out how to stand. It's as though it is not a repeatable process, and therefore feels different every time.

2. I am terrible at it. I understand it takes practice to get better at things, and while I started with a decent level of ability at both swimming and biking, I have never been a good runner, but I used to think I was a good runner. As an elementary school student, I used to have the recess lady time me as I ran between playground aparati, and she was always very kind about it. I was a tight end in high school football, and twice joined the 100 mile club (where you run 100 miles in 20 days), and was never much good at either one.

3. There seems to be no good pace. I simply can't find a pace at which I am not almost immediately out of breath. Even with all the biking and swimming, I can only actually run for about 1 minute at a time. There might be some sort of slow jog/trot I can do, as I did for the Lowell 1st Run, but that won't really get me the speed I need to improve my triathlon times. I jogged a very slow 2 miles in my last race of last season and was actually slower than my better powerwalking 5k's.

4. It kinda hurts. Whether it's feet, knees or hips, I don't seem to have a gait conducive to running without pain. Sure, pain is weakness leaving the body, but if running causes this much pain maybe I do have the case of "vaginitis" that Rach is always saying I've got.

I'm not ready to give up on this process, but I sure hope it gets easier soon!

Pedales Automatiques

Note: Happy Easter everyone! It's been a long, trying weekend but I managed to sneak in a little fun/sadness relief. I put this post together late Friday, and finally got a chance to put it up now. I'll have some updates this week, and we're going to be working hard to crank up the race prep for the May race.

While I mention my sponsors on occasion, review certain products and make sure people know what I like and don't like; I rarely actively tell people they should definitely use something. I feel like everyone should make up their own opinion, and while I use something and love it, you might not. That said, I highly encourage everyone who uses my blog to give MyPoints a try. MyPoints is a web site that gives you points for online purchases, reading emails, visiting sponsor links, and completing surveys. You redeem the points for gift cards. I mostly use it at the holiday season when I'm going to be purchasing things online anyways, and I earn free stuff by going through the MyPoints site links to visit retailers. I've been using it for several years and have earned a couple hundred dollars worth of free stuff.

How this all relates is that I recently redeemed some points for a $25 REI gift card. REI is a sporting goods store that operates as a co-op. They offer a membership to the co-op that gives you a dividend each year, plus you get some pretty good coupons along the way. They have an REI right around the corner from our house, so we walked their today while showing Rachelle's sister around some of the city.

You might remember a couple weeks ago Rach and I visited the Multisport World Expo when it came to Boston. I picked up a pair of Adidas Vueltano road bike shoes for $25, a substantial discount from the $100 they sell for. I was excited about this because bike shoes combined with cleats and the matching pedals keep your feet firmly attached to the bike throughout the entire pedal stroke. This allows the rider to leverage power from the leg throughout the stroke (ie Pedales Automatiques in french). I followed that up by picking up a pair of $79 Look pedals and cleats with my dividend, a 20% discount and the $25 gift card for a whopping sum of $39.

It's not your imagination, those shoes are glowing with power...

Buying new gear is always fun, but it's even more fun when you get good gear for great prices. Between the new pedals and picking up a new pair of Tyr swimming goggles for $6, I had a good day for new gear.

Then I went running. There's nothing like running to take all of the momentum out of an otherwise good day. With just a bit over a month until the Season Opener, I really need to get moving on my running. While I'm far from ready for the full swim and ride @ Timberman, my running has been neglected. It's my least favorite of the three sports, mostly because I'm terrible at it.

I'm following a couch to 5k plan I found at Cool Running. Basically it's designed to get you running a 5k in about 2 months time. Being that I started late, I'm working at a faster pace, except this first week. I'm alternating walking 3 1/2 minutes and then running 1 1/2 minutes for a 30 minute workout. My recent purchase of shoes and insoles to support my arches have made running more tolerable and a little bit easier.

I'm no fool, April

Regular readers will likely have noticed that I didn't provide my normal first of the month weigh in yesterday. Much the same as I try not to walk into McDonalds with money in my pocket and a rumble in my tummy; I try to avoid an open forum on April Fools Day. I even went so far as to plan out an elaborate post regarding how recent events had made me realize I don't have the time to waste losing weight the traditional way, and that I'd be getting gastric bypass and lyposuction. Henceforth the blog would have been known as preppingforsurgery.com.

Thankfully, my better angels held out, and I refrained from such tomfoolery. Unfortunately, I had trouble refraining from less than healthy foods this month, and in the end I wound up at 314 for the month of March. This means my loss was 4 pounds for the month, and a bit of a retreat from the 313 I registered about halfway through. I'm finding that some weeks are easy and the numbers come down almost completely on their own. Other weeks are far harder and that getting through even just a single day has its food and exercise challenges.

That said, between the recent loss of Rebecca and the changing of the seasons, both personal motivation and opportunities to workout are on the upswing. We're spending time with the family this weekend (Rachelle's sister is already here, and her father arrives tonight), so being careful about eating as we show them Boston will be something I need to watch. And the next two weekends lend themselves to eating less than ideally, so I'll have to stay vigilant while allowing myself to still enjoy the meals with the family.

We're now just a little over a month until our first race of the season, the New England Season Opener Triathlon. It's a wholly outdoor race at a time when the air temperature is significantly higher than the water temperature. This means wetsuits; either renting or buying, finding a place and time to train in them. I dealt with wetsuitrental.com last season and they were super nice. In fact, I found out the other day that the wetsuit they let me try out last season never shipped from work, so I have it back in my possession. I'm going to work with them on a rental price for the suit assuming it still fits, and we need to get Rach something too. Ideally, I'll be able to get a sale price on one of last years suits for her before too much longer.

The other big challenge for this season is running. I've done a little in the past couple weeks, and of course there is that jog/shuffle I employed at the end of last racing season to finish off the Nantasket Beach race and the road races that followed. Unfortunately, I may have actually been a slower runner than I was a walker using that strategy, so I've slowly started on a couch to 5k plan. This mixes walking and running in time or distance amounts (depending on the plan) to build up the stamina to run a 5k. As I've mentioned before, 10 minute miles are my goal for this season, and I'm hoping to do around 12 minute miles this first race. That would take almost 10 minutes off my race time. With my improved swim stroke and better cycling endurance, even the first race of the season is shaping up to be a success.

Some tidbits:
- We'll be travelling to New Hampshire tomorrow to visit with Rebecca's family. I'm going to get some kind of workout in before we leave because it's too nice to miss out on an outdoor ride or run. I am determined to start and finish this month right, instead of something in the middle.
- I am actively looking for pedals and cleats to go with my new bike shoes. If you know of a place with closeouts on cleats and or pedals, let me know in the comments or via email.Thanks!
- Ive got some posts planned already for this week including the process of getting fitted for our team uniform. This will be less than pleasant and most likely pretty embarassing, which is why I'm oh so excited to share it with you
- Finally, happy easter/passover/religious celebration of your choice. Enjoy the time with your family.