Mid-season break

It's hard to believe that I started officially training for the 2009 season 26 weeks ago now. I arrived at my coach's house for a threshold test and body composition analysis in the worst shape I'd been in since before I started training for triathlon in 2002. My abysmal 2008 tri season had essentially sucked the life out of me, making me feel as though I had screwed things up so badly that I could never get it back. But for some reason a tiny sliver of hope remained and I decided to start over and give it one more shot. The workouts started out pretty simple, certainly nothing I hadn't done before. But it seemed 100 times harder than I ever remembered. My aerobic fitness was gone. My body fat and BMI told me that I wasn't just big for an athlete, but I had actually crossed the line into being medically overweight. I was still 30 pounds less than my heaviest back in college when I finally decided to turn things around for good, but I was mad at myself for letting it get so bad once again.

The progress was slow, but steady. Of course the progress was only impressive relative to where I had started, but knowing where I used to be still made it hard to be happy about it. The weight slowly crept off, running slowly started to get easier, swimming went exactly the same and biking was almost entirely indoors.

But here we are now in May. Somewhere in the last couple of days the leaves popped out on the trees without me noticing. The grass turned green instead of being that matted, yellow straw that was buried under two feet of snow all winter long. I had to pack up my sweaters and dig out my shorts. I'm roughly 30 pounds lighter, have two half ironmans done for the season and it's time to take a little break. It almost seems a little unfair since I really wasn't that sore after St. Croix since I just plain didn't run fast, but given that the next 11 weeks are sure to be grueling, I am going to soak up the last few days of my rest week.

It was good timing given that it rained most of this week. I've been catching up on sleep, which has been great. I usually sleep pretty well anyway, but the travel and several days of getting up between 3:30-4:30am really threw me off. Today being Saturday, under normal circumstances I'd have gotten on my bike somewhere in the 5am hour, ridden for 6 hours and done a little transition run. Today is quite different. On the schedule for today is a 35-minute run. It's funny how the shorter the workout is the more I seem to like to put it off. I don't know when I'll get to it, but it'll happen eventually.

Instead, I was able to sleep in and eat breakfast in my pajamas in front of the TV, kind of like what normal people do on a Saturday. Of course, it would've been nicer to have had my favorite chocolate chip banana pancakes rather than egg whites with tomatoes, onions and broccoli, but I'll take that compromise if it means I get some extra time to relax. This is the first "normal people" weekend I've been able to experience since October I think. I wouldn't want to do it all the time, but it's a nice change of pace. I'm at my parent's lake house and my sister is coming with my brother-in-law, niece and nephew, and my brother, grandmother and aunt are also coming up for Mother's Day. It's going to be nice to wake up tomorrow morning and hang out and read the Sunday paper with everyone instead of getting out of bed before everyone and spending the whole day getting my training in while they sit around and do nothing. Again, not something I'd probably enjoy doing every weekend, but I'm going to enjoy it while I can!