My Adventures In Training, Racing and Life

Please follow me to my "new" blog!

2010-12-31T10:19:00.000-06:00

Hi Followers!
I'm going to make some of your lives easier.....I/we decided that I'm going to transition to writing all my entries to our "A Life More Complete" blog. For those of you that haven't checked it out yet, it started as a blog about just our adventures together (vacations, geocaching, wedding, etc). Our individual blogs became a place for just our personal posts, mostly about races and training.

I was listing out the updates I wanted/needed to do to both my blog and our blog and really had to stop and think......do I need to continue to maintain two blogs? You wouldn't think it would be such a hard transition (I feel like I'm abandoning my old blog!) but it was a somewhat hard decision and I've put careful thought into it. I think having one blog to maintain and update should make my life a bit easier.

AND it will give you the opportunity to follow me and us on all of OUR crazy adventures in training, racing, and life :) And the many other fun things we do, like geocaching. I'll have much better information and detail on the new pages I'm creating as well

PLEASE UPDATE YOUR "FOLLOW" TO http://alifemorecomplete.blogspot.com

Thanks and see you over there -----<{@
~Kris

ONE disabling injury and 15 pounds ago....

2010-11-24T10:43:00.000-06:00

(no idea how I came up with that title so just go with it.....)

Again I have gone much too long since I've posted anything so a quick recap to get you caught up. Weight loss has been going pretty good. Kind of hitting another plateau lately at 140-141 but that means I'm down 15 lbs from the beginning of the year. I feel so much better about that!!

As for training.......below is a picture from the Monster Dash 10-mile (Oct 30th)

And here is a picture of our backyard, two weeks later, Saturday Nov 13th

So how do you think my past few weeks of training have been going. Shitty, shitty.... 1) because of the slippery, snowy trail conditions and 2) because my IT band has been giving me serious trouble, especially when slipping or trudging through snow.

Mark has been amazing trying to keep me from freaking out but.....I'm still freaking out. About 6 weeks ago I started having IT troubles when we would run past 15 or so miles. Due to the major snowfall two weeks ago when we were supposed to do our second 20 miler, we did 10 miles in the snow (MISERABLE!!) and my IT was pretty tight by the end. We drove home to do the second 10 miles at home where the trails were better but I didn't even make it 2 miles before I had to stop. My IT was locked up and it felt like there was a knife shoved in behind my knee cap. (^$}{!$&*}**&%#$*(%*!!!!!)

I've been taping, stretching, rolling, Adviling and havent run more than like 5 miles in two weeks. Yesterday we went out for a 12 and I thought everything was feeling pretty good. But again, mile 5 my IT started to freak out. Inside my head I was just pissed but we continued the 12 miles, stopping about every mile for a very quick stretch since it was really cold out and we didn't want to cool down.

And now this morning my entire IT band is on fire. Treatment....no running until Vegas :( :( :( I really think it's the only way I can get through it successfully. I don't want to further injure myself and I have done enough training that I have the endurance. I'm just so frustrated that I was on pace to give Mark and myself new marathon PRs for our wedding before we start the tough training for Boston Qualifying. Our long runs have been averaging 9:20-9:25min/mi.

I don't want to hobble through my wedding so it's off running until Vegas. I'm a runner, take away the run in me and I'm miserable but I know it's the smart thing to do. It's potentially going to cause me to slow my overall pace and probably struggle a bit more through the last few miles but I'm counting on adrenaline to carry me though and the ultimate goal for me is to successfully finish my first marathon as Mrs. Kuhn, hand in hand with my husband, and celebrate our new life together (not on crutches ;)

SO IF ANYONE OUT THERE HAS SUGGESTIONS ABOUT WHAT I SHOULD DO FOR MY IT BAND BETWEEN NOW AND THE RACE, PLEASE POST A COMMENT.

Monster 10 mile recap

2010-11-01T22:03:00.000-05:00

So training has been going ok (I think the last time I wrote we did our 16 or 18 miler) and we successfully finished our 20 miler with no nutrition issues.   Since I've been having knee pain issues we opted to his the Luce Line which is an old railroad bed that has been converted to a limestone trail. So it was flat, soft and straight. My knee held up pretty well until around mile 15-ish when I started to get tweaky pains from time to time. (damn it....)    We managed to hold an overall average pace of 9:20-something so I was pretty happy with that.

This past week was a step-back week so while our weekday mileage went up and the weekend went down, it was all Easy pace which was nice. Unfortunately though we got stuck inside for an 8 mile day due to really bad weather so we did 4 miles going in circles on a short track and then 4 miles on a dreadmill. yuck!

Last weekend was Halloween and since our training run was supposed to be 8 miles and we had a discount to enter the Monster 10-mile we opted in to that race and decided to dress up. I had an old pirate costume and Mark bought a few accessories. It was a lot of fun running as pirates and surprisingly the miles went by relatively quickly. I think when your past long runs have been 16, 18, 20.....10 goes by pretty fast, especially when there are people in costume all around you to look at.

We went into the race thinking I could potentially get a new PR but after the first two miles of what felt like a major shuffle-fest, I wasn't so sure that was going to be possible. But once we got free of the pack we started averaging 8:10-something miles and I was feeling pretty good.   Not a super hard pace but moderately hard. My knee started to give me problems around mile 8 so it was more of a mental struggle to get throught the pain the last two miles.

We pulled in to the finish in 1:24:02...holy S^$! that was a little over 8 minutes off my old 10-mile PR.   And I think, had we not gotten caught up in the crowds of the first few miles, we would have even beat Mark's old PR of 1:22:--   Now granted if he wasn't running with me he would have blown that out of the water but still it was pretty cool to cut that much time off my own run.

Arrr maytee!!! :-P

I have not been logging my training miles/paces/heart rate very well and I do want to find an easy way to start doing that but luckily looking back at my past few seasons of run/tri training I do have evidence that my speed/endurance has improved. I need to go back and review that from time to time because, like I think a lot of athletes struggle with, you never FEEL like you are getting any better, faster, stronger. But the race results prove it.

And provided the body doesn't fall apart.....there may be a Boston in me one of these next years. Cross your fingers for me please :)

Wedding updates have been posted on our combined, A Life More Complete, blog.

Marathon Training and Wedding Updates AND...another job added to the mix

2010-10-20T22:01:00.000-05:00

Sigh....again I come to my blog with a thousand things to write about which means....I have no idea what all to say. I'll try to slam down some categories and then go from there.

1) Training and New Shoes -
I really felt like training was going pretty well up through the Birkie Half marathon. I felt great at paces faster than what is on our training schedule. Then....we both spent nearly 2 weeks being sick. The first week took us nearly completely out of the game. Got in a few really easy runs but my sinuses were on fire and it just made me feel dizzy. A couple runs I think I ended in a near panic attack because I was so %^@! frustrated at feeling like this cold was making me take steps backwards in my training. Damn it.....
Plus I made the decision to buy different shoes than I've been in the past few years. Mostly because I was fit for them and they are at least $40 cheaper. So far I think they are ok. Knees were heating up a little bit and damn near failed on me during our 18 miler last weekend but they seem to be recovering. I just hope that the shoes I'm going to be running in (which are my old brand/model again) are going to be ok.

Wedding Shoes, my usual brand

New Shoes for Training, new brand

We had our first long run LAST weekend. (Strangely enough we are starting to call anything up to 13 a "run" and if it's over 13 it then becomes a "long run") It was a 16 miler so we plotted out a fairly flat course around the lakes and down the parkway. We had a good breakfast before we left and I brought 3 gels to take about every 4 miles. Everything was going pretty good until mile 13ish. SMACK! (Who the hell put that wall there???) Our bodies were going downhill fast. My problem was more that my knees and ankles were starting to get weak and very sore and Mark was out of fuel. The last 3 miles were awful and we had to walk a bit.
Some definite adjustments when we did our 18 this past weekend and luckily it was much cooler weather. I had caffeinated gels with me and a pack of Sharkies as a solid food. I probably took 4 miles to slowly suck on those and actually finish the pack and I think that made a big difference in keeping my energy up better than just gels.

Please send happy, healthy, unpainful thoughts for my knees at this weekend's 20 miler...

New Work - ZapEvent Marketing -
Work has been going great and we are looking at some definite growth over the next year. The scary/exciting part for me is that I've decided to transition myself out of the customer service roll and into strictly Marketing (note....I have little Marketing background!) It's going to take me some time to get my feet under me and figure out what exactly I need to do to be successful in 2011 but I think I have great support from Jeff to make it happen. Some days I get really nervous about being able to be successful at it but I'm going to give it my best....

More New Work - Examiner.com -

My Profile Pic - I'm up in a tree and NO
I'mnot being impailed through the
shoulder. The short branch in front of
me just lines up nicely with the one
that's behind me :)

As if I didn't have enough going on already, I submitted an application to be the writer for Examiner.com specifically about Minneapolis Geocaching. And I got accepted! It's not something you do for the $$ but it's a lot of fun researching ideas for articles and getting to do profiles on my local geocaching friends. Some days I get stressed about the fact that I basically added a 3rd job and get sick of not being able to just sit and watch TV some nights. I am going, going, going until 11pm just about every night lately.

Some days between ZapEvent work, USAT work and wanting to post an Examiner article AND having personal items to do (clean the house, laundry, lawn/garden work, misc projects, wanting to actually cook dinner, keeping up on blogs, paying bills....see my problem?) I just feel like my head is spinning and at any given moment I'm not fully focused on any one thing.

Diet -

Been pretty good with eating healthy on round 2 of the 3 month "diet". I do really hate calling it a diet since I'm hoping it's more of a reduced calorie learning experience so that when I reach the end of my weight loss I can maintain my weight with continuing to eat better.

I've been stuck at 143.5 for like 3 weeks now and it's driving me nutz. While looking at healthy recipes in my Runners World Magazine, I got all obsessed with wanting to buy healthier food but since our money is really tight we don't buy fresh groceries as often as I would like. I told Mark a few days ago that I wanted to get a subscription to Clean Eating.

He earned SERIOUS brownie points when I came home yesterday to the latest Clean Eating Magazine and all the ingredients for a watermelon salad recipe I pointed out that I wished we could try. I was so excited to actually get to make a new healthy recipe for us :D

Wedding -
Not much real planning to do any more without the reception so we're basically just down to making sure we have all of our outfits in line. Mark picked up his wedding shoes this past week so we are going to use them for short, clean runs to get them broken in between now and the wedding. I picked up my tulle and some other shiny, sheer fabric. I've got some fun ideas for my veil but now just have to figure out how in the heck to actually put it together.

The Course Map and Elevation Chart are also available now if you are interested in seeing the RnR route. The second half is a LOT of twisting and turning but luckily the final 6 miles are nearly all at a nice downhill grade.

You can also sign up for runner tracking HERE if you are interested in keeping an eye on how we are doing on the marathon. We will be running all of the marathon together so you will only need to really get updates on one of us :)

I'll finish with this cute picture of my Maverick tearing apart his favorite toy.....my roll of paper towels.

He's too cute to be mad at :)

Birkie Trail and Trek - Half Marathon

2010-09-29T22:16:00.000-05:00

(OK well Blogger is making me upset by not allowing me to put text along sides of pictures so I've officially wasted enough time and have given up so it looks like all will be centered in my world tonight!)

It was an early rise to drive up to Cable, WI for the American Birkebeiner Trail Marathon and Half Marathon. Luckily we didn't need to be parked and through pick-up until 9:45am but it was still a 4:30am wake up call and 5:45 out the door. We picked up Mark's buddy Steve as well. He came up to run the half. His first ever half marathon race AND his first race as a Master (just turned 40 last week).

The drive up was relatively uneventful and actually went pretty fast. Lots of color in the sunrise. Sailors take warning!!

Our starting spot was actually the half of the full marathon so we got to see a few people run through. As you can see the weather was beautiful! We were realy happy and excited to start.

Steve wasn't quite as impressed to take a startline photo ;)

The trail was all on a wide, grass-covered path through the woods. It's a large, well-known ski trail in the winter. The first half was filled with difficult climbs. I tried to continue to power up them as much as I could as long as my body would let me recover before the next one. It felt great to pass people going up hills :)

I knew there was a "high point" coming somewhere in the middle. It was climb after climb until the sky opened up and we reached the top of the tree line. With the colors in full bloom, it was gorgeous!! (got me the great new header picture for my blog) Mark got a great shot of me going up one of the final hills towards the top.

Of course there was a "highest point" sign on the course and another runner lady was nice enough to stop and help us take a picture. Deja vu to my highest point picture at Great River Ragnar Relay

From that point on the crowd really thinned out and we had a lot of the trail to ourselves. It was FANTABULOUS! Exactly what I want when I run on the trails. I want just me (or us in this case), no crazy crowd and the crunching leaves under my feet. Here's a great pic of Mark flying up a hill.

Trail running is a lot tougher than road running but the benefits in the beauty of the course are worth the extra effort. I guess this would be another PR since it's a first.

Trail Half Marathon PR - 2:03:28

I would come back and run this race again in a heartbeat. Only change is that we would like to stick around for another day or two to explore, geocaching and check out the mountain biking trails!

Oh.....and this is my official goodbye....to my blue Asics. I decided that this would be their last race before they retire. I have trail shoes but they aren't great for distance races so, knowing the trails would be a little wet and mucky, I wore my Asics as their final race run.

BEFORE THE RACE

AFTER THE RACE. DIRTY, WET AND DONE!

To my Gel-Kayanos....it's been fun, you've served me well this year in training and racing. Not one bad incident with shin splints. Thank you for all the miles, it's now time for you to retire to become my comfort shoes :)

Mileage is getting high for our LV Marathon training. This weekend will be our first run past the half marathon distance. Last weekend was supposed to be 14 but we decided a trail run 13 was close enough. This coming weekend will be 16 so now is when things start to get fun.

So far all is going well and our running bodies are holding up well. We are going to get our new training shoes tomorrow night that will carry us through the marathon. Unfortunately we've both been battling head colds the past couple days so that's held our training runs up a bit.

I'm still doing my best to stick to my diet plan and while I've had some major slips days, all in all I've lost another 3 pounds since I've started back on another 3 month plan to get me to the wedding. Since our first weight loss plan back at the beginning of the year, I'm down a total of 11.5 pounds and I'm feeling so much better because of it!

Next race: Monster Dash Half Marathon

I think I'm ready....

2010-09-16T21:25:00.000-05:00

Ok so first things first, I assure you my brain is still 100% focused on our upcoming marathon wedding :D :D :D but the tides are turning in my head.

I think I'm ready...

To put a 70.3 on the schedule again next year.

This past year I feel was smashed, beaten and spit out after Ironman. I think I had such issues during training and during the race that I just wanted to be far, far away from focusing on triathlon.   It seems like it became all that I was. I was nothing but someone in training for Ironman. I am so much more, I enjoy so much more, I needed time physically, mentally and emotionally away from the whole thing.

But there has been so much buzz about Ironman amongst my friends since many of them did IMoo last weekend that I'm getting anxious to have another big triathlon goal on my schedule.   Don't get me wrong, I think pigs will fly before I set foot on the IMoo course again but I'm sure in a couple years we'll investigate doing another full somewhere else.

Proposed Target: The inaugural Ironman Muncie - July 9th, 2011

Marathon Training has been going pretty well. Last week was our first easy week. Every four weeks we have a low mileage week with a lot of EZ in it.

My EZ pace is supposed to be 9:46/mi and Tempo is supposed to be 8:15/mi

With the weather getting much cooler (most days are in the 50-60s F) I can definitely feel the difference in my training.    Oddly enough my heart rate has been much lower during long runs and my pace has been a bit faster (yay hoo!) Tonight we had a 6 miler with the middle 3 miles being tempo.  The first mile hurt! I was really hoping it was too fast and sure enough, it was about 7:40. We eased up a tiny bit but my heart rate was pegged in the low 180s. Second mile 8:06. Final mile 8:04(ish).   The average came up to be 7:57. Sa-weet! Sub 8 :)

I still wish we would get ourselves into the gym more often to strength train. I know how important it can be but just haven't quite had the motivation to drag ourselves there more than about once a week.

Wedding update: Mark's wedding marathon shoes are waiting for us to pick them up down in Lakeville and we are working with a small company to get our visors embroidered. Then I need to get the veil done :) I'm excited my best friends Jess and Beck wanted to have a bachelorette party for me. We are having dinner and going to Shout House. Nothing crazy, just food and fun with hanging out with the girls. And kind of unfortunately it's the night before we have now all but signed up to run the Monster Half Marathon the next morning :-P

Weight loss has been going well. I've been using the Livestrong.com Daily Plate again to track my calories since Sept 5th.   The plan is to intake 1200 calories + any calories burned in exercise. I have gone over in calories a couple days but most days I do really well.   Mostly my sodium and sugars. Protein too but I don't take that as a bad thing. I think I'm down about two pounds but haven't done an official weigh in yet to compare. Stay tuned.....

This weekend we have a big all-weekend Geocaching event (GeoCoin Fest) so we'll cover that on our other blog. We will need to squeak in a 12-miler at some point too. Next weekend we are signed up to drive over to Cable, WI for the Birkie Trail Half Marathon. They have awesome medals you can see on the website. I'm super excited to do another trail event. Although I'll be doing it in my old road shoes. Can't afford new trail shoes right now but I'm watchin' deals on Sierra Trading Post :) Mark's buddy Steve is coming to run as well so it should be a fun road trip. Hey Steve.....I call shotgun!!! ;)

Anyone else going to be at Birkie??

Minneapolis Duathlon

2010-09-01T21:34:00.000-05:00

This past Sunday was the Mpls Duathlon and while we have not spent much time on our bikes lately, I think it went fairly well. It was not an "A" race for me by any means, more just doing it for fun and for the bling, but I think in the end my results came out ok.

I was surprised how many friends were racing too that I haven't seen in awhile so it was great running into familiar faces before, during and after the race!

My first run went ok. I was trying to keep a decent pace without going all out. The sun was up so not much heat on this one and the course was pretty much flat. We got to run across the Stone Arch Bridge which I always enjoy :) Then there was an out and back section that felt like it took forever to reach the turn-around for. I caught up to Mark's brother Michael too at the water stop. He has been battling a crappy injury but I give him serious credit for still getting out there and completing the course. I did get a quick wave in to our friend Steve near transition and he got a picture.

I look happy to be done with this run :)

The bike was...well how has biking been for me lately (ca-rrapy!) Although I think most of my problems during this race were about the course. I pretty much vowed never to do this race again until they either changed the route or fixed the river road. It was nothing but potholes and bumps for over half the course. I could rarely feel safe down in aero position and all the rattling was making my arms, back and butt hurt. I pretty much gave up any type of hard push for an average pace and just wanted to survive the race without breaking myself, my bike or getting a flat. I was entertained though as Michael caught back up to me and we leap frogged a few times during the second half of the leg.

Steve did get another good picture of me on the bike. Minus my snarling face :-P

I was very happy to be off on my feet although it was no impressive pace. Plus it was getting really hot! Same exact course as the first 5k. After about the first mile I told myself "ok you are doing this for fun but you are hurting at this pace....why don't you just enjoy this a bit more and slow the F- down?!?" So I did pull up a bit in my pace for about a mile or so. When I was within the last mile I did crank it up a touch again and ended with what I'll call an ok min/mile.

My friend Jon got this one of me maybe a mile-ish from the finish line

All in all, a fun race and the free champagne and cake at Vincent's was a big plus!

So that concluded our multi-sport season for 2010 and now it's all about being on our feet. 3 months until the wedding marathon! Birkie half and Monster Half are looking to get on to our schedules for sure plus we would like to do either the Twin Cities 5k or 10k just to work towards saying we've done all of the distances in this event. We've both done the full and the 10 mile. Lack of money for race fees will likely keep us from many more actual races between now and then.

The exact 3 month mark is Sept 5th (4 days from now) and we both have been feeling flabby and fat again so we are creating another 3 month diet fix plan to get us back on track and deduct a few pounds. Initially a daily allowance of 1200 calories + calories spent in exercise. With the marathon training we would be killing ourselves and likely deficient in calories for they day if we didn't allow ourselves to eat what we expended. I would also like to try to reduce the amount of carbs we intake but that might be tough. Seriously...I'm Italian, I live for bread and pasta!

Wish me luck :)

Anyone else running any fun races in the Midwest between now and December?

Great River Ragnar Relay

2010-08-26T14:55:00.000-05:00

Great River Ragnar Relay 2010
Wow now that was an experience! Last weekend Mark and I participated in the Ragnar Relay with our team "Java Junkies" If you want to read more about what the relay is, here's the Webpage, I won't write it all out for you other than it's a 12 person relay team, split into two vans of 6 people running from Winona, MN to Minneapolis, MN. Our van consisted of the two of us, my friend Mandy, Mark's friend Steve, Mark's brother Michael and his wife Cari.

The Girls

The Boys

While it was a bit like herding cats for me to get the team going when we got to the start area, our van 2 saw our first runner Brady take off and then we had about a 5-6 hour wait until we started. Luckily we found this cute restaurant with awesome food and awesome service in Alma, WI called "Kate and Gracie's". I highly recommend you give this one a try. It's in an old building right on the main drag through town (don't blink, you'll miss it) but the service was fantastic and the food was great. Not just a little greasy spoon bar type place like you normally find in these area.

I was the first runner in our van and started out around 5pm or so on Friday. Unfortunately the sun showed up right about that time and it go thick and hot! My run was 6.2 miles with about mile 2-3 being straight up! Good lord I was nearly crawling to crest this damn thing! I was so happy to see my van at the top and get some food/drink.

The next mile was all a decent slope downhill in the shade. WEEE!!!! I was flying down that part! It felt great! Last mile and a half or so flattened out and was in the wide open sun so I was toast by time I got done and sweating enough for the whole team. I think that's my first time finishing a run and slamming and entire bottle of water in about 10 seconds.

6.2 Miles 4:50pm Friday - Very Hard - 1:03:06 HR - 184)

My second leg was at 3:40am. Mark and I got about 3 hours of sleep on a blanket in the grass before I had to get ready to run again. Running at night was weird! Especially considering some spots of my 3.2 miles was dense fog! Made for an interesting halo around me from my headlamp :-P This run was relatively flat but the thick air made breathing a litte moe labored but all and all this was the best leg since it was the flattest and coolest!

3.2 Miles 3:40am Saturday - Easy - 27:06 (HR - 178)

My third and final leg was about noon on Saturday and luckily for me the clouds were still holding back the hot sun. It was great that we got to spend a few hours at the exchange area which was at a Lifetime Fitness so Mark and I went in, got soak in the hot tub, showered and rolled out our legs before my last run. I wanted to push a little on this one since it was my last leg but lack of sleep was definitely playing a part in how well I was running. Plus we were in the heart of Woodbury and I actually had to stop for 4 different stop lights during my course. The hardest part of this leg was around the halfway point when I was running up this gradual hill through a boring business park/industrial type area and instead of just going straight up the road, we were moved onto the winding path which made the stretch longer to get to the top of the hill.

3.7 miles 12:00pm Saturday - Moderate - 30:36 (HR-174)

I feel like I did ok overall. Always wish I was faster but oh well. We had a great time and I give a lot of credit to Steve and Cari, our final two runners for making it through some seriously hot sun and hilly terrain to finish up the race :)

Back to front, left to right:
Cari, Michael, Dawn, Dan, Melissa, Rich, Mandy
Mark, Myself, Steve (missing is Lance and Brady)

A good number of our team are already talking about plans to race next year in the Madison to Chicago Ragnar on June 3-4th.   We would also make it a birthday trip for me since I turn 30 on June 7th (bleh!!)

Healthy eating?
Yeah that has gone out the window lately. I've felt kinda sluggish lately because I've been consciously eating a lot of crap. Crappy foods just taste better but I hate feeling weighed down and fat.   So yeah, still trying to kick my own arse into a different rhythm.

Going to the State Fair this Saturday probably isn't going to help on that front but I am excited to go every year.   We will be going over to Leinie's Lodge to see Tonic-Sol-Fa perform. They are one of my favorite groups and very entertaining. Then we have to get through packet pick-up for the Duathlon on Sunday and then go to our first pre-season home game for the Vikings in the evening. Yes folks, it's time for football again!! :)

The Mpls Duathlon
is on Sunday and as of right now that will be our last multi-sport race of the season.   We haven't been on our bikes nearly enough but I'll survive.   We've had the greatest of intentions to get out more for BRicks but seems like the evenings get filled up so quickly and we've been too comfy to get out of bed in the early AM. I love working out in the cool mornings but it's also the best time to have the windows open curled up in bed!

Wedding planning?
Well we are working on reserving our rooms at the hotel and hope to gather the money to book our flights soon as well.   Keep in mind we need to fly and hotel ourselves and our film guys so it's a little more expensive but definitely worth it to have them there to capture our wedding.  Actually through blogging and the wedding contest, I have met a few different couples that I am looking forward to meeting out in Vegas. Our blogger friends, Team Baby Dinosaur will be out there running the half marathon and also a trail running couple that voted for us and I've been emailing with is doing their first road marathon. It's fun that the social media can introduce us to new people and we will get a chance to meet on our wedding day :) My next project is working on finding a place to get our visors embroidered and get the vail figured out.

Anyone have any cute ideas for attaching a veil to my SweatVac visor? I'll be wearing it for the whole marathon.

Geocachers
If you are reading this blog, be sure to check out our #Geocache365 on our Life More Complete Blog or follow us on Twitter. We started the cache a day for 365 days challenge :)

The First Official Training Week

2010-08-18T16:18:00.000-05:00

So Monday was the first official day of our marathon training for the Las Vegas Rock 'n' Roll Marathon. While I do have a time I hope to finish in, considering this is our wedding, I'm not too overly concerned with how long it takes us to finish.   If a photo op presents itself, we will be stopping :)

Yesterday was supposed to be just an easy 3 miles.   The training plan we put together and are going to follow said my easy pace is supposed to be 9:49 but a mile in our pace was just over 10. Damn it! So my easy run turned into more of a moderate run.  My bad habit is that if I make a training plan too aggressive, I won't slow down to what feels easy, I'll push for the pace it last listed for me that day. Has kicked me in the arse before so we'll see how this goes.

Mark just got his GPS training watch so that will be helpful for us to keep pace. I've really been missing my Garmin since it died last year.   Since he's WAY faster than me, on occassion I kick him in the butt to take off and run ahead so he can get in a hard run too but for the most part he said he's going to stick with me on training runs for this marathon since we're running it together anyways. (Love you Handsome!) Having him next to me is motivation a lot of days to push just a little harder.

We have the Ragnar Relay this Friday/Saturday.   Kinda bummed out that my run legs have been modified since we chose which ones we all wanted to run.   Mine got shorter and easier. I wanted to have more of a moderate set :(   It will be fun though provided the weather doesn't make a mess of things.  Currently there is a forecast of humid rain on Friday and hot/humid on Saturday.   We start 9:30am Friday and predict to finish up around 3:00pm on Saturday.

Still haven't gotten back to the pool. Our focus has been so much on running we just haven't had the motivation to throw that into the morning routines yet.   Have been getting to the gym to lift at least once a week which has felt great.

Wedding reception plans are a little stalled out right now. We are deep into evaluating what we can afford. I'll just leave it at that.

No Longer Obsessed

2010-08-11T22:19:00.000-05:00

Well as anyone that is within 1000 mile reach of me, you got my obsessive PLEASE HELP, VOTE FOR US!!! messages last week for the wedding contest.   I'll spare the details and let you read more about us and our wedding contest HERE.   We are still waiting to see if we won, we were in 2nd place and really couldn't figure out the couple in 1st place so we are hoping they were a fake or they totally cheated!! Results were supposed to be posted today but no luck.....stay tuned.

We have been out running a lot lately and have officially written up our training plan betweeen now and Las Vegas.   It likely won't include too many actual events because money is well beyond tight but have a few in mind. We can get into Monster Half for free because of our volunteer hours and we've been eyeballing the Birkie Half Trail Run as well.  1) because it's a huge trail run and 2)...is has a sawheet medal!

Work has been....work. Don't get me wrong I do enjoy what I do but spending time in a cold little cubicle with very little human interaction and really annoying office environment "things" makes me want to "Pull a Slater" (which is what a lot of people seem to be calling it after yesterday's national news), I decided that I needed to request a change.   Since it's a small company, there are currently no benefits including no holiday pay so I opted to ask for days at home. For now we discussed allowing me two days a week to work from home.    :D I can't even tell you how much happier that makes me. I worked from home for a number of years and I miss my own environment, the stress-free-ness of my own desk, being able to throw in a load of laundry, work with my kitty on my lap, not have to bring crappy microwave meals for lunch, being able to open the window and get FRESH AIR!!!! So my sanity has been spared a bit.

Totally different subject...I'm very excited that this Saturday is the annual open house at Home for Life so I get to go spend a few more hours there and cuddle with all the animals and my sweet girl Olive.   Not sure if I posted this before but here is a photo from our last visit last month where my sister came along.

Deb and Lily and Lily's friend Kate get to join us at the open house and I hope they enjoy getting to see the facility and all the great work they do to care for these animals. And of course meeting my sweet Olive :)

(look out....left field!) We haven't been back to the pool in a LONG time. Last time I did laps anywhere was maybe once since Minneman on July 4th. Now that we are getting more settled into one house together, I think we are just enjoying that we can choose to sleep in so we haven't made it up to the pool just yet but I'm pretty confident one of these days we are actually going to regain the WANT to go swimming and then we'll fall back into a 2x per week rhythm for over the winter.

Quick Post: Please vote for us! 20 Fabulous Weddings Contest

2010-07-28T22:51:00.003-05:00

20 FABULOUS WEDDINGS CONTEST

WE NEED YOUR VOTE!! OUR STORY ABOUT HOW WE MET RUNNING AND HOW WE ARE GETTING MARRIED RUNNING IS A FINALIST IN THE "20 FABULOUS WEDDINGS" CONTEST!!

PLEASE VOTE FOR US EVERY DAY FROM EVERY COMPUTER YOU HAVE BY CLICKING ON THE LINK BELOW!

PASS THIS ON TO YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY TO VOTE FOR US AS WELL! WE'RE CURRENTLY IN SECOND PLACE!!

VOTE ONCE PER DAY FROM EACH COMPUTER YOU OWN FROM NOW THROUGH AUGUST 6TH

CLICK HERE TO GO TO OUR WEBPAGE AND VOTE FOR US!

Home for Life Visit

2010-07-22T13:11:00.000-05:00

I had to put this post up quick as well. Mark and I recently went out for a sponsor visit to Home for Life to see my girl Olive again (which if you haven't read about her yet in my previous blogs is shown in the bottom two pictures of this post)

We brought my sister Deb out to see the sanctuary as well and I think she fell in love with all the animals as much as I did the first time I was there. She's hoping to join us and bring my niece Lily to their open house on August 14th.

Here are a couple photos from our visit.

Can't remember the golden color dog's name but the black one is Ashley. She doesn't have use of her back legs and how she got that way just breaks my heart (and makes me want to seriously hurt someone!) but she is very sweet and VERY happy at HFL.

This is Nike, he also had a rough start to life and doesn't have use of his back legs but can't fly around the sanctuary when he's in his cart.

Can't remember this little fluff-ball's name either but super cute!! Looks like he just went though the dryer!

I have a super soft spot for Celeste as well and wish I could afford a double sponsorship for Olive and Celeste. She's completely blind but sometimes you have to wonder as she can navigate around just as well as any of the others. And LOVES to cuddle :)

And last but not least is my very sweet, loving girl Olive. She's gotten very tolerant of letting me pick her up and carry her over the past few visits and makes me feel REALLY guilty if I walk away and am not giving her my FULL attention. She's got this super cute way about her, when she's up in one of the high cat beds, she flips over and looks at you upside down wanting you to pet her :)

Seriously....could you walk away from this sweet face? :)

Living With Dogs

2010-07-22T12:50:00.000-05:00

Rule #1 - Nothing that is food, smells like food, looks like food, or is nearby to food can be put anywhere below 5 feet of the ground. Made the mistake of putting a bag of baking items in a reusable bag in the closet. While we were gone, one/two of them opened the bifold door and ripped apart the tupperware containers of sugar, flour and even the Hershey's cocoa powder. Mark and I were pretty much already at the end of our sanity ropes by time we got home and saw the mess. Truffle (our miniature pincher) was COVERED in flour and cocoa powder. (BUSTED little girl!!) Lesson learned....

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Mark and I have been working non-stop to get me moved into his house. He's been doing some remodeling projects and I've been trying my best to consolidate everything from my townhouse. We've also put a bit of time into re-arranging things for the dogs to now have access into the basement. It seems things are all falling into place and our stuff is all fitting together pretty well. Moving just is never fun. I'm so excited for us to be in one place but so much of his stuff and my stuff has to be STUFFED into a storage locker. I did a more detailed write up on our A Life More Complete blog that should be posted soon.

Diet - out. the. window. Another product of moving. Our time has been so cramped and half my kitchen is in boxes so in the past 4 days, 3 of them included pizza and pop. I know when we get settled and the kitchen is in one piece and we have money to go buy decent groceries again we'll be back to our normal eating healthy routine. This morning I woke up feeling so "blah" that I dug out the last two pieces of frozen chicken and am going to do just that with mixed veggies for dinner.

Training - see the above response to "Diet". Another reason I'm feeling totally "blah!" We have put moving/cleaning/remodeling as priority #1 and therefore we haven't run, swam, biked, lifted in like two weeks.

This weekend can't get here soon enough! The goal is to have me and the kitties staying at the house starting Saturday. We will gain ridiculous numbers of hours a week back that we currently are spending driving back and forth between houses so training and eating better will be so much easier. Plus we are working to get my townhouse rented out so the extra income will allow us to crawl out from underneath our credit card max limits.

And I can get back to wedding reception planning <3

Minneman - Making the Top 3

2010-07-11T21:18:00.000-05:00

Last weekend was my precious Minneman Triathlon. I went into it having no clue how I was going to go. With the wedding and trying to figure out our housing situation, lack of money, logistical nightmare of two houses, 35 minute commute, 7 animals....(ok i'll stop), training has not been a high priority. But I felt good at the beginning of the day and was happy to have Mark there cheering for me and Roscoe got to join us for the morning as well :)

It was a very windy morning so I knew that would be a factor. And I just didn't feel like my head was in the game while I was waiting at the start line. But my wave took off and with the wind the water was very choppy. I finished my swim in record time but looking at everyone's times and paces it became VERY obvious that the buoys must have moved in with the wind and we didn't swim the full 0.3mi. I got going on the bike and was hoping for a good ride with my new bike.

It was straight into a headwind but I wanted to try to keep pushing myself at least a little to see what I could do on this bike. Since this is the only race I did last year, I felt it was my only real chance to compare. Well all in all it wasn't a big difference but you also have to factor in the wind. Last year was 19.5mph, this year was 19.4

It was a little warm for the run but not horrible. We haven't been doing much of any BRick training so it was a good mile before I could get my run legs under me but I really wanted a good time. Up to this point I was trying really hard NOT to look at anyone passing me or anyone I was coming up to pass. I knew I had a better chance of placing this year since my age group was only 15 people where past years it was 25 or so. I got into a mantra "strong, fast, 7, strong, fast, 7" The "7" was because I desperately wanted a sub 8:00 pace (7:59 or better) but unfortunately I didn't get it. 8:18

Crossed the line in 1:15:43, beating my previous course PR by 3 minutes but keep in mind I think the swim skewed that by at least 2 minutes.

Mark enjoyed watching the race with Roscoe since Roscoe doesn't get to travel out with us much. He's getting older so we can't take him for very long trips but he was like a little puppy watching the crowds and even breaking to share a cookie with Mark.

So I went to get my results and was shocked. I finally did it. The past 3 years I've raced and placed, 5th, 5th then 6th and today....I got 2nd in my age group!

I was very excited and even if I had been doing a lot more training, 1st place was another 3+ minutes ahead of me so taking 2nd was awesome and I had a great race :)

The rest of life, well I've been doing horribly at trying to lose the last few pounds but my excuse is lack of time and money to eat better. And the stress of moving. We're both very excited to be consolidating into one house now in a couple weeks but it all is falling into place very suddenly and is taking priority. Check out our "A Life More Complete" blog post "A Really Big Change" to read the details.

The past week has been a lot of packing and moving but today Mark raced in the Graniteman Triathlon. Neither of us have done this one and it was a beautiful day for racing. He had a phenomenal race but I'll let him tell you about it. Watch Mark's blog for a posting (yes honey this is me nudging you to get your blog post done :)

I'm really hoping to get more time and money for us to have a better multi-sport training season next year.

Next up as far as racing.....Ragnar relay on August 20th

Weekend of Relays: Tri-Loppet and Lake Waconia

2010-06-30T12:47:00.000-05:00

OK Blogger I officially HATE the amount of stress I endure adding/placing photos on your site.....

This past weekend we were part of two relay teams. I've never done multi-sport relay so it was a new experience for me. Saturday was the Tri-Loppet. The night before the event we had a huge storm that dumped a ton of rain so the run and bike course ended up getting modified due to flooded trails and roads. We started down at Calhoun to watch Jeff take off on the canoe portion. He's in the very middle of this picture in the yellow sea kayak. What was really cool is that while they were waiting for the start signal, an eagle did a "fly by" across all the canoes/kayaks in the water.

Jeff had a great paddle and then handed off the chip to me for the 5k trail run. That was by far the hardest trail run I've done. My average pace was 10:57 if that tells you anything. There were a couple massive hills that I had to walk. One I walked just because of the mud and how slippery it looked. It was a fun run though since there were steps, branches, tight turns, rocks, trees across the trails that you had to dodge.

And at some point Mark snuck in a "Steve in a Speedo" tribute photo. Sigh.... :-P

I handed off to Mark for the mountain bike and he had an absolute blast on the mountain bike and was caked in mud by the finish.

Another note was that Charles from Forever Films Photography came out to get some action footage of the two of us for our life/wedding video. We did a little interviewing on camera too. I'm so excited to see how the video turns out :)

We ended up placing 3rd out of 4 corporate relay teams and 5th out of all relay teams so we were super happy with that and look forward to hopefully competing here again next year :)

Here's a video someone did that shows you the whole race Tri-Loppet Course. Note you will see my at the start of the run in purple and pink (around 1:44 in the video) and if you look quick you can see Mark waiting for me in transition on the right hand side (around 2:42 in the video) Tri-Loppet 2010

Sunday was the Lake Waconia Triathlon. We decided to do this one as a relay with Mark's brother to give him an introduction to the world of triathlon and again, just try something new and fun. This was a "Best of the US" qualifying race so a lot of the local elites where here competing and being in the circuit for a few years now, I recognized a lot of people. It's fun seeing a lot of friends and other triathletes that I know and can cheer for. Even if they can totally burn my ass in pretty much every way shape and form of competition :-P

I started everything off by doing the swim. It was the smoothest water the Waconia Tri has ever had. Normally it's windy and choppy (last year they had to shorten the swim course due to adverse conditions). I tried to give it a pretty hard effort since all I had to do was the swim. Ended up finishing in 16:06 (1:50) pace. Was hoping for better but I guess that's what I get for taking such a break and slacking on swim training.

I handed off to Michael for him to take off on the bike. He was flying and ended up with a 18.8mph pace! I would have been no where near that :-P

Michael completed the bike and handed off to Mark to finish on the run. It got pretty sunny and warm so for the most part it was a hot run for him but he did awesome as usual averaging 7:37 for the 4 mile run and was in a neck and neck with another guy for the finish.

We placed 4th out of 13 in the mixed relay team category and 5th out of 19 in all relay teams.   We had a blast and are considering putting this one on the calendar again next year to make a push to place in the mixed category :)

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Other updates from me other than racing.....work has been going well but being inside all day long, sitting in one spot in front of my computer with no fresh air is killing me still. It really puts me in a depressed place some days. I got to work from home the past 4 summers and have the window open and spend time with my kitties so it's just really depressing for me.   Especially on top of how much I'm not able to be home with our traveling back and forth between houses.   I can't wait until we have one house and I feel like I can actually have a home and spend time there.   When I am "home" these days, I almost never get to do anything but laundry, dishes, feed the cats, unpack, repack and sleep. Maybe once a week I actually get to make dinner and watch a TV show but even then I'm usually having to watch TV and pay bills or something at the same time.   Enough of that....

Still trying to get myself feeling better about myself too. We are getting to the gym now once a week before Tuesday night swims so that feels great. That's another part of my life right now that is completely neglected due to time constraints.   Spending time on me.  Hair, nails, tanning, shaving....girly stuff that I always used to do to keep me feeling good about me. Unfortunately all takes time and money in some cases.
(didn't I say enough with the depressing stuff???)

Next weekend is Minneman. Not sure what that will bring since (again) haven't been putting in as much bike and swim time as I have in past years but I still love the race (it was my first tri) and am looking forward to doing it on Saturday.  Will be my 4th year in a row racing there. The one thing I shouldn't have just done is look at the field this year and look at my results from last year. Now I feel more pressure...5th last year out of 25 in my age group. This year there is only 15 in my age group. Better odds right, even if I'm not faster? And I think I can beat a 8:27 run pace this year....can't I? And I do have a new bike...?

It's 4th of July weekend too and is sounds like we might have a party to go to on Sunday but other than that it should be a pretty relaxing holiday and can get some housework done between Sunday and Monday. Probably work mostly on the remodel projects at Mark's house. Pending weather we are also hoping to get out for a mountain bike ride (or road ride if the trails get wet).

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades - Irvin 5k Recap

2010-06-23T12:55:00.000-05:00

'Close only counts in horsehoes and hand grenades" or at least that's what I've always been told. The William A Irvin 5k was not exactly what either of us had hoped it would be. I barely ran in the week leading up to the race as we were both tired and having a few pain issues. So that in itself made me doubt if I could make my goal at the race. We got to the race and it was hot and seriously windy!   I knew the heat was going to take a toll but we got in a short warm up and I tried to stay calm with my music in my ears.   We both ended up bringing out headphones and ran with music. We normally don't but figured it was worth a try.   The first mile for me was ok but my mouth was dying out pretty bad from the heat and wind.   7:12 (too fast)
Mile 2 the heat started to play a big factor and I could feel I was slowing down.   I tried to just put my vision onto the shoes of someone in front of me that I could pace. 7:47 (too slow)
Somewhere about 2.75 my legs wanted to fail. My heart rate was in the mid 190s and the muscles were getting shaky. I knew my chances of making my time were slipping away so I just pushed as best I could and hoped for the best.
I rounded the corner with about and saw the clock in the distance click to 23:00 and knew I wasn't going to get there in 18 seconds.   I tried to give it a little gas but there wasn't much left and I crossed the line in
23:29.6 with a HR of 199.

I was a shaky, overheated mess. But I guess it is a new PR so I'll take that.   Then I find out my "Age Group" is F19-34. WTF?? Thanks to this being some national race they use the age grading stuff for the age groups and mine is the horrifically large range so I landed 16/332 (and let's point out the two olympian female runners are in their early 30's). If it would have been the usual 25-29, I would have been 3rd. Seriously, damn it.....   Mark's age group was normal range 40-44 and even with missing his goal time by over a minute still WON his age group 1/42 :)

We enjoyed the rest of the weekend by doing some geocaching in the area and cheered on a couple friends of ours that were running the full marathon on Saturday.

Mark jumped on the course to run a few steps with his buddy Steve and take an action shot :)

All our friends finished and we celebrated that evening together before crashing in bed and having to make our way home on Sunday. We stopped at a few State Parks on the way home and I'll cover and post a bunch of photos when I write up the post "Grandma's Marathon - Caching Duluth and a Few State Parks" in our A Life More Complete blog. Hope to get that done tonight/tomorrow. Here are a few teaser pics of some of the places we visited. ;)

This deer was a great distraction to the not so nice encounters we had when we were here. Wait for my other post and you can read about it. Sigh....damn ticks....

So now what you ask?

Well, we are going to back off a bit on run training for the next week or so to recover and try to move the focus to include more lifting and biking. It's been a huge weight on my mind that we haven't been able to get strength training to fit into our schedule up until now. I have been kind of depressed about that lately and it just makes me feel a lot better about myself and how I look when I've been strength training. We got to the gym last night for some lifting before our outdoor pool swim with Masters. It felt great! Swim was a little "soupy" since it was super hot yesterday but we are both really enjoying the 50m pool.

This weekend is the Tri-Loppet and the Lake Waconia Tri Relay. We are doing the Tri-Loppet as a relay with our friend (my boss) Jeff doing the paddling, then I'll do the Trail Run and Mark will finish with the Mtn Bike. It's going to be interesting but I'm looking forward to it. Different is fun ;) The Waconia Tri we are doing with Mark's brother Michael. I will be swimming, Michael biking and Mark running. I've never been on a relay team so doing two in one weekend is going to be fun. Especially since I get to run one day and swim the next. BUT Waconia is notorious for having really choppy swims so we'll see what this year brings.

Oh, and this Friday night we are meeting with our Ragnar Team for dinner/drinks and hopefully finalizing some info. We may need to look for a replacement for one team member who has been non-existent and has not been replying to emails. Everyone else is on board and we've been having fun getting to know each other. Hard to believe that is less than two months from now too!

Manitou Triathlon and Preparing for William A Irvin 5k

2010-06-16T12:02:00.000-05:00

OK first I need to vent because I have had a crappy morning and for some reason throwing it on my blog makes me feel better (and will hopefully keep me from throwing something at our receptionist. I'm sitting at work right now and she is very poorly singing along to the radio. Seriously!!) Money has still been ridiculously tight and now I had to throw $443 at my air conditioner for my townhome. This morning my car was making a weird vibration (keep in mind I just had it serviced a few months ago) and the stupid unfriendly bank teller lady was making me mad because I just needed to quickly deposit a few checks and garage sale cash to pay down my credit card.   First she made me count all the cash, just to turn around and recount it and change my total. Then I had to use the change machine to count the change and she wouldn't take the full unopened roll of nickles.   Add on that my escrow refund check from my old loan that still has Kevin's name on it that she wouldn't deposit without his signature and I had HAD IT.   My nerves are shot already this morning and it's barely 10am......

Anyway.....moving on......

The Manitou Triathlon has been renamed this year to the Optum Health Performance Triathlon.   Both Mark and I didn't know what would happen at our first triathlon of the season since we had only been to one lake swim. Honestly the night before the tri we were contemplating not going. We were tired, it was a 4am alarm, we didn't feel prepared.... But I knew Mark would be disappointed if we didn't go and likely I would be too. Plus my USAT "boss" is the race director so I would feel horribly guilty if I didn't show up :-P We arrived with just enough time to pick up our stuff and quickly get setup in transition. Then it was about 1.5 hours before our wave start so we relaxed with some friends that were racing.   Warming up before the swim start wasn't much of a warm up since I didn't get very far in the water. I was shivering from how cold the water was so I decided to just get wet and wait for my wave.   The swim went ok, I was a little cautious to keep my head up and not get smacked.   Weeds were pretty thick too but they don't bother me too much during a race.   It was two laps and the second lap I had plenty of space for about 2 minutes until the wave behind me caught up and I got a bit ran over.
I was surprisingly dizzy getting into T1 so it was a bit slow getting my bike shoes on but I got out on the bike course just hoping my bike would stay in one piece this time. Weather was cloudy and kind of cool so riding was great. It was a rolling hill course and I tried to use the downhills to recover some speed although some spots in the road were rough and I didn't want to risk being in aero in those areas.
T2 was a sigh of relief because I made it through the bike with no issues!   :D :D
The run was great although a tough start as usual. Body just isn't used to the bike to run transition yet for this year.   The course was nice and flat and pretty much exactly what we ran for the Jump To It 5k so that was a nice flashback since I had a good run that day. I was running probably 90%, not wanting to blow everything I had on this race since the Irvin 5k is this coming Friday.
Overall I was satisfied with my times: Swim: 18:14 (pace 2:05) Bike: 44:00 (pace 18.4) Run 24:53 (pace 8:18) Age Group placement 7 out of 19.
Unforunately no pictures to post from this event, at least yet.

Last night we went to our first outside Masters Swim at the New Hope pool. Unfortunately there was also a group of young kids taking up 6 of the 8 lanes with a coached swim so they annoyed me a bit.   But it was our first time swimming a full 50m pool.   Wow I was thrown at first, I took off for the first lap and I had NO idea how far I was from the end. But it was fantastic to be able to swim that far and concentrate on technique for much long before having to turn around.   My typical stroke count in a 25yd pool is 20, in this 50m pool is was 52.   And it was fun being out in the pool while it was starting to get dark and they turned the lights on. One of the last laps I did, I was turning around at the far end and looked up into the sky. There were the coolest clouds from the rain that had been passing through the moon was shining brightly. I actually stopped for a few seconds just to take it in. I LOVE being outside :)   This evening swim is available to us now Tues/Thurs nights through July.

We are running a small bit this week in prep for the 5k on Friday but I have no idea how it's going to go. I just don't have confidence that I can shave off enough time to make my 23:18 goal. I'm considering putting the headphones on for this race. Might as well try right? It's going to be a fun weekend away in any case.   We have our 5k on Friday evening then we have at least 3 friends running the marathon the next day so we will be on the course cheering for them and then partying away the evening. Sunday we need to make our way home again but our plan is to hit a few of the State Parks and pick up the Passport Club, Hiking Club and Safari Challenge Geocache at each one and still get home before too late.   We have a tendency to want to spend too much time exploring the parks and before we know it, we are out of time. But it's fun :)

Legends 5k and My First Annual 29th Birthday

2010-06-11T21:51:00.000-05:00

Seems like I'm on a two week posting routine. Honestly I think about writing just about every other day but by time I get home and have time, the mental energy is gone to sit in front of the computer.

Let's get the 'blahs' out of the way first.

Work:

Don't get me totally wrong, I love what I do, I just can't stand WHERE I have to do it. I knew it would be hard for me to transition back into an office again but now that the weather is nice, it's sucking the life out of me. Have to stand up if I want to see out the window, none of the windows open, the other people in the office chew their food like they were born in a god damn barn and I live off frozen meals or cans of soup. I know I could get out and walk or whatever for a break but it's isn't as refreshing as you think walking up and down Washington Ave by yourself. And not to mention all the driving I have to do while Mark and I continue to have to maintain two houses. I literally get only minutes outside in the fresh air before it gets dark. Otherwise I'm in my office or my carThere may be a day in the future where I can spend some days working from home and that will help and I desperately hope that when we get our own office, I have a window I can open right next to my desk!! I'm not an indoors person and I got to have my home office and my windows and my kitties and my run breaks all the time for over 3 years so lately my routine is doing nothing but severely depressing me. Bleh....ok moving on....

Memorial Weekend:

Mark and I had a ton of garage sale items on my parent's sale again this year. I was super excited that I sold my road bike before the sale even opened. Listed it on the Craig's List ad and a guy responded Tuesday, came out to see it Wednesday night and paid cash. I couldn't believe both of our old mtn bikes and my road by were sold by the end of day 1 :)

Memorial Day we went to the Gunther's House for their "Mixed Up Tri / BBQ party" They were doing a group ride, transition, group run, transition, group swim. We opted to sleep in a bit and skip the bike but we got there in time for a 5.5ish mile run and then a swim across the bay (about 2/3 mi). It was our first time getting back in the lake this year so it was nice to get back in and get used to lake swimming again.

ALARC Legends 5k

We planned for this race to be our last "tune-up" leading up to the William A Irvin 5k (our goal race). We knew it was a smaller race and the way things had been going at the other small 5ks we have been doing, we knew there was a chance to place well again. Especially since there was a partnered 10k which a lot of the faster runners there were doing. I was focused on my overall time but I knew it was going to be hard to get a fast time since this course was hilly and we've been racing flat courses until now. The first few hills shot my heartrate up pretty high but we got on the limestone trail before mile 1 and stayed on it until about 2.75 maybe. My body calmed down a bit from the hills once I was on flat ground for a bit and I realized I was first place female. (sweet! but will it last.....) Somewhere around mile 2 I could definitely feel I was losing steam and the HR wasn't coming down from 190. The last .2 or so was back up a somewhat small grade and then to the finish. There was no "push" into the finish but I still managed to cross as the first female and landed a time of 23:58 - AVG hr 186.

Minneapolis Marathon:

We volunteered as course marshals for this event the day after Legends. We might run the 5k event they have here next year but we'll see. (I have a bit of an issue with the group that runs this but I'll keep that to myself.) We were around mile 4.5 which was perfect. We got to see everyone go by and then we were off to chase down Mark's brother Michael as he was running his first full marathon. We saw him right around the wall of mile 20 and then again at the finish. He did awesome! I know he really wanted a 4hr marathon, I did too when I ran my first one but it's harder than you think and the sun came out to heat him up midway through the race which didn't help anyone I don't think. I always look back at my first marathon, not happy with my time but I try to remember all the things it taught me and apply them to my endurance runs.

My First Annual 29th Birthday:
We started the celebration by going out with our Groupon coupon to Forepaugh's Restaurant in St. Paul. It was this great old house converted to a fancy restaurant. We picked up a cool geocache in the area before our reservation but I'll talk about that in my post on our "A Life More Complete" blog.

The morning of my birthday was just another morning, followed by just another work day. First time in years I went to work on my birthday. Would have taken the day off but trying to preserve the vacation days for the wedding :) Thanks to my birthday showing up on all my "friends" Facebook accounts I got a ton of bday wishes on there all day long which was great. Also a few phone calls and text and emails :) That evening we went out for dinner with my parents at Houlihans. I was uber excited that I got a DSW gift card from Onyx the cat, an Olive Garden gift card from mom and dad and the best of all....Mark got me a gift card to Sanctuary Salon Spa to get my hair done!!!! OMG you have NO idea how badly my hair has been needing a makeover. Long story short, I made it all of two days before I made an appointment for my fancy new 'do. Love it!! I also got a great Fuschia plant from Mark so now my patio actually has color :)

Wedding:

Things are still progressing on the wedding front. Throwing $$ in all directions but things are slowly coming together. I think I'll start trying to be more consistent and post wedding updates only on our "A Life More Complete" blog and/or the wedding webpage on The Knot.com. If you all follow me on Twitter, I usually send out a note when I update either of these pages.

Training:

Has still been pretty much run focused and even that has been suffering due to lack of time/energy lately. My bike is being picked up from the shop tonight probably. Had the crank arms looked at and basically they said the true fix is to buy new ones ($170-ish) but for now the temp fix is lots of lock-tite. Sigh.....

Masters swim is now offering outdoor evening swims at the New Hope pool Tues/Thurs nights so starting next week we are going to try for that option the next two months and see if that is better on our schedule. I think we can stay up later much easier than we can get up earlier while we are still doing the two house thing.

Next up:

This weekend we have the Manitou Triathlon. That should be interesting considering we haven't really done any bricks and only one lake swim. I think our multisport season this year is going to be based around fun and not speed. And I guess that's ok. buy my competitive subconscious tends to make me feel crappy about not being in top shape for tri's this year.

Gear West Duathlon and lots of updates!

2010-05-30T22:39:00.001-05:00

Geocaching update:

Last weekend we went to the spring MnGCA event and had a really great time. For more detailed information on our adventures in Nerstrand Park, check out my post about it on our "Life More Complete" blog. Below is a fun picture of Stage One of a LONG 3 stage multi you'll have to read about.

Wedding Update:
Again, more info on our "A Life More Complete" blog post but what I can add here is that we have been concentrating on decoration ideas. We found that since we are both a touch creatively-impaired, it seems to help if we page through wedding magazines and play off what we see in pictures. Latest ideas, there will be mile-marker type signs involved in our walkway to the main reception that will showcase some fun pictures of us.

Financial Update:
Yuck, yuck and more yuck. Still struggling more than we would like on this front. Fortunately we just got through the garage sale and managed to make just under $800 at that but the unfortunate part is that a few days ago my air conditioner at my townhouse went on the fritz and will need to be looked at next week. (Weekend calls start at $200 so we decided to stick out the warm days and give the cats extra cold water) We're hopeful that it's just in need of freon but due to the weird noise it's also making there is worry that it's a problem with the compressor. Best I have heard is a minimum of $1200. The universe doesn't seem to want to give me a break. So if you could all send some luck my way I'd appreciate it.

Racing update:
Last weekend we had the Gear West Duathlon. Weather was great! We weren't going to "race" by any means but basically make it a great training and then hopefully win at the raffle. Mark's brother was also racing and we found a few other friends by the start line so everything was starting ok. The first run leg I held back a bit and paced with a friend of mine Sarah. I rarely run into her so it was nice to get to catch up a bit. After about half way through I pulled ahead to run a little faster and came into the T1 feeling pretty good. Here's me getting out onto the bike. I look happy....this will soon change....

I settled into a comfortable pace. Nothing too hard, just a comfortable ride and pressed up the hill that was somewhere around 6 and began the downhill after the turn. All of a sudden it felt like my left foot came unclipped so I tried to readjust. Something felt odd and I looked down to see my entire left crank arm attached to my shoe and NOT my bike. Long story short I spent a long time pulled over until a gear guy came by and helped me fix it as best as possible. Neither he nor I had the right size wrench to fully tighten things back together so I just had to soft pedal on my left foot the remaining 12 miles. It came off 2 more times and I ended up stopped quite often to tighten it up best I could.

Now those of you that have been reading since last summer know I have a bit of "history" with biking. Psychologically this little incident took a major toll on me. I rolled into T1 so far behind I could hear them talking about where the final biker was behind me. I got off my bike and fell into a panic attack. Mark was already done and when he saw me in transition and thought I had a fast time, I began to freak out even more as I just got mad and told him I hadn't started my second run yet, I was no where near done. The "pissed-ness" was radiating out of me and I couldn't calm down enough to breathe normally and had to give in to walking a few times. I was emotionally beat up. I began to think about all the issues I had last summer and how this was the first race on my NEW bike since Ironman (and we all know how well that went) and this is the NEW bike that I paid a lot of money for. How could I still be having bike problems? What the hell?!?!

My wonderful friends all spent a few minutes consoling me after I crossed the finish line. That was where I couldn't hold it in any more and just broke down. It shouldn't have been that big of a deal but I think due to all the problems I had last year, having another major problem was detrimental to my mental state which took me physically out of the field. Mark being the wonderful supporter he is helped me walk it off and remember that life will go on :-P Below is a picture we took while waiting for the awards and prize drawings.

Training Update;
Everything is still pretty much focused on the 5k time for the Irvin 5k. Although we are starting to get a little worried about how warm it might be since it's an evening race. We've been back in the pool now at least once a week and last week actually made it twice! I keep forgetting we have a sprint tri coming up in two weeks so we're looking to find a few nights to get back into the lake too. Tomorrow a friend of ours is having a Memorial Day Tri BBQ where we will get in a group run and a group lake swim so we'll see how that goes. Funny how every summer it takes a few times in the lake to really get used to it again.

Other Update:
We got out on our mountain bikes today for our first real mountain bike ride. It was my first true mountain bike ride and I found out that my instincts are that the bike will react like my road bike which is very much NOT the case. It will take a bit for me to learn how the bike manages certain types of terrain and how to tackle different obstacles on the track but I enjoyed the ride. It's so much fun to be off road and get to see a lot of areas you would normally never go.

Ciao for now ;)

Three in a Row! and maybe a 4th...?

2010-05-24T18:53:00.000-05:00

OK I seriously think I take way too long to get these posts up but honestly it's time consuming and my time is already fully consumed! Plus I think I'm always obsessed and slow at compiling pictures between my phone, Mark's phone and the camera and then putting them into a post.

I have three races to report on. Two of which I'll cover in this post.

First is the TC 1-Mile. This was my second year running it down Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis and I had been looking forward to it. All out for 1 mile, that's it. It was a pretty cold evening and it started raining a bit while we were waiting for our wave to start. Here's my being REALLY excited about it starting to rain :-P

Mark's buddy Steve was also running his first TC 1-Mile and you can see him with his hands in his pockets behind me in the above picture. White shirt, black pants.

And of course Mark got this great shot of us before the start of the race too. Say Hi again to Steve taking a picture of himself as well off my right shoulder.

I wasn't sure what to expect since I thought I got a pretty fast time last year (6:57). My shins/ankles have been giving me on and off problems too. The first 2-3 blocks were a lot of people dodging to get out in front of the wave so that took a slight bit of energy. Once I got some space I settled into a hard pace that I thought I could hold on to. Amazing how after training for distance running, one simple mile can feel SO long! I crossed the half way clock and thought I was going to die soon. HR was pushing 190 and I wasn't even half way yet. Hit a little bit of headwind for a block or so but nothing horrible. I got close to the finish line and saw it was getting closer to my time from last year.

"Crap, I'm going to miss this PR. I was SURE I'd be faster than last year! "

So I booked it with my last ounce of energy to cross the finish line as fast as I could. If you need proof, see the really awful picture of myself proving I was working hard....

Bleh!

In short, we did end up finding out the clocks were a few seconds off and I actually DID get a new 1-Mile PR 6:46 with an average HR of 186.

Our friend Steve had an awesome run as well and is working on perfecting his one handed post-race portraits. Nice work Steve!

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This Saturday (yesterday) we had the Spring Fun Run here in Eden Prairie. This was a circular course, mostly flat that we chose as our tune up "B" race for this weekend. Weather was pretty cool but warm enough that I could sport my new SkirtSports running skirt (love their stuff!) It was a very small race and mostly run by teenage girls as it's a "Girls on the Run" event. I figured Mark and I had a chance to win at least our age divisions again but my focus was soley on just being faster than my 23:51 from Jump To It. With our "A" race coming up in less than a month now, I can actually find myself getting nervous at the starting line of these "B" races.

We starting on the front of the line but as I figured, we were quickly overrun by teenage girls starting out MUCH too fast. Took a bit of dodging but not too horrible. My shins/ankles have still been getting hot and with about a 10 minute warmup pre-race, I was feeling pretty good about a mile in. I had no idea what pace I was going, just trying to push 90% of what I got. I was starting to get very winded by the time we were coming up to the only small hill on the course so I pushed up it hard hoping to recover on the downhill. No such luck, I couldn't get my heartrate back down so I know my pace was suffering somewhere just after the 2 mile mark. Hit a headwind coming towards the finish line for this one as well and crossed at a clock time of 24:03.

Damn, 12 seconds slower than my PR.

I figured between the humidity and my shin/ankle pain, I was slowed down more than I had hoped. BUT there is rumor that the course was actually measured to be closer to 3.2 miles. Which would actually have brought my time down to almost exactly what I'm shooting for as my goal at the William Irvin 5k. How to know? Did I get a 4th PR? We may go measure the course ourselves one of these days to find out for sure :)

And once again we proved picking the small races can have advantages, Mark and I for the first time ever made the "Top 5" lists on Online Results. How cool is that?!? He and I both got 2nd in our age groups as well.

So now I have to move to a new post about the Gear West Duathlon since I figure getting 3 race recaps in one blog post along with a personal update is going to be a bit straining for my readers :-P

Two PRs in a Week?? - Jump To It 5k

2010-05-10T14:35:00.003-05:00

Mark and I are at a point in our 5k training now where we need to run "B" races every other week now until Race Day (June 20th). So last Saturday we went up to White Bear Lake for the Jump To It 5k. Course looked nice and flat, fit well on our schedule and was reasonably priced.

It was friggin' cold for May 8th. The start line temperature was somewhere in the 40s so neither of us had any idea how that was going to affect our performance. We did a good warm up around the block a fwe times and lined up. 10k and 5k runners started at the same time so the start area was pretty crowded. Both courses were around the block and then an out and back. Mark and I both new we had to try to be consistent and not over or under run our first mile. Well at mile 1 I was supposed to be shooting for just under 8:00 min/mile and I was at 7:08 min/mile. Shit.... All I could think was that I was going to be burned up by the last mile and that I already screwed up. But I tried to keep moving in the range of 90-95% of what I had in me. I was a lot further towards the front of the pack than I'm used to so that was kind of cool.

"Hey...maybe with this race being small I could place in my age division?"

Then as I was nearing the turn around I saw Mark already on his way back. Wait a minute....there was NO one in front of him. He was leading the 5k! 90% of everyone in front of me/us were running the 10k. I got to the turn around and was turning the corner at 2nd place female.

"What the??? Nah this won't last, some speedy will fly by me soon."

I was exhausted and didn't know what I had left in me but I was always in sight of the first place female. A guy that I passed even yelled to me "First place female is just ahead, go get her!" That was cool to actually be in a place to be chasing first place but I knew she was way too far ahead and I was way too low on gas to catch her.

I came back to the finish and we had to round the damn block again and I made a peek behind me. 3rd place female was at least a block length behind me and I had very little left for a burst to the finish so I just tried to keep as consistent. Flew through the finish line with my HR at 196 at 23:51.

"Holy crap! I just pulled another new PR and finished as second place female. Seriously?"

Ok, here's the proof....

Mark was the overall winner which he was VERY happy with on top of managing his goal time for the day.

(You kicked tail Honey! <3)

Notice the female that beat me got EXACTLY what my goal is for the Irvin 5k so visually I could see where I want to get and how much farther ahead that was.

"Yikes....."

The total field was only 107 people that ran the 5k so our chances were pretty good but neither of us ever thought we'd come to this race and win our age groups.

"Yeah it's a tiny race but we are SO putting that on the calendar next year ;)"

We hung around to claim our 1st place medals and take a picture by the finish. We also got to see most of the speed demons doing the 10k finish at faster paces than we finished our 5ks. The 10k was obviously the "main event" which is what gave us our opening to place high in the 5k. I beat my old 5k PR by 15 seconds with an overall HR average of 188. So putting the medal aside, I was very happy we came and did what we set out to do time-wise. Next "B" race (tune-up) is in another two weeks and my goal for that one is going to need to be like 23:40 so we'll see if I can get there by then.

So last Sunday I PR'd at the half marathon and this weekend I PR'd at the 5k. Not a bad week :) But now it's on to see if I can make it 3 PRs in 12 days....

Mark and I have the TC 1-mile this Thursday. This is such a fun, arse-kicking race. The one and only time you pay money to go flat out for less than 10 minutes, feel like death and get a t-shirt :-P (Well and also get into the lottery for the TC 10 mile.) This one is also fun in the fact that the people going to win it go last so you actually get to watch them run in. The male winner last year broke 4 minutes and went home for I think $25k. Not bad for 4 minutes of work ;)

Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon - The Unexpected New PR

2010-05-05T12:05:00.000-05:00

This past Sunday was the Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon. This is my third year running this event and I've come to like this course a lot. Not super easy as there are a number of hills but it's got about 3,000 runners and this year was their 30th anniversary and were giving away finisher's medals. Swag snob that I am, I couldn't NOT run....I wanted the medal :-P

Mark and I have been concentrating on our 5k speed so I haven't had much of a focus on the half marathon distance in terms of training. The thought was to go and do this race for fun, get in some long distance training and enjoy the day.

Yeah..well that went out the window around mile 6, and in a good way.... Let me explain starting around mile 3...

Below is the downside of what I affectionately call "that damn hill". It's the hill that has kicked my butt every year right after crossing Hwy 15 I think and as usual I was dreading it again this year, but we rocked up it and I WASN'T dead. In my head I was like "Huh? Where did that come from? Oh well THAT went good but I'm sure this energy won't last, we haven't been training for this distance." We were on the downhill when Mark took this picture (you can see him in the shadow)

Then a little while later my body was still feeling pretty strong and Mark again took a photo of us while we were running. How he does it so well I have no idea! :)

So on we went and for anyone that races and knows me pretty well, you know I despise knowing where I'm at time-wise in a race.   When I'm feeling good, I don't want to know how fast/slow I'm going because it subconsciously makes me want to change my pace.   BUT around Mile 6 I was still feeling really good and holding what felt like a good pace so I peeked at my watch...."what the? That's a sub-9:00 pace. That can't be right....wait (calculating....) yep. Wow! Crap.....now I have to push for a new PR...."

Little did Mark know I was continuing these thoughts for the rest of the race. Trying to be casual and not get all worked up about what may or may not actually happen at the finish. I just kept pushing a long a little faster than what felt comfortable and my body kept coming right along with me.   Granted it was a perfect temperature for running, sunny with a nice cool breeze so that likely helped me a lot. I am not one to do well when I'm too hot or cold.

Around Mile 11 mentally I started to REALLY want the finish line but I was trying hard not to psych myself into feeling more tired or push too hard.   If you ask Mark I think this is about where I started to get pretty quiet as I zoned into my happy place.   In my head I was thinking "c'mon you could PR today, you don't know why, you don't know how but just keep moving!"

We got on the trail with a little over a mile to go.   Here's a picture Mark took at the Mile 12 Marker.

I could hear the finish line more and more as we pushed through the last mile. HR was in the low 180's starting that last mile and I was NOT prepared for the new finish. Instead of going from the trail onto the road through downtown that was relatively flat, the last maybe quarter mile was on some pretty good rolling hills through the backside of town. Once we got off the trail Mark started to pull me along and we took off just a bit faster. I spotted my friend Jon near the finish. Always a great distraction when you see a friendly face! The last few blocks we fired up the calves, quads and heart rate and pushed into the finish holding our hands together in the air. HR - 195.

In my head I was thinking:
"ok catch your breath and THEN look at the watch....don't be disappointed....you may not have done as good as you thought....just know you felt good today....it was better than you expected"

Mark:
"Check it out, you just finished in 1:54:51"

Me:
"Say what?!?!? That's 3 minutes off my old PR. Where the frack did that come from?

In my head:
"Yippie skippie! Holy crap! Yippie skippie!"

So we grabbed a few quick snacks and a few finishing photos together. This one below is my favorite

Unfortunately we didn't have time to stick around as we were headed to the Minneapolis 10 Years of Geocaching get together and were going to be cutting it close to get there in time. That write up will be on our "Life More Complete" blog hopefully within a day or two.

So I was pleasantly surprised with this run and as usual, give a lot of credit to Mark for my success. I don't think I would push as much without him being by my side. Love you Handsome ;)

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Oh and the afternoon we had a short conversation about what it would take for each of us to qualify for Boston. Quite a bit faster than that pace but hey, on a good day you start to wonder what's possible....

5k Training and Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon

2010-04-30T22:14:00.000-05:00

I feel like I've bounced back and forth with wedding updates.   Tonight my write up is on our "A Life More Complete" blog so go there to check that out.

I just wanted to quickly update on training. We are still concentrated on 5k speed and Wednesday we went to Core/Speed class at ALARC where luckily the "speed" part of the group was doing track repeats.   The schedule was to do 1 mile repeats but a few of us were kind of doing our own thing.   Mark and I needed to do 1/2 mile race pace repeats with a few minutes rest in between.   I did manage to make each of the 5 repeats on pace but my heart rate was averaging high 180's and my legs were Jello.   I did what I needed to do but I can't help but keep thinking.....how the hell am I going to keep up THAT pace for 23 minutes and 18 seconds?!?!?

And unfortunately when we got to the Wednesday night training, we got out of the car and out of no where I started feeling a pinch in my right glute/hamstring.   It hurt when I walked but was ok while I ran.   By the end of the evening and most of the next day it was tight and painful mostly behind my knee (argh!!!) But luckily today (Friday) it seems to be mostly gone.   I've been taking Advil and using BioFreeze so I'm guessing that helped it heal.

Short easy run tomorrow morning and then we are off to a geocaching 10 year anniversary event for the afternoon and getting to go to the Owl City concert.   I managed to win tickets from 101.3 KDWB on Twitter :D   Then we are both hoping for a soak in the spa.   Sunday morning is the Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon.   We haven't been training for this distance so we are mostly doing it for fun (and the 30 year anniversary finisher's medal). I keep telling myself this race is for fun but subconsciously I know I want to still pull at least an OK time.   Not wanting to push for a new 13.1 PR but at least well under a 10 min/mile pace average.

We are hoping to maybe make some time and find mental/physical energy to get out on our road bikes this weekend.   3 weeks until the Gear West Duathlon and I feel like my attempt at that race is going to be a complete joke at this point.   I haven't been on ANY bike for probably more than a total of 3 hours since last September. (another sigh....)

Weight loss is ok but very slow since I'm not honestly trying very hard. I want to be but just not quite sticking to it. Especially with all these free dinners and drinks we have been getting lately for wedding events. Still targeting another 4 pounds by my birthday (June 7th)

Trying not to be too depressed over our housing situation. Absolutely no idea how we are going to come up with the spare cash to make the downpayment so I get really bummed out thinking we are going to be married and still live in TWO houses :( In the meantime we are working on going through all of our stuff to get rid of what we can at my family's garage sale at the end of May and get my placed cleaned up for showing. Whenever that can actually happen. Stay tuned....

No swimming or biking but running! Housing, wedding and training

2010-04-27T21:57:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to get around to writing this for a week or so now but as usual, the few times that I do get time to sit still and think about it, I don't want to do anything other than NOTHING. So while I may skip some details of the past few weeks, I'll try to get you caught up again.

Trail Mix 50k relay - This was a really fun race. Granted the near perfect run weather and fantastic trail conditions probably had something to do with it but I would definitely recommend this one to anyone.   I was happy with our time (Mark held back to run with me) and just enjoyed the great run.   It was a relay that we did with my friend Mandy and Mark's friend Steve. It was a little different in that we all started at the same time, ran the same distance and our times were just added together to come up with our final result.   I ran the 7.75 in 1:15:55 which was a 9:48 pace.   Considering trail runs are harder and I wasn't really pushing for speed, I'll take it.

Run Training - Been going pretty well although mentally I'm feeling under conditioned since I haven't been doing any strength training which is one of the first things that was drilled into my head by my trainers and coaches.   We've been trying to run 5-6 days a week with a long run on the weekend and a speed training day usually on Wednesdays. The long training is longer than typical 5k focus training but that's because we have a few longer fun races planned and would like to come out without injury.   Next being this weekend at the Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon.   I've done this race the past two years and this year is extra special since it's their 30th anniversary and are giving out finisher's medals.   Yes....I am a swag snob :-P

Diet - So while we kind of let the diet go loose on what was supposed to be the final few weeks leading up to Mark's 40th Birthday (ps we had quite a fun weekend so checkout the blog write up on that) I did manage to weigh in last week at 144.5 lbs so I have technically reached my goal but I have decided to try to spend the next month leading up to MY birthday to continue the diet with a small change to now budget in calories lost from workouts to get down to 140.   I can tell my clothes fit better but I worry a lot lately that some of that weight is muscle loss.   I have only been running for the past few months. No swimming, no biking, no weight training. It's eating me alive that I have no drive to squish any of this into my schedule. I want to WANT to do these things but I'm just too worn out and tired.   Which leads me to my next topic...

Searching for a house - Now that Mark has a full time job and is no longer a contract worker, he has provable income and we have been working with my past saviors (during the buying of my townhome AND the refinance after my divorce) Chris from Bell Mortgage and Tyler from ReMax. They are doing everything they can to help us get everything in order to sell my house, rent out Mark's house and buy ONE house for us to live in. Keep in mind with 5 dogs and 2 cats that I will NOT EVER let come into contact, we have a few unique needs but nothing that crazy.   Some days I just fall to pieces being so tired of maintaining two house and 7 pets. It's so much driving and wears on me mentally, physically and emotionally. I know Mark has the same moments from time to time as well.   So having one house just sounds like the ultimate answer right now.   One house, one set of house payments, less time on the road, more time for the pets, more time for us.....   I feel awful right now that I'm never home with my cats.   I am the type of person that feels sick if I don't get fresh air so I feel horrible that I'm not home to give them time with me and with the windows open.   I'm having a horrible time being ok with having to go into a stuffy cubicle every Monday through Friday but that could be a whole different blog post. I love my job but I literally feel sick thinking about being in cubicle conditions for much more of my life.   I need fresh air, I need sunlight....(at the right moment I'll likely want to blog and freak out over this issue to all my readers but for now I digress)....There's one big problem, we can't make a move until we can figure out how to come up with about $8,000 for a downpayment.   We just don't have it anywhere, nor can we save that kind of cash while maintaining two houses and trying to get married.   I'm very nervous that this is going to keep us from being able to get our new home :( So much is really on hold until we can figure this out or find a way to borrow the money. Stay tuned...

Wedding plans - are going along but not too quickly. Again, not much time and not much money.   We did spend this evening at Atlas Grill for a complimentary tasting session. Wow, the food there is unbelievable! Plus the "tasting" was basically a full 4 course meal for both of us. We are considering this location for a special party before we go to Vegas for the marathon but nothing set yet. We are also going to a wedding band expo on Friday night to see if we can find Mark a ring.   And I'm trying to find the time and energy to put together our info on TheKnot.com but just haven't gotten to it yet.

So that should get you up to date for now. As with my last few posts, I really am going to try to get into a habit of posting shorter posts more often!   Please send us good luck to either win the lottery or "accidentally" come into an extra $8k that doesn't have a catch of some sort!

Money, money, money! Outbound that is...

2010-04-15T09:27:00.000-05:00

As usual things have been crazy and the only reason I have time to catch up right now on my blog is because I'm stuck at Walser waiting for my car Engine light to be checked.   Ugh....another who knows how many $$$. Luckily my deductible is $100.   Money has been going out much faster than coming in lately.   Yes I did make the decisions to put the mountain bikes on my credit card AND buy the Tri bike so I guess about $1600 is not necessary outgoing money but oh well.   I am getting a tax refund but on the flip side Mark is going to have to pay in.
While we're on the subject of money, Mark and I have been attending wedding fairs and small expos we've been invited to and getting more ideas on things.   Here's what we've got so far:

1) Found a great cake place last night in Edina (Queen of Cakes) that we think we are going to sit down with and talk about cake designs and options for late night cupcakes to go with the snacks around 9pm
2) Think we have a pretty good idea of what we are going to do with our "wedding party" to celebrate before we take off to Vegas. Details will come later as I don't want to ruin the surprise until we know for sure
3) We've got the colors pretty much figured out for our decorations/flowers but need to start talking with different florists to see who we want to use.
4) Putting down the deposit today on our reception site (The Garden Room in Eden Prairie)
5) I need to find running shoes for the marathon/wedding.   Being as I'm going to be completing the marathon in them, I'm pretty particular on which brands/models I'll buy but I need to find ones that are white or mostly white with a pink that matches my pink top.   Then at the same time we need to try and find all or mostly black running shoes for Mark.   I love Asics and Mark runs in Mizunos. Anyone have ideas on where to look?

Not much new on the housing situation. Our mortgage guy is looking through our stuff now to determine what we need to do to get our credit in line and apply as soon as Mark has his first pay stub or two and we are meeting with the realtor next Thursday over coffee just to start talking about what we are looking for so he can have that in the back of his mind.

So in terms of training I've been really stressing out. We just don't have the time to get in anything but running. We are so exhausted from driving all over the place that we don't have the energy to get up really early in the morning to run before work (and then have one of us have to run home before work) or get to the gym to strength train. That is the biggest stressor for me.   Ever since I first started training for anything, trainers and coaches drilled it into my head that if you want speed to run, you need to incorporate strength training.   We haven't been in the gym for probably a month.

Last night we went for a tempo run around Lake Calhoun.   Without my Garmin (it died...) I have no idea how fast I'm running and we figured I should be running 50 seconds between the 1/10 mile markers. Well unfortunately they are not clearly marked all the way around the lake and I knew I was just about right on during the first mile.   Then I lost the markers for awhile, my heartrate was in the high 180s, low 190s and I caught a set of markers and I was sure I was running them at a 1 minute interval.   I was beat and I wasn't keeping my tempo pace (so I thought) so I pushed hard and when I saw the next 1/10th was close to a minute again, I basically had to slow nearly to a walk for a minute to catch my breath.   I don't know what my body/mind problem is but that was a bonified panic attack.   Never EVER had them before last year's training.   I was devistated that I didn't think I was on pace.
I finished the run feeling like I was going to die, knowing I basically ran a race and not a tempo run because I thought I wasn't going fast enough.   But as you can guess by my wording, what I THOUGHT wasn't right.   I actually ran a 5k in 24:28(ish...couldn't look at my watch right when I stopped because I was dying so I think it was about that)   That was about a minute or so faster than I was supposed to run and 1:10 slower than my final goal I want to run at the Irvin 5k. So I've got two months to figure out how to shave off 1 minute and 10 seconds (pray for me......)

Next up is the Trail Mix this Saturday. We are running it as a 4 person relay team. 50k total but each of us run about 7.75 miles.   Mark, myself, my friend Mandy and Mark's buddy Steve are doing it together.   Should be a lot of fun as I'm getting more and more into the trail running thing.   Although trail running takes MUCH more out of me than road racing does.

And I didn't get into the ING New York Marathon so unfortunately I won't be running that with Mark but I did decide that I still wanted to do something long distance so we can kind of train together. Although I can't keep up with him so we'll be doing more support roles while training for these two. I'm going to do Surf the Murph. It's a small race in terms of field size but I've heard it's a great course.   It's a trail run south of the cities and is the weekend before New York.   I haven't decided yet if I'm going to do the marathon distance or the 50k (31ish miles)   I've read that the marathon course is a slightly different route and is actually harder terrain than the double loop 50k so I have to think about that.

For now, I have to go grab my rental car and head to work. (Should be about $123 when I pick up my car later. Would be more if not for my service plan)

Wedding and Biking and Triathlons...oh my!

2010-03-25T13:04:00.000-05:00

The weeks have been busy as always and when I do finally make my way home, I just can't pull myself up to the computer to write up a blog entry.   I find more and more lately that staring at my computer all day makes me uninterested in looking at it in the evening, especially when we have so little time to sit still as it is. But I really do think about catching my blog up just about every day. Maybe sometime soon I'll find a pattern that will make me more consistent :)

Mark and I have been back in the pool a few times and have promised ourselves to get our butts back to Masters in April. He's been working on bilateral breathing and I'm trying to concentrate on technique.   Still not done any biking but I'll touch on that more here in a minute. Running has been the bulk of our exercising and it's been great since the weather is finally getting nice. We are in the base week of a 5k training plan aimed at the Irvin 5k on June 18th. Unfortunately due to our crazy schedules we've missed the sunny early evening and get stuck running near sunset but I just try to breathe and remember that hopefully somewhere in the next year our housing situation will be resolved.

This weekend is ALARC core class Saturday morning, a MNOC orienteering event at Hyland park in the afternoon, Wizard of Oz at the Orpheum that night THEN Sunday morning an LTF Indoor Triathlon again in Maple Grove, the big wedding expo in the afternoon and possibly a bike ride on our new bikes after that. More about the "new" bikes in a minute.....

Quick note on that, Mark has landed a new job that he will start in a few weeks and will becoming an employee of the contract house so we should be able to start looking at qualifying for loans in another month of two. I think I mentioned this before but we want to stay somewhere on the west side of the cities and need a two level house. Cat level and dog level :)

This last weekend we volunteered for the Team Ortho Get Lucky 7k which was fun. We did packet pickup at Kieran's new location in Block E on Friday evening and stuck around for a drink and dessert. Saturday morning we course marshalled on the west river pkwy and thought we could take off for a run right after that. Unfortunately we got roped into a few other volunteer jobs and didn't get out of there until noon.   Due to needing to get ready for evening plans we didn't get in our run.   Mark went gaming with the boys and I was out for Girls Night with Joni and Deb. Always a fun time to catch up with them and we tried out the new JJ's Coffee and Wine Bar in EP. Great place to hang out for a simple dinner and glass of wine and great service.

Sunday we slept in ( yay!! :D) and headed over to a small wedding fair in Chanhassen.   I think we came out with a few good ideas and even won a 50% discount on DJ services which we think we are going to take advantage of.   It's always fun to walk around those expos sampling too many pieces of cake and telling people about our destination wedding and waiting to see if you get a "wow fun!" reaction or a deer-in-the-headlights "what the hell would you do that for?" look and a "oh, wow, that's nice" reaction. I personally like getting a mix of both to keep things fun :-P
We do have the big Twin Cities Wedding Fair coming up next weekend and after that we are going to start making some decisions and probably putting down the depositn on our reception site. I think the Garden Room is still coming in first place due to the great space and price but we'll see if we find anything else.   Still struggling with that to do for the wedding party for the reception in terms of their attire....

Diet has been going ok although we have been letting ourselves slide quite often here and there but still feeling like progress is being made. Maybe just a little slower than I would like.   One thing I taught myself again (for about the 20th time) is NOT to go running on an empty stomach. We tried to go for a 3 mile tempo run last week around Lake of the Isles after work and I hadn't eaten anything since lunch. Horrible stomach pain and thought I was going to puke a few times. Argh.... hopefully I've learned THIS time.
I have come to what has been a barrier for me in the past.   Last week I weighed in at 145.5. 145 has been a sticking point I have gone down to and back up again a few times now over the past years so it will help me physically and mentally to get below that number. Yesterday....still 145.5 (sigh...)   I think my body naturally wants to stay at 145 and getting below that is going to be hard to do and maintain. And maintain enough strong muscle for racing so we'll see if I get much below it in these last few weeks.

And Mark and I made the decision to buy mountain bikes and start adding that to our repertoire. Since we've gotten into trail running, this will now also get us into off road triathlons and adventure racing as well. I am a complete novice at real mountain biking so this is going to be a learning experience for me. Hopefully one that doesn't include any broken anything on my body!

And i'm looking at buying a tri bike. I just CAN'T tolerate the idea of ever getting back on my road bike. It's a mental thing but I think I would break into tears if I had to use that for another season. So I found a barely used 2008 Felt S32 for sale and long story short, I'm picking it up tonight and putting down a deposit to try it out for a week. I want to try it out and get some opinions on the price he's asking. I've been told from two sources already that I shouldn't pay more than around $700 for it but he's asking $925. But I'll work negotiations once I decide it will work.
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And to finish off, my random little story of the week:
I had gotten another betta fish a few weeks ago and one day we were sitting near the tank and I looked at it....looked at Mark and said "uh...where's my fish?" He had no idea. I thought maybe it died and he was nice enough to flush it for me before I saw it but that wasn't the case. After much confusion and a little investigation, I figured out that I left the tank lid open and he jumped out, falling to his death in my recycling bag. The bag was all crumpled up too since the cats were trying to get at him but they failed. We found the poor little thing dead in the bottom of my paper recycling. I was truly bummed but learned never to underestimate a normally docile betta.

Week 6 and 7, Wedding Updates and Training

2010-03-10T08:06:00.001-06:00

I feel like I start out this way alot but once again I'm behind in blog posts! I think about writing all the time but just don't seem to actually get around to it. So I'll apologize if this one is a little "jumpy" in topics!

The diet is going ok although we have been letting ourselves slack a little this past week. Last week I weighed in at 146.5 which I was happy with. But this morning after two days of overeating I was up 1.5 lbs.   Argh!   But I guess the good thing is that I know why I didn't lose weight this week. It's my own fault and now I just have to work to correct it.

Run training has been going ok. Since the weather is finally getting up in the 40's (F), Mark and I have been outside for a few good runs. The current plan is to concentrate on 5k speed but get our long runs up to 1hr 30 min before the Lake Minnetonka Half on May 2nd.   I know I still owe you all a list of which races we are signed up for :)

This past weekend Mark and I did the Lifetime Fitness Indoor Triathlon at the Eden Prairie club.   I think had we not signed up and paid for it ahead of time we may not have made it there. Motivation and sleep has felt low lately and I'll get into that more in a minute.   The indoor tri was 10 minute lap swim, 10 min transition, 30 min spin, 10 min transition, 20 min treadmill run. I knew I couldn't push too hard on the swim or bike since training in those areas has been lacking but I was basically ok with how my swim went. The spin was ok, just found a comfortable mid-level pace where I could still talk and managed to keep my legs moving.   I have been on a bike seat MAYBE 2-3 times for a spin class since IMoo.   The bike was really what makes me regret all the time I wasted on that one stupid race. But someday I'll come out of that funk and maybe accept my finish. May require a good psychologist but definitely no budget for that.

I digress....

The run was the one real spot I felt (and I think the same goes for Mark) that I could really try to push a little.   I started off at 7.5mph and felt pretty good only being 0.5mph behind where Mark was but of course as he increased his speed, I had to throttle back to 7.0 for the last few minutes and then bumped up to 8.0 for the last minute or so.   Heart rate average was somewhere in the mid 180s topping out at 193.   Here's a link to the results if you wish to see: LTF Indoor Tri - EP

We also have been passing back and forth this nasty head cold over the past month and that's been our reason/excuse for not getting back to swim training at Master's in the mornings.   I am feeling increasingly guilty ever day I'm still not going to swim training but at the same time I am SO tired in the mornings that getting up seems much more painful than another hour or so of sleep. We do still enjoy going to Core with ALARC at least once a week for strength/core training.

I am looking forward to the trails clearing and drying up soon as I want to get out for some trail runs.   I'm looking forward to giving that more of a try this year. Just to mix it up a little and it will also come in handy for our other adventures of adventure racing, orienteering and geocaching mega events that will be talked about on our combined blog.

Wedding plans are going pretty well.   I had the thought of unveiling the plans more grandly than this but I think I've got to just find one of those planner pages to fill out and keep you connected to as I make updates!   (Suggestions anyone other than The Knot.com?) So the countdown clock on my blog is headed for Dec 5th, 2010. For those of you that don't know, we have decided to run the Las Vegas Rock and Roll Marathon that day and get married at their "run through" ceremony.   Go to the website and click on Entertainment and then "Run Through Wedding Ceremony" We run/walk to mile 3.5 where about 50+ couples will either be getting married or renew their vows under the Eiffel Tower at the Paris hotel, we kiss to seal the deal and then take off to finish the marathon.   We met running, got engaged on a run and now will get married on a run.   We wanted to do something different and unique and what would be more fitting?   We are planning to come home and have a reception dinner and dance probably the following weekend.   We have checked out a few venues, one in Eden Prairie right now is the front runner.   The top choices we looked into were Guthrie Theatre or Mill City Museum (can we say WAY expensive!?!) and the MN Zoo (which will be closed for rentals next winter for construction).

Kinda bummed that money is coming in the way of doing something downtown since we both also have a love for going to downtown shows and restaurants but I guess it's more important we try to save some money to hopefully get a house together.

Currently we still aren't in a place financially to be able to house hunt so our motivation and sleep has been lacking to due the fact that we still need to do a LOT of running back and forth to end up in the same spot in the evenings and keep the cats and dogs taken care of. Hopefully we can at least start looking before we get married as I think it will be slightly depressing to be looking towards our first anniversary and still have two separate houses.

So this weekend is a fun 5k for St. Patrick's Day.   OSE Shamrock Shuffle. Results to follow....hopefully less than a week later :-P

Week 3 and 4

2010-02-23T18:59:00.000-06:00

The past few weeks have been a little trying on the diet since we had quite a few things going on. So the past two weeks basically ended up a wash. No gain, no loss.   Sigh....   I'm trying not to invision any changes showing up tomorrow either and I guess I'm better off with no expectations and be surprised.

We've been out running a few times which has been refreshing although I still struggle with feeling like my athletic ability is ever going to be anything worth anything. We've also been to the pool a few times but no adventures on a bike seat (which will likely crush my mental stability to a pulp for awhile)

We are hoping to get back in the pool on a regular basis starting in March with a new morning swim training routine.   Running just happens whenever possible and we try to fit in strength training once a week.

I'm feeling a little spratic today in my writing but I wanted to get something down. The lack of sunlight and mileage driven on a daily basis definitely takes a toll on our free time.   And yes I'm sure you've noticed most of this entry is "us" and "we" (and I love it btw :)

Wedding plans are slowly taking shape. We are going to a few wedding expos over the next few weeks and will hopefully find some fun creative ideas and then I can give a better report on the plans.   In the meantime, you'll all have to watch my wedding day countdown clock, make your best guesses on why we chose the date we did and be patient until I have enough to "unveil" to you.   :)

Yukon Days and A Very Shiny Surprise

2010-02-08T22:04:00.000-06:00

This this past Saturday we decided to participate in the Yukon Days 1 mile race. Thought it might be a nice little speed challenge and then we had the option to run in the 5k afterwards as well. Plus, they were giving out sweatshirts instead of t-shirts :) We didn't really think much about it but the course was on the lake for both events. Our original intent was to do the snowshoe 5k but we ran out of time and didn't find a place to rent snowshoes.

So we got there and trekked out onto the lake for the start. We decided to each run our own race so as usual, Mark was off like a flash. I trotted along trying to build speed but quickly got frustrated by the loose footing. A few inches of loose snow and a frozen lake below. Ugh....it sucked all the energy right out of me. I was beat and my ankles were not happy by the half mile mark. Right about that time I got passed by a little old lady and mentally I gave up and just tried to survive the rest of this #&^#&a;! course. 10:32....utterly, disgustingly awful for me. Mark had an awesome run although he will tell you differently. But we finished and looked at each other and thought the same thing. We're done....not running a 5k on that footing! So we grabbed a glass of water and left.

The rest of the day consisted of some geocaching and Mark's niece's 3rd birthday party. Those items we will cover in our combined blog.

But let me jump to Sunday.....

So Sunday we didn't have any plans until the evening when we were going over to Mark's brothers house to watch the Super Bowl. We decided to sleep in and then leisurely have some breakfast and after caring for the dogs and cats, head out for a run around Lake Calhoun. There was some significance to choosing to drive over to Lake Calhoun instead of running by one of our houses. Exactly one year ago, we first met at Lake Calhoun when a group of TNTers got together for an early run before the whole team met up. There was instant sparks from that day forward. So we were out for an easy run, reminiscing about that day we met and the past year. Along the east side of the lake, we ran by a bench that we have stopped at a few times in the past to sit and chat and people watch. It became a special spot for us. So when we came around the second time, I failed to truly notice that Mark just happened to have to fix his shoe right by our bench. We stopped for a moment, I stretched my calves while I waited for him and when I turned around to look at him.....

He was down on one knee holding the most beautiful ring I've ever seen. (well...I did help pick it out awhile ago) I was stunned, excited and no longer noticed the chilly air. He asked me to marry him right there in a special place on a special day. I said "YES!!!"

The below picture is of me in front of our buried bench and our "witness" in the background. Somebody built a crazy looking snowman with antlers coming out of it's head

So now it's on to another chapter in life. I am engaged to the most wonderful man and I am very excited to spend the rest of my life with him.

And for those of you that are curious, yes I do know the WHEN - December 5th, 2010. We are going to run the Las Vegas Rock 'n' Roll Marathon and get married at the "run through" chapel. Hoping we can find some friends to join us that weekend but also know it's a lot to ask so I am starting to work on plans for a reception for friends and family when we come home. We want to have a fun, not so formal party but still somehow incorporate having a bridal party without the expensive dresses and tuxes. I'm thinking something like running skirts and cute running shoes or something for the girls.....I'm open to fun suggestions :) We met running, we got engaged running and we will get married running. Just can't think of anything more fitting for the two of us <3>

Week 2 Update - And Multisport Expo / InStep 5k

2010-02-04T20:57:00.001-06:00

So first thing yesterday morning we did our check on how the weight loss is going. I was excited to see a drop of 4 pounds after only losing 1 last week. Mark was quick to say "I told you so" since he's been telling me since last week that I would surely see a change. Yes honey, you were right and I feel better now actually seeing the change :) Looks like he and I might be flip flopping weeks. He loses more one week, I lose more the next. Works for me as long as there IS a loss of something.

Plus I've been feeling much better physically. The first week to 10 days was torturous on my physical and mental energy. I had stomach pains and just felt like not moving, I was OUT of energy. But the past few days I've been feeling much better. I think my body is finally in a rhythm with my new eating habits. (excluding Sunday when driving home after the 5k race in the morning and a full afternoon of caching I thought my body was going to shut down I felt so crappy and hungry!) It dawned on me today that what I'm eating during the day too has taken a drastic change for the better. Before, my foods were WAY excessive in calories and carbs. Today I looked down at what I packed for food and was pleased to know I was happy bringing an apple, clementine, raspberry yogurt with pomegranate seeds and a little leftover cornbread stuffing to get me through the day.

So back to recap this weekend.....

Mark and I were extremely impressed by the Multisport Expo we attended in Milwaukee this past weekend. Below are a bunch of pictures of what they all had going on. There were a lot of high profile vendors, great speakers and fun activities. I even ran into a couple of the Midwest USAT council members that had booths there and we all agreed it's crazy that USAT didn't have a presence there. I got to meet the Event Director, Hank, to briefly discuss online registration but I also connected with him that I would hopefully be able to bring USAT to this expo next year and spread the word to Twin Cities clubs about this event and the bike time trials. To be at something like this and NOT see Gear West red everywhere was just odd :-P I promised to pass the word along to Kevin at GW.
Here are some pics from the Expo

A view of some of the booths

The endless pool available to try

The portable showers :)

Team Bike Time Trials

Saturday night we took it easy. Mark picked up take out from TGI Fridays and a bottle of wine. We did some geocaching queries and then relaxed in the spa tub for quite awhile. It's so rare we get a relaxing evening since we spend a lot of time driving back and forth to care for his dogs and my kitties.

The next morning we got up to run the Instep 5k going on at the Expo.

Super cute puppy that ran the course

There were a few hundred runners there and it was a great course. Through the WI State Fair Park and around the Milwaukee Mile Race Track.

Here's me passing the Cattle Barn

Nearly perfectly flat so it was a perfect benchmark race to log for the beginning of my season. I didn't push hard but I didn't slow up either. Mark, as always, encouraged me along and I'm sure contributed to me being faster than I would have by myself. I was very content knowing I can mark the start of my run season with a 5k time of 27:20 (8:48 min/mile) and an avg HR of 179. Feeling like my 7:30 min/mile pace is actually reachable by mid-June although I know it's going to be a tough road to shave off 4 minutes.

Post race with my cup of pretzels

Here we are in front of the main park sign

After the race, we spent the afternoon geocaching through the area before heading home mid-afternoon. We will get the write up of the fun caches we picked up on our "A Life More Complete" blog soon.

Other updates - I've been going to Beginning Jazz dance classes at Zenon on Tuesday nights and that has been a lot of fun. I really miss dance. Although I have found I still suck at double turns :-P

We have Core/Speed with ALARC tonight which has proven to be a great addition to our weekly workouts.

Diet Update and the 2010 Great Lakes Multisport Expo

2010-01-29T14:58:00.000-06:00

This week has gone pretty well but I must say that my body has not been happy with this diet. My doctor swears I'm not diabetic (two people in my family are) but with how crappy I feel sometimes when I'm really hungry I have to figure something is off. Tired, headaches...just lethargic. Bleh..... But to try and combat that, I've been attempting to stretch out my eating during the day as much as possible as to not have massive gaps in between munching. Monday we went to Core/Speed after work and I felt like my body was going to shut down. Luckily Mark was full of energy and felt fine but part of me wanted to knock him over and steal some of that energy for myself. It was awful....

And to add insult to injury, he shows a noticable change at our one week "weigh in" and I only drop 1.5 pounds. The problem being that I have been flexing between 153-156 for months now so for it to go from 155 last week to 153.5 this week felt like I made no progress through all those days that I felt crappy. One week down, 11 to go. Sigh.... hopefully next week will show better results.

We are headed out to Milwaukee this weekend for the 2010 Great Lakes Multisport Expo. I actually found out about this at work since I was researching RACC and attempting to contact them and see if I could convince them to try ZapEvent for their online registrations. They actually put on the event and considering it's going to be full of race director's and event info, Mark and I figured it would be a fun reason to get away for a few days, check out more events to possibly participate in and network a bit for my work.

While we're there, we will of course take the opportunity to:

1) Geocache the Milwaukee area

2) SLEEP IN!! without being woken up by dogs or cats (but please note I will miss them dearly while we're gone :)

3) Run in the Instep 5k Race Against Childhood Cancer on Sunday morning

The Geocaching piece will be documented in our "A Life More Complete" blog so check there over the weekend for details on our adventures and finds. We are bringing a few of our new 2010 Coffee Love Pathtags along so drop in the area.

Farewell for now....

Securian 5K

2010-01-26T07:54:00.000-06:00

So now while in Day 4 of our strict diet, Mark and I were off to run our first "race" of the season. The Securian 5k. This was more of a "get the body back to moving" race, just for fun and to get the cool swag.

A big ol' mug and they had cool shirts this year but they cost us extra.

We started out by watching the half marathoners take off and wish good luck to Steve in a Speedo, who in this picture is taking a picture of the crowd lined up.

Here's me trying to stop shivering long enough for a quick picture

Anyway, I was feeling quite hungry at the start of the race but was hoping the bagel I had for breakfast would carry me through. It was quite a chilly start, a little windy and a little drizzly. Since we had to keep track of our own time, we just started at the back as to not get forced into a too fast pace or get trampled.

The first mile I felt pretty good. Didn't feel like I was moving very fast but not making any big push to go fast either. Second mile I started to feel the weakness in my legs. Crap....fuel tank was starting to be obviously low. Somewhere around here we ran past the caterpillar of runners from a local run group so I gave them a high five.

Mile 3....somebody drag me! I could tell I had no fuel anywhere in my immediate digestive system and I was running on mental energy alone. That carried me through (barely) and a drug myself up the final hill to the finish. Ugh..... You can see the "2" behind my head. Clocked showed 29:52 when we crossed. So minus the 35 seconds before we crossed the start line, our final time was 29:17.

What did I learn?? There is a VERY good reason to fill the tank before every race. I felt like crap for the rest of the afternoon. Tired, week, cramped stomach. Luckily (or unluckily for my diet) we were having dinner at my parent's house so I got in a good re-fueling. We went a little over in our calorie count for the day but oh well.

29:17 was our final time. Check our Mark's blog write up too if you get a chance. Faster than I thought it would be. Avg hr - 173

Here are a few other pictures from after the race. Of course we went straight for Caribou Coffee to warm up and had a quick chat with Dave Ryan, local radio talent.

And on the way back to the car we saw the mascot for the race and grabbed a quick pic with him as well.

Then, since we were in downtown St. Paul, we buzzed by where the ice sculptures were being displayed for the Winter Carnival. While I was freezing, it was just around freezing air temperature so many of the sculptures were dripping a bit but still very detailed and very cool!

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I've been doing very well keeping to my calories of this diet but have been feeling "bleh" more often than not. Especially when we exercise. It often feels like I'm going against everything I've been taught. You must feed your system in order to have energy to workout properly. I know it's just about losing the fat right now and needs to be about cardio workouts and calorie burning but it makes me frustrated that I feel weak and light-headed from time to time and can't keep up with the group. I want to be getting faster and stronger this year. How can I do that while feeling hungry and weak? Sigh..... The first few weeks are going to be rough but then we up the calorie intake a little for Month #2 to properly accomodate our workout schedule. Hopefully then I can feel like I'm making progress on both the front of weight loss AND speed/strength training. For now, I just have to keep muddling through and know the end result will be worth it.
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Next weekend Mark and I are headed out to Milwaukee for a Multisport Expo. Reason #1 to go and check out what's up and what's new and #2 to network and hopefully make some connections for work. There will be a lot of race directors at this conference and I hope to get to know a few of them enough that they will at minimum return my emails :)

And PS - I can't even begin to tell you how disappointing the Vikings loss to New Orleans was on Sunday. I'm going to be distraught about that one for a few days. Many mistakes lead to them losing that game and....I thought I would never say this but.... I actually feel bad for Brett Favre.

The Next 90 days

2010-01-21T11:39:00.002-06:00

Well actually today is Day 2 so technically it's 89 days. But anyway......

I'm totally going to cheat and cut and paste some information from Mark's blog since he's very nicely given the details on what our plans are for the next year, race-wise. I will try to get a complete listing up in the right hand column soon!!

I will second Mark first by saying that 2010 is shaping up to potentially be a banner year. Finally back in a full time job, getting slowly back on my feet financially, have a wonderful new relationship. I'm very excited for what is in store. The past few years have had anything BUT a bright outlook. I feel like I've finally plugged back into the world and am moving excitedly forward, For those of you that don't know, we also have a combined blog “A Life More Complete”. I invite you to take a look and see what we are up too when we are not racing or training, which is the subject matter for this blog.

When it comes to the fitness, racing, running, triathlon, multisport front, we have now pretty much nailed down our schedule for the year race wise, and we are now putting together the specifics of our training schedule. From a 10,000 foot view 2010 is shaping like this:

Jan 20th – April 20th: will be our 90 day get back into shape for the season and I will explain the 90 day thing in a minute.

April – June: will be focused on running speed with our goal “A” race being William A Irvin 5K where we both hope to set new 5K PR and in particular, I have a goal of a 7:30 pace, while Mark will fly by me shooting for a sub 20 minute 5K.

June – mid September: We switch to the multisport side of things and work on our speed during Sprint Triathlons & Duathlons, with the final race being a strange mix of speed and endurance at Burrito Union 10 Hour Triathlon as a two person relay team. (One of us completes a full sprint triathlon and then the second person starts the “next leg”, another full sprint triathlon on the same course, and then we alternate for 10 hours. I've heard such great things about how fun this race is so it should be quite the experience!

I also will be signing up for Minneman Tri again. PRAYING the equipment gods send me a new bike for this summer and I can again beat my time from the prior year. This race is definitely my "benchmarker" season to season.

September- December: Will see start switching back to running but in an endurance mode with plans to run the New York Marathon (I've got my name in for the lottery, Mark is already running for sure) in November, Las Vegas Rock & Roll Marathon in December and then after the first of the year, Goofy’s Challenge – Half Marathon on Saturday and Full Marathon on Sunday at Disneyland.

It is going to be a full year! Not only with our race schedule but we are also adding new components, winter sports (XC Ski and Snowshoe), Trail Running, Orienteering and Adventure racing as well. Most of those items we will blog about in our combined blog but I'm sure I'll touch on them from time to time here as well since some of that activity will be race type events.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So the 90 day thing......as usual we both gained a few pounds over the winter off season but honestly I've been wanting to lose a few more pounds than just getting back down to where I was last summer. I feel like I'm in "ok" shape now, last summer I was in "good" shape...but I'm shooting for "great". I haven't felt "great" for years in terms of how I look. Now that I have Mark in my life to help me better myself and be there training/racing right along side me, I feel confident I can reach my goals. I've been ridiculously over-eating and continuing on that path will lead to poor race condition for this summer. So Mark came up with the idea that we are going to take 90 days and get back into shape. Diet and Exercise. And it just so happens the end of that 90 days is Mark's 40th birthday. Figure it I get all back in shape I can count it as a present for him :-P

So here goes....all the stuff a woman normally won't admit too. But I want to get down all the "yuck" about where I'm at now so that I can have a "YAY!" blog to show how great I've done. Hold me accountable people.....

Current Measurements:

Arms - 11"
Waist - 28"
Hips - 40"
Legs - 23.25"

Weight - 155lbs

I don’t have any particular goals for the measurements, those are just interesting benchmarks; my major goal is my weight. The plan is to be down to between 140-145 lbs, lean and a low body fat percentage and then we are looking at doing the V2O Max and a new Bod Pod testing for body composition for additional benchmarks going forward.

So how do I (we) get from here to there in 90 days? We have joined ALARC and are attending their Speed & Core class; the classes are on Monday and Wednesday evenings and Saturday morning, which we plan on attending 2 sessions a week. We have also found a different Masters Swim group that is at 6-7am Wednesday and Friday. As much as we both love Scott’s Hopkins Masters group, the 5:30 is just too early for us and the 6:30 is just a little too late before work. We are also going to be on a diet and closely track what we eat with Livestrong.com’s Daily Plate.

We have already started getting back out and running this past weekend and our first race, just for fun, is this coming Saturday, the Securian Frozen 5K. A great swag race as they give out a nice coffee cup for finishing the race.

So there it is. We're in Day 2 and due to the massive calorie reduction I feel like I'm going to fall over! And thank the heavens I can still fit in my morning coffee with cream! But it feels good to know I'm doing it and I'm going to make it work. We didn't take "before" photos yesterday but I think we will do that tonight. But I might not post them until this is all over :)

A New form of Butt Kicking (and abs, and arms and shoulders....)

2010-01-08T16:14:00.000-06:00

As Mark and I are figuring out our working routines, training schedules and races for 2010 we heard about a group that sounded too perfect to pass up on trying. It's the ALARC running club and their Core/Speed progam. For what I consider a very reasonable fee, you can join them up to 3x per week for 1.5 hour session of core strength training and speed work.

Since we are just starting to come off of our winter hibernation we knew going into this that this could be a little tough for the first few sessions. And boy was it ever! Being athletes we were handed to the more advanced group. The session contained circuits of track running with alternating stations of core, legs and arms. The group leaders were fantastic and gave us great instruction on how to ease back into things and not blow out our bodies before the night was over. I was doing a lot of the easier positions and still came out exhausted, sore and hungry! All very good things! Here's the whole group during the warm up.

I think it's safe to say for both of us that we are HOOKED! And I honestly recommend this program to athletes of all ages and skill levels. The group leaders are great at giving options to increase or decrease difficulty and everyone is very friendly. They even all go out for food and drink after the sessions together. How great is that?! I really appreciate finding groups that not only have a strong focus on fitness but also on camaraderie.

And needless to say, now two days after the first ALARC Core/Speed session, everything hurts.....but it's a good pain ;)

Quick note on another subject, so I got my new trail shoes (first pair) and am super excited to try them out this year. You can see them on our other blog (A Life More Complete). I/we have a few trail races on the schedule to see what we think of going off-road. I can really see myself enjoying it. We opted to stay on the lower end of the price range since at this point, neither of us really know what we prefer in a trail shoe. I figure as we progress we can move up in price with the features we know we like.

And I promise we are working hard to get our 2010 scheduled nailed down so I should have my list up soon :)

Anyone have recommendations for trail shoes? Trail races in the Midwest?

Happy New Year!!

2009-12-31T10:03:00.000-06:00

Well once again I'm going to reference that if you told me last year I would be in my current situation/life by the end of 2009, I think I would have laughed in your face! So much has changed...

Bought my townhome
Laid off from my FT work from home job
Got two part time jobs with ties to triathlon
Got divorced (finally ok with saying the word!)
Met and fell in love. (With the type of guy I gave up on believing existed)
Found in incredible new hobby with Mark (Geocaching)
Turned over about 75% of all the people I've been hanging out with for the past few years. Some outside of TNT that looking back now, had a very negative impact on my life
My sister got divorced as well - who would have thought we'd share that experience!
I'm now working a FT office job downtown.
AND I for the first time in the past few years actually have a positive feel going into 2010!

Well except for the fact that training begins again with me losing the 7lbs of winter weight I decided to put on. Sigh....it's a vicious cycle I go through every winter. Mark and I are in the process of putting together our winter/spring training plan to get back into things. As I've likely mentioned before, this year is going to be all about speedwork. Sprint tris, short road races and even a few trail runs. We ordered trail shoes from Sierra Trading Post a few days ago. Got killer deals! We opted to stay on the less expensive side of things since neither of us have been trail runners before and don't want to spend a ton of money on shoes until we know what features we like.

Paypaya Yellow North Face shoes for me / Harvest Pumpkin Teva's for Mark (must have been hungry when we were picking out which colors we liked!)

So I think that's all to report for now from my side. Hope to get my tentative 2010 race listing up on here soon. We've been hashing out our schedule the past few days.

Tomorrow AM is the ALARC Ice Dive. Mark is classified as a Minnow right now. I am a Guppy. After the dive I become a Minnow and he will be a Walleye. I think I mentioned Mark and I are doing this with my friend Jess's husband Andy. She harbors the excuse that she's pregnant so she can't do it ;) Should be a blast and ^#&*^%# cold! Temperature should be somewhere around 8 degrees F above zero. Pray for me.....

Winter Waddle (or more like Struggle...)

2009-12-23T09:10:00.001-06:00

Ok so the holidays have been eating up a lot of our spare time the past few days so I'm a few days late in posting a few updates.

1) Mark and I went to the Tonic Sol Fa Chrismas concert last Monday.  Those guys are incredible and seriously funny!   Greg...you and the plastic snowman had me in tears I was laughing so hard!

2) We also went to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theatre on Wednesday. That was by far the best production we've seen there so far in my opinion.

3) Saturday we went out for a geocaching event in Waconia and also saw the Holidazzle parade in the evening (post-Winter Waddle). You can catch the recap of those on our other blog

4) But the main reason for writing today is to recap on the Winter Waddle 5k. Mark and I have been completely sloughing off on our workouts and enjoying a break from it all. Although once we get past the holidays I need to get back into some sort of routine. Feeling fat and lazy!!   And wow did that 5k kick my arse! Granted these were very different conditions than I was expecting.
Here's the starting line:

It was 20 something degrees I think and the race was at 4pm. The run route was actually on a golf course AND I was not prepared to be running through spots of up to 6 inches of snow! You can tell they went through and groomed the trail but the loose snow and breaking through the top layer as you were running made it pretty much impossible to get up any kind of speed.

Mark managed to run backwards for a few seconds for me to get this picture. I would have fallen flat had I tried that manuver

After about 1/2 mile, a lot of people had to stop and walk.   I managed to keep moving but only because I had Mark to pull me along and after about 1.5 miles we figured out (along with pretty much everyone else) that it was WAY better footing to run in a single file line and follow the tracks of the person in front of you.

I wish my heart monitor battery wasn't dead. I would have liked to know what my average was for that race.   At the end I estimated somewhere in the 180s. Ugh....yeah that was tough! Quite the experience, likely to not be repeated :)

Here is the sheet showing our final times.   WAY slower than what my "in shape" times but like I said, the super soft footing took a toll on everyone. For reference, most of the 5ks I've been too, the winners come in around 15:30 - 17:00 total time. At this race, the winner came in with a final time of 21:23.

The past two nights Mark and I have been gift wrapping for donations at the Barnes and Noble at the Galleria. We donated the money to Home for Life. I think our final total on the two nights was $193 so I was very happy about that. Likely we will be volunteering with them again on Saturday this weekend at the Mall of America.

Next up.....the ALARC Ice Dive! Yes I have committed to freezing my entire body in the name of fun and insanity on Jan 1st. Mark and I will be jumping with my friend Jessica's husband Andy. He is a newby diver too so it should be fun. Jess gets out of it with the excuse that she's pregnant :-P

Hopefully I'll have a post-Christmas update this weekend and also start updating my race list on the right-hand side of my blog for the tentative 2010 races.

Merry Christmas!!

Learning Curve (pictures!)

2009-12-15T22:21:00.000-06:00

OK here are the pictures that go along with my previous post:

A few more random notes:

Maverick, being upset with me as I'm taking his picture and then running out the door to work, leaving him and Neo home alone

Tonic Sol Fa concert from Monday night. We brought our picture that we got with the guys this past summer at the State Fair and had them sign it. Framing it and it's going on the wall :)

Home for Life - Mall of America. Mark with one last hug for Dodi before she was on her way back home to the Santuary.

Deb and Lily at the MN vs Cincinnati game. Lily's first professional football game and she had a blast! So did Deb :)

And some random cuteness of my Maverick as he insisted on finding a way for me to pet him and work on my laptop at the same time.

Til next time.....

Learning Curve

2009-12-15T16:41:00.000-06:00

So I have a few minutes here at the end of my day and thought I would take the opportunity to update the ol' blog.
The new job is going fantastic. I am getting the hang of things and enjoying getting involved in some of the new development projects.   Surprisingly even with a few crappy snowy days the past week or so, I'm not getting too stressed about the commute.
I'm so excited for Christmas this year. Well 90% excited.   I've 'bah-hum bugged' my way through the past few Christmases since life was a little stressful and emotional.   But this year I am very excited to spend time with Mark and his family and have him spend time with mine as well. The reason for the 90% as I'm still bummed out about not having much of any funds to spend on Christmas.   I have to give these small gifts to everyone and I hate that. I love shopping and wrapping (and having the cats tear my wrapping!) and having piles of gifts for everyone to open. But this year is definitely slim and for that my 100% goes down to 90% but that's still about 85% more excitement than the past few Christmases :)
I'm still trying to figure out out to motivate myself back into the gym. Mark and I have both found that we've fallen into that winter "rut" that so many people do and just lack the enthusiasm to find a way to work it into the already short days. It is eating at me more and more that I feel "bleh" and need to get back into a routine of lifting and cardio so I feel better about myself.
Sort of along that lines, Mark and I have also been in many discussions trying to figure out how to be the best support system for each other when it comes to racing.   We both are very supportive of each other and we both (well a little more on my side) have lingering issues of jealousy when one of us is doing an event and the other one isn't.   I think most all athletes have a hard time being a spectator to some degree. It's hard to watch anything and not want to be participating. I've been a gumble bum about feeling like I have to sign up for everything he does and that does two things 1) doesn't give him me supporting him along the course and 2) sometimes puts me into a race I am not excited about doing, just so I can say "I did it too".   Part of me thinks that if I'm standing around as a spectator, other spectators don't think I'm an athlete and that reflects negatively on me. I look like just a lazy spectator. (yeah, yeah i know it's insane but maybe some of you other athletes out there can relate).
For any of my readers, please drop me a line or comment if you have any feedback on this issue.
For now we are really looking forward to racing together this next year but we are also going to be careful to add in a few events that we don't do together.   I think it may just be a learning curve where we get used to the fact that we don't have to do everything the other one does. I think it will also make the races we do together that much more special.
A few more random notes:
- The cats are doing well although it's very obvious that Maverick doesn't like me not being home all day now. Some nights when we are at my place he is very needy and needs me to hold him all the time.
- We were at the Tonic Sol Fa holiday concert last night and, as always, it was fantastic!
- We have tickets to go see Christmas Carol at the Guthrie tomorrow night.
- It's fun that Mark and I both enjoy going to shows, musicals, concerts together and we have been getting some great deals at the Guthrie.
- I actually finished another book!   I know, I know...can you believe it?   I've become a reader! Since Mark and I have been together, I've finished "It's All About the Bike", "Dewey", "All Creatures Great and Small" (audiobook I listened too on my commute) and am currently reading "The Man Who Swam the Amazon".   I've definitely found that right now I prefer non-fiction where Mark is more of a fiction reader.    He's got this monstrosity of a book he's reading right now "Under the Dome" That thing is like weight lifting!
- We helped Michael and Cari (Mark's brother and sister-in-law) move into their new house last weekend. That was a long time coming for them
- Last weekend we also volunteered for Home for Life at the Mall of America and might be going again on Sunday the 20th. Waiting to hear back if they need us and it's possible Lisa might bring Olive for me to hang out with and show off next time (yay!!!) And she also said she'd be willing to bring one of the Dobermans for Mark to handle. Haven't gotten a response yet but my guess is she'll say she wants our help.

So tonight it's off to Target to pick up a few necessities and maybe one 'want'. I honestly can't afford any 'want' items right now. Even groceries puts me in the red on a monthly basis. But thankfully the new job should help resolve that a little. Plus Mark offered to buy groceries if I make him meals.   DEAL!!! Especially since most mornings I can get away with putting a bowl of cereal in front of him :-P But I'm more partial to bagel sandwiches.

I've got a bunch of pictures from some of the items I mentioned above but I'll try to post those tonight in a follow up entry.

Living History Farms Race

2009-12-07T22:04:00.000-06:00

Ok, ok I'm FINALLY getting around to writing up my post on the Living History Farms Race. Wow what insane fun! So we drove down the night before to Mark's cousin Eric's house. Mark played the cousin card and we got a free night stay :) Although Eric was having a small party when we got there and in the morning I think forgot we were sleeping on his futon.

He rode down to the race to spectate and also played photographer for us. Although for this photo we recruited a bystander.

When we first started at the gun, it was nothing but shuffle-fest on this paved road for probably the first 1/2 mile since it was a mass start of 7,500 people. We were not racing by any means but just wanted to participate in our first off-road run race and see what all the fuss is about. There were probably 5-10 people actually seriously racing for time on this course and the other 7,490 were there for a good time and most were in costumes. Everything from jailbirds to crayons to the barefoot runner in no more than a loincloth to Santa tethered to his 8 tiny reindeer.

The course started out on the road, then on a dirt road, onto a farm field, ok then a couple potholes...nothing too bad yet...then we hit the first of eight creek crossings. You could choose to go THROUGH the water or skip across the top of a few rocks but either way you had to get up this muddy embankment on the other side. Ugh, I just got my hands all dirty....Wow that was fun! Then it's through the woods, back across fields, and around to the creek again. Hm....I turned to Mark, we paused, I said "I Love You" and through the water we went. There was NO way around it so I just shrugged and got all wet and muddy. Coming out the other side the trail was so wet and slippery it was hard to run with any footing. And granted another situation where I learn how bad road shoes are on trails!

To shorten what could be a lengthy description, let's just say the rest of the 7 miles went though the creek 6 more times. Most times were you could go through ankle deep water, or knee deep water. Up the smaller hill or up a muddy incline that requires you to rope climb. We opted to take the harder, wetter, muddier routes. What the hell....we were having a blast!

If you look to the left, you will see Mark waving. Eric caught this picture when we were closing in on the last mile or two

Unfortunately the hills were very tiring and after the last romp through the creek we had to run up this hill along a farm field and for whatever reason my body went into meltdown. My heart rate and respiration got faster and I even got a little tingly in my face. Body brought me to a walk for a few minutes. Very weird! But then we got back into rhythm on the downhill and rounded our way through the Farms and across the finish line.

Here's the best shot we got of Santa and his reindeer coming in to the finish line.

This race I think has one of if not THE best post race food. BEEF STEW WITH CORNBREAD!!! Here is us stuffing our faces.

And here is us after we snuck back through the line for a second helping :)

We couldn't stick around long as we were wet and getting cold and wanted to try to grab some caches on the way home before dark. You can catch up on the details of that adventure on our other blog A Life More Complete

Here's a few pictures of how dirty I got. Honestly could have been much worse. Kinda wish we would have dumped ourselves into a little more....why?....because we could :)

We stopped by Perkins at the end of our day and devoured an order of boneless wings, chicken sandwich with fries and here's what's left of when we devoured the cookie sundae for dessert.

All in all it was a super fun race and we plan to go again.   Possibly in costume ;)

A quick update, personally I haven't done ANY biking since IMoo (ugh...).   We've been back swimming a few times but it's proving to be difficult to get into a 4:30am wake up call to get there.   We have to be up that early for me to get all the way home to take care of the cats first, then to 6:30am swim, get ready for work in the locker room, grab coffee and get to work before 9am.

Been horrible with getting to the gym for lifting. Probably a total of 3 times since IMoo for that as well.   Honestly I'm feeling fat and lazy.   Put back on the few pounds I lost this summer so I'm disappointed in myself for that.   And going into the holidays is a near impossible time for me to be in weight loss mode.   I just have to work not to gain.   What can I say...I love food :-P

Mark has somehow gotten me to start reading books. Really for the first time ever. I've never been much into reading unless forced by a teacher. But I've found I like to read non-fiction books. Amazingly I've already finished Lance Armstrong "It's Not About the Bike" and "Dewey" and I'm currently reading "The Man Who Swam the Amazon" and I'm listening to "All Creatures Great and Small" on audio book during my commute.

New job is going really well.   I think I'm surprising myself in knowing more about my job than I realized coming into it.    http://www.zapevent.com/ for those of you that don't know that is the new company I'm working for. We are an online registration company so if you are a Race Director or organizer for company conventions, call me and I'll help you get setup online for no fee! -end of pitch- support@zapevent.com   email that and you will get me :)

Back to the Pool and a New Job

2009-11-12T15:44:00.000-06:00

Quick update.....after two months off from swimming, Mark and I managed to get our butts out of bed for the 6:30am session this morning.   It actually felt a little awkward for a few laps and a LOT tiring but we both survived and hope to stay in the rhythm of swimming 2x per week.

We have been doing a little running and NO biking :D :D (still excited to be away from that damn piece of equipment).   Unfortunately the new Tri frame I thought I was going to get and make work from the Foundation ISN'T going to work.   There are major parts issues and I'm just going to have to give it back. Damn it...    Plus I guess I feel like I need to give it back for a second reason....

I HAVE A FULL TIME JOB!!!   Yes folks, I have accepted a full time position as the Administrative Assistant at ZapEvent.com.   I'll make it a short story and say that I wasn't really actively looking for work and just sort of happened upon this opportunity.   The situation is that the Foundation can't offer me a full-time position and without a full week, I can't keep my bills paid without collecting partial unemployment.   And that runs out in January.   So I am officially done with the Miracles of Mitch Foundation next Thursday.   I'm starting at Zap tomorrow. Putting in a few days trying to get setup around my Foundation hours.

I'm excited and nervous.   I am going to have to get into a true morning routine again, And commute again. Maybe even become a bus rider from time to time. The office is just inside downtown Minneapolis on the west side so I'll definitely have to learn to deal with rush house.  But I already have my parking space :)   It's going to cause Mark and I to "juggle" our routines quite a bit more to make things work but we'll figure it out.   Workouts are likely going to have to be in the mornings (to be successful and/or not skipped in the evening) so we'll have to get our butts out of bed a little earlier but he's willing to make it work with me for getting to the gym and continuing to swim.   Best...guy...ever...

I am SO excited about my new job, don't ever doubt that.   But I am nervous about getting in my workouts.   I'm used to quite a bit of flexibility and now time is going to be a lot less flexible. I'm going to have the three days off before Thanksgiving so if I'm really ambitious, I may kick start my body by spending those three days in the gym.

Final race of the season

2009-11-03T09:01:00.004-06:00

As you can probably tell by the infrequency of my blog posts, the season has winded down. At the Plymouth 5k, I got it in my head that I wanted to try to race for a PR at the Monster 5k. I pulled a 7:45/mi at Plymouth and I wanted to spend a few weeks concentrating only on 5k speed and try to reach 7:30/mi at Monster. Unfortunately I am not as hard core as I'd like to be and cold, rainy weather, difficult evening schedules and hating getting up early kept me from training the way I had hoped. I did absolutely nothing the entire week before the Monster 5k. So I figured I had to let that goal go until next year. On top of not training, I got a pretty good head cold.

The day started out with Mark racing the Half Marathon and his buddy Steve racing the 10-mile (his first). Mark, even with also taking a few weeks off from training managed a fantastic race, making his goal of a sub 1:40:00. Hey, 1:39:59 (officially) definitely counts :)

Steve had a great time racing the 10 mile and successfully finished the race with a smile.

My race wasn't quite as exciting. I started a little cautiously since my cold wasn't helping me breathe very well. But unfortunately my ankles/shins were heating up. I tried to push through it for awhile but at about mile 1.5, I had to slow down. It was starting to hurt to much. I can push through being tired but not pain. So unfortunately I was feeling like I was hobbling through the rest of the race. Finished in 26:16 (8:27/mi) in pain. I had to try and walk it off and rub out my shins. I was so bummed out. What the heck is the problem? Was the Plymouth 5k time just a fluke? Sigh....

But after the race we snapped a few pictures and caught up with Michael, Cari and Michaela. Michaela was dressed up as the cutest lion but was a little upset since she wanted to go swimming. Hard to convince a 2 1/2 year old that the lake is a little too cold in October. So Dad (Michael) got her a cookie and all was better :)

Below is Steve, myself and Mark at the finish area,

So what's next?

Well there are definitely a few fun 5ks in the potential future over the winter but we are going to try to concentrate on swimming and strength training for the next few months. Unfortunately I wanted to start back swimming today but my head cold is keeping me from breathing so that didn't happen. And as far as strength training, I/we need to work on developing a routine to follow as I'm not very good at just showing up at the gym and figuring something out. Just has never felt effective to do it that way.

Also, there is a potential I'll be starting a new job downtown. I don't want to jinx anything so I'll wait to give you the details. But it would be a major change in my day to day schedule and figuring out how to spend time with Mark, the cats, the dogs, at the pool, at the gym and sleeping may be a bit of a challenge to get figured out since I haven't had to commute for over 3 years now.

Quick training update and Margaritas

2009-10-14T10:24:00.004-05:00

So the weather has gotten bitter and has chased me indoors. I am trying to stay focused on training for the Monster 5k but I've been allowing myself to slip from time to time. This past weekend Mark and I ended up getting a TON of little projects done around our two houses and didn't get in any running. But I was completely ok with it because I think we were both very happy to make progress on our houses since they have been neglected all year.

My hopes for training the next few days is to get in some sprints on the treadmill tonight and try to get in an easy run tomorrow and then a pace run on Friday. My goal is still to try and shoot for a 7:30 pace but we'll see, confidence isn't up right now for that. The weather is supposed to be much better this weekend and our schedules are pretty relaxed again so hopefully we'll get in a longer easy run as well. For me an hour would be plenty. Mark is doing the Monster 1/2 marathon so he needs a little more distance than me. I still feel really bad that he had to resort to this race and can't go to NYC this year. He was really looking forward to it but luckily he still has a guaranteed entry to go next year and since we will be spending much of the late season next year training for running only, I think it will fit in really well for him. I might try for the lottery for NYC next year too, we'll see.

This weekend we are looking forward to a MnGCA event in Afton. I haven't been to one yet so I'm pretty excited to check it out and get us another state park in the Safari Challenge. For those of you that have NO clue what I'm talking about, see how I'm earning my nerd points here.

A little life update:
I'm looking to hopefully complete my refinancing on my townhome within the next few weeks. I am very thankful that my loan officer is getting my a great deal that I can actually afford when it comes to the closing and this will actually bring my mortgage payments down just a touch per month. I'm anxious to get this taken care of so Kevin and I can finally begin untangling our money since currently we still have bank accounts together. This is mostly due to the fact that I can't get a credit card until we both have our loans closed off and I'm off of his. Once I get my credit card I can have some room to take over all my monthly payments. Unfortunately I'm still going to go slightly into the red on a monthly basis but doing my best to try and remedy that. I've got another income prospect I've started on so hopefully that will ease the pain a little here and there and keep my bills paid.

I've also gotten to be quite the coupon clipper along with taking every survey I find that I can win stuff. Currently my fingers are crossed for the $5000 at Home Depot, $1000 at Target or $100 at Caribou Coffee :) Oh how I miss going shopping....

A quick picture since I can't seem to go a post without one....
Fromt left to right, Deb (my sister), myself in the middle and Joni (our good friend) try to get together for a Girls Night dinner every few months since it's so hard to get together with our schedules. Thanks to a free burger coupon I had, my dinner only cost me $8 for a margarita. We decided we are renaming our get togethers as "Margaritas and Chocolate night" since we always splurge to split a dessert too :)

TC 10-mile

2009-10-09T21:59:00.009-05:00

The TC-10 was a great race and we were just out there to have fun. Luckily it wasn't as cold as I thought it could have been. And we decided to wear our Caribou jerseys to see if we could get a rise out of the crowd. Plus we just like dressing the same for races. (aw! I know)

The first couple miles we had to take it at a slower pace since my shins were a little warm and I knew if I didn't give them time to warm up and relax I would be paying for it for weeks. So by mile 3 we were cruising along at a comfortable pace. Normally by mile 4 the mile markers start getting farther and farther apart but surprisingly they were flying by. I was having so much fun with people in the crowd cheering "Go Caribou!" and "We love Caribou!". We were having a blast and were thoroughly entertained. Hopefully someone from corporate caught that :)

We saw a few friends cheering along the way. Jon, (one of the best cheerleaders ever!) was on the bridge leading over to St Paul.

Then we saw Steve Scarrow (have to use the last name since we now have two Steve S running friends) just up the way.

Then we saw a soon-to-be chicken making his way to the cheering spot with another chicken, a pig and a cow. He wasn't in costume yet since he just finished the 10-mile himself but hung out to cheer on all the marathoners. Here's a link to his video of the farm animals. Love it!

We finished up in 1:32:(something). Considering I wasn't going for any speed I was very satisfied with that since it was a 9:15 pace. Mark and I started and finished together but somehow that little bugger got his timing chip foot in front of mine and crossed the finish one second before me which landed him a 9:14 pace. Seriously? Yeah, for real :-P

So Mark has gotten incredibly good at doing the self-portraits of us but for some reason this one was hard to line up.

The Many Faces of Mark

Happy!

But that's not going to work (Me -3/4 smile)

Content.

A little closer but not the right background (Me-still smiling)

Concentration.

Would have been good but a little too serious there Mark (Me - cheeks in pain)

Happy! Yay!

Now we've got it :D (Me - smile stuck, too cold. Can we go get some coffee now?)

So now my concentration is on nothing but 5k speed for the next few weeks. Today (Friday) I actually ran 15 minutes on the treadmill before I went to the CRT class at Lifetime over lunch. I put my 15 minutes at a pace of 7:47 which actually felt comfortably uncomfortable. My goal is still to try to get to 7:30 min/mi for Monster. Now the CRT class was a very humbling experience. 9 months of Ironman training has done NOTHING for my ability to keep up with a 60 minute aerobics class. Ugh! That kicked my butt so bad it going to hurt until Sunday. Really.... So a secondary goal for me is to keep going to classes each week and hopefully lose 7 lbs and feel like I can keep up for the whole 60 minutes by the end of the year.

But I digress....

Last week Monday was the Packers vs Vikings at the Metrodome. There was so much hype it was crazy. 1) Monday night football 2) border battle 3) the first time Brett was playing against the Packers in purple

I'll summarize by saying the game was AWESOME! Brett was AWESOME! Jaren Allen was AWESOME! It's like we have a real football team now.

There were so many Packers fans there that no matter who had a good play there was significant booing and cheering .

There was a tank on display out front before the game, very cool

Since it was a Monday night game, the ESPN crew was there commentating. The guy sitting on the left in the tan suit is Jon Gruden. Sweet!

Well I'm finish up this blog long overdue so I'm going to cut it short here and hit "post" and then continue my more current thoughts on another post.

Cause and Effect

2009-10-02T13:39:00.003-05:00

So this week has been difficult. The cold and wet weather caused us to stay indoors and has kept us from getting in decent run training this week. Mark had a great track run on Wednesday. I was ready to head into it and try to kick out some good 800s but as we were warming up my shins were heating up, bad. I got in one 800, stretched, walked, tried a 400 and that was it. It hurt too much and I didn't want to irritate it to the point where I'd have trouble on Sunday. I was defeated, pissed. Finally I have my head on a potential realistic goal that I could be proud of and the universe kicks me in the shins (sort of). Best I can figure as I was sitting there thinking about it as Mark finished his intervals, my pain is probably the effect of cold weather and trying to fly out the gate at speeds my body hasn't been able to do this year. Ironman forced me to slow down and I think the 5k I cranked out last week didn't help either. I had a great run but it was at a pace my body isn't used to.

So...now I'm sitting on my butt for a few days praying that Sunday at the 10-mile I don't have the shin pain. Any suggestions anyone???

Wow, that was a short post for me. Are you impressed? :-P

Firefighter 5k, clay pigeons, ink and football

2009-09-28T18:23:00.004-05:00

So this weekend brought some fun and different experiences. We started off with a 5k race in Plymouth for the Firefighters 5k. Mark's friend Steve also came to run as he is quickly becoming addicted to the sport :) Since Ironman, as I have mentioned, I have become focused on my 5k speed for the rest of the season. As the race started and I quickly was passed by what seemed like a hundred people, I tried to find a comfortably hard pace to start with. What I didn't know is that this entire course was rolling hills.

Mile 1 there was a guy calling out times. 7:41. Yikes that was impressive. Granted my HR was running in the low 180s which was a little high but I had a quick discussion with my body as I tried to recover down the hill. "So you're only going to recover to 178 off that hill huh? Well fine then, let's see how long we can keep THIS up"

Mile 2 my heart rate was up around 190 and not letting up but I felt like I was still holding a pretty good pace. I was following this kid who couldn't have been more than 13 or 14 years old most of the race and by this point the little bugger was getting away from me and the other guy I was trying to pace pulled over to walk for a minute so I just tried to keep pushing up the hills and getting in a slight recovery downhill.

Mile 3 was just after a long hill but on it's way downward to the finishing shoot. I turned on the turbos as much as I had left and crossed the line at 24:06 (damn those 6 seconds!!)

My legs were really shaky and the heart rate monitor was flashing 200! 200! so I decided to jog around the parking lot to cool down a little slower.

All in all I was happy with the race. I was hoping to break the sub 8 min/mile and that actually came out to be 7:45. Small victories :) Mark had a fantastic race pacing at 6:46 and Steve paced just over 10:00 which for his first few months of running is pretty awesome on a course like that.

Next goal.... 7:30 min/mile at the Monster 5k.

After the run we had to clean up quick and head down to the MN Horse and Hunt Club in Prior Lake for the Miracles of Mitch Foundation Shoot for a Miracle fundraiser. Mark and I offered to volunteer since they needed a few extra hands. Little did we know we were going to be manning shooting stations, flinging clay pigeons all afternoon. Crazy different ( especially for my city boy <3>

Unfortunately we couldn't stick around for the dinner since we needed to be up in Maple Grove for my 6pm tattoo appointment. Yes everyone, I finally settled on getting one after MUCH deliberation with myself. Here is me looking very relaxed but actually gritting my teeth and trying not to fling choice words around the room. Tattoos hurt....end of story!

But in the end I was SUPER happy with my design. Especially since it was pointed out that this design has the bike on top of a "hill" which is very fitting for Madison. The focus of my tattoo I wanted on the triathlon part more than the M-dot and this works perfectly for me. Left ankle.

Sunday we went down to the Vikings game. We ended up switching seats and it actually worked out VERY well since we were in perfect view of the Favre to Lewis pass. Wow what a moment that was! Here's a few game pics. This first one is of the Marine Corp Silent Drill Team. Being a previous marching band color guard member, I love getting to see these guys. Very cool!

And here we are about 15 seconds after the amazing game winning pass from Favre to Lewis. I don't know what was better, the pass or the catch, but the star aligned for that play!

This week we have to hit the track tonight, easy on Wednesday, pace on Thursday and easy on Friday. Then it is TC Marathon weekend. I am definitely looking forward to running the 10-mile with Mark. We didn't know each other last year when we both ran the full TC Marathon and were in very different places than we are now in terms of relationships and emotional stability so I know I am looking forward to celebrating as we cross the line together this year and get our 10-mile medals to pair with our marathon medals <3

A new goal...something a little shorter

2009-09-25T14:50:00.002-05:00

So I've been back running the past week. I basically didn't do anything post-IM for a week. It was GREAT! Except for the cold I had....bleh!
I'm signed up for the TC-10mile and wanted to do a few 5/10ks for the rest of this season. I was out for a tempo run yesterday 2.6mi took 21:56 and the avg heartrate was 172. It was pretty much a flat run around Lake of the Isles. I wanted to blast through it but since I have a 5k race I want to RACE on Saturday, I had to dial it back a little. Not saying I had much more speed in me but it averaged out to about 8:26/mi. Shortly after I learned that, I got it stuck in my head that my new goal is to get my 5k time down to sub-8:00/mi. Which means I need to get through a 5k in better than 24:51. Nothing to brag about but it would be an improvement for this turtle. I would have to be having a seriously good day to make that goal tomorrow but I'm hoping I can get it by Oct 31. Mark will be racing a half marathon that day and I'll be racing a 5k. We have two options for locations to race that weekend but haven't come to a conclusion yet. The one we want to do more requires travel and potentially an overnight and honestly we are kind of burned out on driving and spending cash is low.

So on that note I'll jump topics to my financial life. Unfortunately I had to ask my 'rents to co-sign on my home loan. Due to the change in my job and unemployment and divorce over the last year, I couldn't qualify on my own. I'm sure Dad will qualify to co-sign but I was about ready to have a serious fit when he started lecturing me on my jobs. I think it's a generational thing but basically he thinks I'm going to need to go back to a "cubical job" in order to get through life. He made that point very clear and I was pissed. I am getting by.....barely......but I like what I do and I'm willing to keep trying to make it work so that I don't have to go back to a cubical job and hate life 9-5 M-F. I knew trying to work part time jobs was a bit of a leap of faith but it's my choice and hopefully he can find a way to accept that.

And a little teaser, I'll have some new "art" this weekend. I'll post pictures as soon as I can

A quick, not so happy post

2009-09-21T08:47:00.005-05:00

So I feel I have to address something on my blog. It is something I have NEVER had to write about but I guess there are people out there that somehow twisted my life references into being something completely different. Honestly I'm really mad and hurt about all this and after I hit "post" I'm letting all of this negative energy go and moving on away from this situation and those who can't seem to accept me as I am.

I have recently been told that the reason people think poorly of me is because of how I've been acting and what I've been writing on my blog. I was shocked to hear this and went back to re-read every last entry I wrote for the past year. The only conclusion I could draw is that some of you (and you know who you are) are taking my references personally when they have absolutely nothing to do with you. I honestly have never had any reason to ever speak ill of any of you. You have been my family. But unfortunately, due to the recent happenings, our friendships have fallen apart. I'm deeply saddened by this but I've also tried to live my life being able to let things and people go that negatively affect my life. So to those few people, here's the last piece of info I will say about this entire situation:

In all my past entries, my obsure references to "people" or "negative groups" or "they" that are negatively affected my life and how I've been living the past year or so......were about no one other than my ex and the friends/family that have left my life because of my divorce. Those references are not about anyone else, including YOU.

I have spent much of the past few years feeling beaten down by the way my life was going and didn't feel like I had much to offer the world. I didn't know what I wanted. And now that I have finalized my divorce, survived a major lay off from my job and I do have a wonderful, positive relationship and have re-bounded enough to barely get by financially....if somehow that makes you think we can't be friends, then you are right, we can't. I don't want to lose any of you but that's where we've gotten. I just hope you can be mature about this and we can all still hang out together without whispering like children or the rolling of the eyes. Last time I checked we all should be old enough to think for ourselves and not gossip when it hurts other people.

So, sorry to any of my readers that didn't enjoy this post but I'm mad and hurt and need to pound out my last thoughts and now try to simply move on doing what I need to do to make my life continue forward, positive and happy.

Ironman 2009 - I made it

2009-09-17T18:29:00.014-05:00

Since it seems I can't narrow my list of pictures to post I'm going to try to keep my explanations short as to not make this rival the length of War and Peace...

Race morning started like every other, except for the fact that I had no gear to bring other than swim. Bike was setup, clothes for changing, helmet, shoes, etc were already in place from the day before.

I got bodymarked by my buddy Jim who was volunteering and headed down to prepare myself for the swim. Which means squeezing into the wetsuit.

(wow, seriously do I pose for every photo?)

The swim start was beautiful in terms of weather. Water was slightly warm but calm. That is until the cannon went off and it was more of a washing machine in overdrive. It was such a rush to hear the crowd as we were starting in the water.The swim went very well for me. I was hoping for a sub 1:20:00 but since I was being over-cautious to not take an elbow to the face, I ended up with a 1:29:00. I tried to stay to the outside of the crowds so it added a little length to my swim. Honestly once you rounded the two far buoys the first time, swimmers got pretty spaced out and you could get into a pretty good rhythm.

Here is a picture of my #1 fan who wore our favorite jersey so I could spot him on the course. (seriously, we should get commissions for all the advertising we do!) The other picture is looking back at the helix at all the spectators. It was a really cool sight from the water seeing and hearing everyone.

The bike portion went fairly well for me. I was excited that after the first loop I had maintained over a 15mph average and felt confident going into the second loop. No major saddle issues at this point but my lower back was starting to get very sore. My legs turned completely to jello somewhere about 10 miles into the second loop and the three big climbs were taking the last of the energy out of my legs. I was climbing the first of the 3 hills the second time around and Kris S jumped out onto the course to ask me how I was doing. I was later glad that he did because at that point he supplied me with the advice to stop eating any of the sugary stuff I had with me because I was getting an awful stomach bubble that I was sure was going to kill me on the run if it didn't go away. And unfortunately with about 20 miles left, my back was on fire, my shoulders were on fire and the balls of my feet were in pain. I had no power left due to all of this and unfortunately had to snail my way back to the Terrace. I'm fairly confident that if I wouldn't have had those problems, I would have finished with a 14.5mph average or better. But considering all the hell I went through with bike training and the decision to switch to a completely different bike with a completely different body position 3 weeks before the race - I think I did pretty well. I knew switching bikes might have it's reprecussions and unfortunately it did.

(I'm smiling here but trust me, only happy to see Mark and Andy....that's IT, the rest of me is very unhappy)

I was nearly in tears coming up the helix into T2 knowing that I made it through the bike. I made the time cut off. The one thing I spent the past month panicking about. I made it!

(and here you can see a bit of pain in my face but I was more just unsure how my body was going to want to work after nearly an 8 hour bike ride)

But I got out on the run and felt fantastic! I mean, my knees were tired and my lower back was still very tight but as long as I wasn't doing squats or bending over to touch my toes, I was feeling good! My strategy was to keep running except for up hills and water stops and keep my heartrate above 140 but below 165. The first loop went great, I got to see Mark in multiple places along the course and that always gave me a burst of energy. State St was also fantastic - all the crowds of people cheering for you and calling your name and they don't even know you. It was so re-energizing for me.
Below are pictures from loop one and loop two. Yes I was smiling the whole way....

I do admit you get carried through the 13.1 mile turn around by the energy of the crowd and I also managed to spot an old co-worker friend of mine from the Madtown area that came out to surprise me so I was in and out onto my second loop in no time. That's when it became a mental challenge. Knowing I had to do that all again and it was getting dark. (hence the glow rings on my arm). I looked at my watch at this point and realized I was clearly going to make a sub-15 Ironman. I was ecstatic! But of course my competitor in me started thinking "well how sub 15 can you go now? You've got 13.1 miles left to leave it all on the course" So I continued my run/walk strategy and had a discussion with my legs. I promised them if they gave me everything they had left they could rest tomorrow and the next day, and the next day, and even the next.

I was taking a small bit of gatorade and water at each water stop and every once and awhile I was grabbing a banana or some grapes. That seemed to keep me well fueled. Running in the dark was great because the weather was cool and for me a perfect temperature for running but it was also very hard because parts of the course were pitch black. One area was completely dark, followed by "inspiration mile" which was the half way point of the loop and had all of the signs people made for their athletes lining the course. I wish I had a picture of it, there were hundreds of signs. I entertained myself by reading them all and looking for the sign Mark made for me. When I found it, it gave me an extra burst of energy to see the rest of the race as "just a 10k left" It got more lonely since runners got pretty spread out. I was also starting to noticed how many people I was passing. So many people were doing a LOT of walking. Don't get me wrong I did my share of walking but I was making up a lot of places. When I was about 2 blocks out from State St I took my last walk break. Because the last thing I wanted to do was turn the corner and walk any part of where the big crowds were. I hit State St and my cheeks started to hurt I was smiling so big. Everyone was cheering and clapping and saying my name. It was unbelievable. I rounded the corner through the last water stop where I saw my friends Steve and Sarah. (Who might I add were volunteering EVERYWHERE on the course. Thanks a million to them both for being such awesome cheerleaders and volunteers!!!) They gave me another burst of encouragement and as I blew through the last water stop, telling the volunteers I wasn't stopping for any aid. When they realized I was pushing through they all erupted into cheering "you go girl!" I was on a serious high and my feet, hands and arms started to tingle.

It was a wonderful feeling but at the same time I had an internal discussion again with my body saying "ok whatever this tingling is it better be good because if you shut down now I am seriously going to be upset". I noticed about two blocks out that I couldn't hear my own thoughts the crowd was so loud. I looked around and noticed there was just one lady in front of me. I considered trying to get around her before the finish line but decided to take in the moment and put some space between us so she could have her moment on the carpet and damn it I was getting mine!

When I hit the carpet I didn't hear the music or even Mike Reilly saying my name. I just heard the crowd cheering and threw my hands in the air for what I hoped would be a great finisher's photo.

It was a feeling like no other. OMG, I was DONE!!! 14 hours 38 minutes and 16 seconds in one day and Ironman was over. I am an IRONMAN!

After I got my finishers medal and picture, I was handed off by the volunteers to Mark. I couldn't have been more happy getting a hug from him right then and there. Sharing that moment (and the whole day for that matter with him) was unbelievable. Thinking back to how unsure and unstable my life was a year ago when I signed up for this race, I would have never imagined that I would find my perfect match and have him there with me every step of the way. Training with me, racing with me, supporting me, cheering for me....I feel like the luckiest girl in the entire world. Whoever or whatever out there thought I deserved this guy......THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

So I wrapped myself up in mylar, grabbed Mark and went straight for the pizza. (yummy, yummy, fatty, salty pizza). I felt good but was very tired so it was off to bed so we could get up early for the finisher's merchandise. The next morning we were up in time to get coffee and head town to see if I could buy my finisher's jacket. Due to my extremely limited budget, I had to narrow down what I could buy and the only two things I wanted was the jacket and visor. Luckily I got both. :)

We headed home and I was quite stiff most of the way. So since we had plenty of time to get home, we made a bunch of stops to cache along the way and also grab snacks. Here is us at a virtual. I thought this statue was too funny. And hey...I was hungry!

(Thankfully Mark shares in my insane sense of humor)

So back home and back to reality. Few days completely off of training (especially since I landed a head cold on the way home) but then I need to start moving again to get ready for the TC 10mile that we are running together.

Pre-Race #2

2009-09-11T14:29:00.006-05:00

So yesterday we walked around the expo and the merchandise area to see what was available. The expo isn't super huge but of course there are plenty of expensive bikes to drool over.

Part of the expo was pretty much right at where the finish line will be

Took a quick picture from the bridge that spectators can be on that overlooks the bike staging area. ONLY the bikes stay here. All of our other gear is put into bags and into separate transition rooms inside the building. Considering the distance to get up to this area, through the rooms, change, back out and too the bikes....I can see why T1 and T2 times can get to be 10-15 minutes even if you kind of hurry.

With my low number, I am actually racked all the way at the other end of the transition area from where you enter after the swim. I'm actually kind of excited about that because it means I don't have to run more than a few feet holding my bike. Mount area is right behind where the short pillars are behind me in this picture. The pillars won't be there tomorrow :) This morning we got up a little early to go to the swim start and get in a short swim. For me it was more about getting in the water and finding my sighting points since my plan is to stay outside the buoys and hopefully not get too caught up in the bottlenecks going around the first two corners.

This afternoon I turned in my bike and my T1 and T2 gear bags. This is a picture of where I run through to grab my swim to bike bag. Which, by rule, contains not only my change of clothes but my shoes and helmet and race belt.Janus had an area for spectators to make signs. Mark made me an awesome sign :D Janus actually takes theses out on a dead spot (spectator-wise) of the run course and sticks them all in the ground in what they call "Inspiration Mile"

I think I'm ready for tomorrow. About as much as I can be I guess. Nothing I can do now except try to relax, eat, drink water, eat and mentally prepare myself for a very long day. I also found that Mark has the same problem I do. Doesn't matter what event I am at, big or small, if I'm not actually participating.....I'm kind of bummed out. It's an interesting dynamic dating another athlete and for me, it is a serious blessing to have someone who understands racing, training, cheering, etc. We also understand that no matter how excited we are to be there and cheer on each other at races, we are still always going to be a little jealous that we aren't also participating. I've had this conversation with quite a few of my other athlete friends so I think it's pretty common to feel this way. (Feel free to chime in with comments if you are reading this.) I will do Ironman tomorrow but if I went to watch a marathon next weekend, part of me would want to be out there.

For now, it's trying to keep myself calm and get through tomorrow. Then the focus changes to rehabing myself for our TC10-mile run and then Mark's big day at NYC Marathon.

Pre-Race Thoughts #1

2009-09-10T20:21:00.008-05:00

So I've been thinking about writing this post for a few days now and I've been stalling because I don't know what to say. Honestly I think it's going to make more sense for me to maybe do a few shorter posts as the weekend goes on.

A few paragraphs of digression.....

Monday Mark and I went to Gunther's for their annual "One More Tri" party. Which consisted of a swim, T1 with bagels, coffee, cookies, bike, T2 again with food, run and then grilling and potluck. It was good for me training wise but killed me confidence since I was WELL in the back of all three elements. Which I suppose is destined to happen when the group consists of a bunch of elites (including Cathy Yndestad) and top age groupers. It was a lot of fun but like I said...a little rough to be on the tail end all day. Here's a pick of the group before we took off on our ride. Go me, dropped my chain right off the bat in front of everyone. Smooth... :-P

That afternoon we were at mom's house for Lily's 10th birthday. We gave her tickets to come with us and Deb to a Vikings game. She was super happy and it was a super cheap gift for us :)

I had a big crappy day about coming to this race again on Wednesday but I'm fighting as best I can to find a positive attitude. Alex hosted a great Pasta Party for everyone attending as a racer, volunteer or spectator. Everyone was asking how I was feeling and I passed it off as "good, just nervous" when in actuality it was more like "totally freaked out, crabby, unsure"

What's funny is after having a negative and sappy day thinking about the race, I went out for my training run that night and while listening to my "rough day" music, managed to hear my inner positive me telling me (in summary) that everything will be fine.

This morning before Mark and I left to drive to Madison, I was packing my stuff and reading through all the "good luck" comments, emails, etc I've been getting from people and trying to feed off that energy. I think it helped.

I really haven't been feeling the nerves until we got into Madison and rounded the Capitol to our hotel. Then my stomach did a few flips. It was really funny when we pulled into the hotel parking garage and found a spot close to the elevator....we pulled in, looked up and saw that we parked in spot #68. Which just happens to be my race number. Still can't figure out how I got that low of a number :)

So we're just vegged out in the hotel for the night. ($200 a night mind you) doing computer stuff and waiting for our pizza to show up. Tomorrow is athlete check in, see the merchandise area ($$$$) and then the welcome dinner and meeting in the evening.

MN State Fair

2009-09-09T17:44:00.004-05:00

So here's a quick recap of our trip to the State Fair. We chose to go on Sept 5th so that we could see Tonic Sol Fa on the free stage. Love these guys! There are very entertaining, compose their own music and can actually sing! After their performance we hung around to get a picture :)

(Mark, Jared, me, my Mark, Shaun and Greg)

And mom insisted we stop by to see the winning pumpkin. She's a little obsessed with pumpkins since her neighbor Deb is trying to learn how to grow her own State Fair "largest pumpkin"

Nothing to crazy exciting at the Fair. A run down of what we ate - We got their early grabbed some coffee, a cinnamon roll and egg/cheese/sausage stromboli for breakfast. Had a lemonade, tater twister, aussie potato fries (yay!), a bucket of Sweet Martha's cookies and some milk. Believe it or not, we actually left the Fair NOT feeling ill from over eating :)

We had a lot of fun walking around just about everywhere although we didn't make it into that back shopping area (next to the Midway and behind the Cream Puff stand for those of you that know the area). We probably would have stuck around a little longer but unfortunately I still had to get home for an hour run.

Oh and did I mention we went to the Eco Building? Yeah...sigh.....here's my man right here....

LOL

We got back to the bus loading area and to our surprise, instead of the usual black/brown buses, we had a double decker waiting for us. Sweet :)

I have more pictures posted on Facebook for those of you that are my friends on there.

Sorry Lance, it IS about the bike

2009-09-01T09:55:00.011-05:00

Ok so I know this isn't what Lance meant by his book title but I thought this post title would be funny....deal with it :-P

To keep the story short, my bike problems may have been solved, at least to get me through IM. There's two parts to this story:

1) The Foundation (my work) was donated a beautiful adult triathlon frame a year or two ago and it's just been sitting in the office. It's a Aegis T2 and here's a pic of one. Mine will be a different color is all.

Basically, as my 'bonus' for assisting on the MiracleKids triathlon I was given this frame and am getting the 650 tires that fit it. I am ecstatic! I happily have handed my old bike and the new frame over to Karl D to let him have fun tearing apart my old bike and building up what we are now affectionately calling "the Dreamsicle" since the frame is bright orange with white lettering. It might look a little funny at first with all my old parts on it but the hopes is to slowly convert parts over so it's more of a real tri bike.

2) So you might be wondering...."two weeks out from the tri, you're tearing apart your old bike? Will you have your new one in time for IM? How will you have time to get used to it?" Answer - I'm borrowing a different bike. Thanks to Tony and his incredible network of friends (and I think some sympathy for my extreme bike issues), he hooked me up to borrow Dave Goldberg's Ti-Phoon for the next few weeks. (He was a 2008 MN All American, 2009 Short Course favorite, and placed 20th at Nationals a few weeks ago!) It's been a blessing and leads me to my post title

It IS about the bike!

It took a bit to get used to the speedplay pedals, shifters on the aero bars, no drops and much flatter positioning but I feel so much better and can get so much more power out of my legs. Our long ride on Saturday actually exhausted my quads which is the first time that's happened in months! On my old bike I just wasn't getting the right positioning to really use my bike legs. We covered 50 miles and I managed to average 15.6 mph. Yay!!! There is hope! I kept enough a pace that I finally made Mark work a little to ride with me :-P

So another thing about Saturday, we found out there was a charity ride for the Carver Scott Humane Society. The exact ride with the stops they had planned was only about 20 miles but the routes and stops were in and around Chanhassen, Excelsior, Minnetonka area so we were able to spend less time at the stops and add a lot of our own miles. Below are pictures of us before the ride. We rode with adoptable animals pics on our backs. Mark rode for Tom, I rode for Posh. I picked her since she looks like my niece's cat Pumpkin. :)

So on to Sunday....

Mark and I raced in the Inaugural Minneapolis Duathlon It was a 5k run / 18mi bike / 5k run. I really didn't know what to expect being on a bike I rode for the first time the day before and really haven't done much in terms of speed training. I'll give more details below, but to start, here are a few pictures.

Mark, as usual, takes a great pic of us before the start.

Mark's brother Michael also completed the Duathlon. He's a great cyclist and this was his first multi-sport event. He said he enjoyed the event and I hope he'll join us for more duathlons in the future. Cari, his wife, was there to cheer us on. It's always awesome seeing someone along the course :)

This event definitely drew athletes of all abilities. I saw everything from super high end triathlon bikes....to bikes with fenders and baskets. This was our favorite :-P

So as for details on the race - it was perfect weather and luckily a calm wind day. My strategy was to push myself a little but concentrate on keeping my heartrate below 175 on both runs. The first run, my body was just sore and tired from biking the day before, so I felt like my heartrate was around 170. But when I looked at my watch, I was only at 163. So despite the aching, I pushed myself a little bit faster. The course was mostly flat except for a couple bridges going across the river.

The bike I was ready to push a little and see what I could do on this bike. Unfortunately my quads were on fire from being burned out the day before and my "girly parts" were sore too from the long ride. The road had a couple rough areas that jammed the saddle up (feeling something like sitting on a pitch fork) and made me throw out a few choice words. So I had to stand and coast through a few sections (which unfortunately was hard on my quads). So I think if I was on fresh legs I could have gotten a better average but now that I'm looking back on it, I am very happy with how I did.

Second run I didn't know what to expect as I haven't run off this new bike yet. It ended up feeling pretty much like running off my old bike. It took me about the first mile to get my legs moving smoothly underneath me. Again my goal was to hold my heartrate around 165-170 which I managed to do except for up an over the last little hill in the final .20 mi.

I was really tired but am now very happy with how I did. I say "now" because I felt like I could have been better at the finish of the race. I was kind of bummed that I had to do the race on sore legs and have an automatic response system that turns on during races that reminds me I have no natural talent and have to bust my tail to maintain an "ok" status in the race world and tend to be jealous of those who do a lot less training and coem to races, exert less effort than myself and still manage to kick my arse. Mark has been patient with me and we've talked through this a few times now. I've been trying to assess this negative mental energy and determine how to turn it off and be proud of the progress I've made over my three multi-sport seasons. I am so greatful to have him to train with and am curious to see how being able to actually put some emphasis on speed training next summer will improve my 'skilz' (or should I say actually GIVE me some).

I'm officially in my 2 week taper now and did my last long swim at Gunther's last night (Monday). Mark did one lap which was a little over a mile and I did two laps which was about 2 miles. We stayed together on the first lap since most people that swim there are much faster than we are. I guess while I was swimming my second lap, Mark was talking with another guy Josh about training and how we do what we can to train together. Josh was saying how that is so awesome and how he really wishes he had someone to train with. Which leads me to my final thoughts for today:

I can't tell you how special and important it is for me to now have someone in my life that accepts and appreciates what I do and wants to train WITH me, even though we are at very different levels. (He's a stallion, I'm a turtle :-P) Yes there are times when he has his races/training days and I have mine but we also can find the joy in completing an event together and worrying less about our individual finish times. He's helped me work on speed and I've taught him about Zone 2. We've been told by many people how awesome that is that we can stick together like we do. And I'll never take that for granted :)

11 days, 19 hours, 17 minutes until IM......

NFL, HFL and a ride from hell

2009-08-24T16:45:00.010-05:00

For my faithful readers....the answer to the previous question is a screaming NOPE! But I'll get to the explanation in a bit...

Unfortunately this last week I ended up having to take a few days off from training due to an obnoxious head cold. I missed two swims, a bike and two runs. It was driving me nutz to know I missed so many sessions this week but at the same time I think my cold would have lasted much longer had I not rested.

Friday night Mark and I went to the pre-season Vikings game to be there amidst the Favre hype. Mark has season seats up in section 217 (not the greatest placement for me but I'll skip the details) so I'll get to be at each game to see if this #4 investment was really worth it.

Here he is warming up. Exciting huh? :-P He only played the first few sets and did ok I guess. It was a lot of fun just to be there. We left during the 4th quarter since it was pretty uninteresting by that point and watched the wave go around for about the 6th or 7th time.

Next morning we had to get up early to get in a 1:45 run / 0:45 bike / 0:30 run. It was a cooler morning than what we've been having so I thought it was perfect for training. Just steady efforts, nothing special.

We were up early due to Home for Life having their annual Blessing of the Animals and Open House. I NEVER miss an open house event as it gives me a chance to spend more time with all my favorite cats and dogs (and tortoises?), especially my little girl Olive. Unfortunately due to my poor planning we got there about 30 minutes late. The Blessing ceremony was done very nice and they had great food catered in for the event. The only thing I dislike about this ceremony is seeing the pictures of all the animals from the sanctuary that have passed in the last year. Part of the ceremony is dedicated to remembering all those they have lost. I was very heartbroken to see Chako the dog and Speedy the cat up on the board. Here are pics of them:

It instantly brought me to tears and I had to walk away. HFL is such a wonderful place but it's so hard to see who has been lost since I was last there.

Here are a few pics from our visit:

Me and a pile of kitties. Olive is the white one on my right

Here's a close up of her gorgeous face

More of my Olive

Mark got one of the cats to give High 5s

Mark also got quite attached to Lacey from the other cattery :)

Here I am with a cat pile in the other cattery with another of my favorites on my shoulder. The lighter colored cat is Celeste. She is blind as she has neither of her eyes. She LOVES to cuddle and honestly with how well she gets around, you almost won't believe she can't see.

And the resident tortoise, Goliath

Mark having a staring contest, nose-to-nose

One of the other jumpers hanging out on my shoulders.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Saturday night we had a nice dinner over at Mark's mom's house. Mikaela, Mark's niece, has somehow learned my name as "Kris-miss". Which we all found to be absolutely hilarious. No idea where she got that from. We were thinking maybe it's just how she decided to distinguish between auntie Christine and Kris. In any case I think it's super cute, especially since I'm known as Kris-miss around my family quite often.

Sunday we slept in! Ahh.....what's better than getting to turn off the alarm and just wake up whenever? Not much! For breakfast I actually got to make waffles. The idea was originally pancakes but the pan just wasn't cooperating so I whipped out the waffle iron. Then while Mark mowed his lawn, I got on a tangent pulling weeds in his yard. The weather was so great to just be out in the yard doing chores. I felt like such a normal person as opposed to my current Ironman trained drained self.

But then onto the ride from hell. Mark and I chose to make another attemped at the Rolling to Rockford route that had failed us earlier this spring. (See my posting from June 8, 2009).

It was gorgeous weather for riding. A bit windy but nothing horrible. I was on my completely re-adjusted bike and could tell I took some pressure of my hands and off the front end of my girly parts and was sitting more on my rear. I made it somewhere around 30 miles before the issues began. I started getting that cold shiver from the ache in my backside as I felt my butt bones were about ready to protrude through my skin into my damn seat (sorry, should have warned you....this posting is PG-13).

So as I kept riding, all the moving around just made my shoulder hurt, my back ache and my knee twinge with pain. Again I started to panic and I mean a literal panic attack again. "Damn it! Really? Again? I can't suffer through this for 112? My body just won't do it". We kept stopping to let myself calm down and hit 'pause' on the pain button. The secondary effect to all this was that since I couldn't breathe well from panicking, I couldn't take in much nutrition. Which in turn made my stomach sour and hungry and therefore emptied any energy that may have remained in my muscles.

4 hours, 30 minutes, 60 miles and many tears later.....we finished up the ride and went for a quick 30 minute transition run.

I was devastated. In my mind, I am concluding that either a miracle happens or I will DNF at Ironman. Not due to lack of training but due to pain and uncomfortableness (that can't be a real word...?). I had troubles pulling myself together for the better part of the evening. I was just crushed at the reality that the ride that day was not enough to complete the bike portion of the Ironman ride. There is no way I could have continued that on a more challenging course for another 52 miles at a faster pace.

Mark was very sweet and took me out for dinner to TGI Fridays were to fed my sorrows with boneless wings, half a Jack burger, two glasses of Sprite (since they didn't have my vice Mt Dew) and part of a Chips Ahoy dessert sundae.

I don't know yet what the solution is going to be. I am working on a few different things and praying for something to work. I can only chalk it up to the many, many more hours I've spent in the saddle this year over others. I mean, I just did a half Ironman a few weeks ago. That was 56 miles and I wasn't in this bad of shape! The more the weeks go on, the fewer and fewer miles I can get through. It's so incredibly tough for me to know I'm in my 3rd year of racing tris and it's like I've disgressed to being worse off than many people that are brand new to the sport. I know and love at least one of them that I KNOW right now could go complete IM way better than me. What the hell is my body's problem. I train and train and train and go no where with biking but in reverse. I honestly think if I could transfer my IM race number to someone else I would. Maybe people like me just aren't meant to do IM and this is some way of the universe telling me so.

So yes, mentally and emotionally I'm in a very bad place with my body and my training right now. (Despite managing to lose 4 pounds so far over the summer which is a "yay!" point)

I'll conclude with saying....cross your fingers for me for a miracle and I'm off to enjoy my off day with 6 of my favorite 4-legged companions, chicken dinner and a geocaching walk.

PS - I am raising money for Home for Life through the Janus Charity Challenge. Please check out my page and help out if you can! www.januscharitychallenge.kintera.org/wi09/kmielke

Race the Lake -

2009-08-17T10:42:00.006-05:00

This trip was quite an adventure. I'll try to summarize the whole weekend....

So Friday night was my friend Becky's wedding. We've been friends since 2nd grade and I got the priviledge of being a bridesmail. Here is Jess, Becky and I. The three of us have stayed close after high school.

It was a little warm but a beautiful day for an outdoor wedding. Becky was gorgeous and we all had a fantastic time! The evening for me ended somewhere around midnight since I had to getup at 5:00 for work.

Yes that's right, work on a Saturday. It was the larger of my two main work events. The MiracleKids Triathlon at Lake Ann. It's the largest fundraising event for the Miracles of Mitch Foundation. It was a little on the warm side but the event went really well. We had over 800 kids racing that day. My favorite part was getting to meet all the All-Stars that I have been in touch with only over email at this point. The All-Stars are kids that have or are in remission from cancer that have an affiliation with the Foundation. Clean-up from the event ended somewhere around 3pm. Then Mark and I had to get packed up and head for Freemont, WI

Freemont was about a 4 hour drive from home. We found a cheap hotel to stay at the night. It was pretty funny. Although at the time it was quite creepy! The place had about 8 rooms that look like tiny old bedrooms converted to have a sink in them and a shared bathroom that I attempted to avoid. You had to check in at the bar downstairs and honestly it felt like the kind of place they film the start of horror movies. Here's a couple pics of our room

And this picture would be why I think these rooms were usually just used for drunks that couldn't make it home from the bar downstairs....and the reason I couldn't get myself to believe the covers were clean enough to sleep under...

So the next morning we got up before anyone in town was anywhere near awake to drive to the start in Fon-Du-Lac. I was surprised at how many people were at the event. It's only the second year this event has been put on.

Here's a good shot of our wave waiting to startAnd us of course sporting our Caribou Coffee jerseys.And the beautiful sunrise over Lake Winnebago somewhere in the first few miles.

Now as many of you know, I have been having nothing but issues with my bike comfort. This ride was no exception. Somewhere around mile 20 I was starting to hurt something awful. Girly parts were not happy. And of course my wonderful, cheerful companion who is so great at biking and taking pictures captured me here. You can tell how enthused I am about this whole thing.

Luckily there were quite a few rest stops and unfortunately I had to use every last one to stay sane. Emotionally and mentally I was done somewhere around mile 30 (because I was physically done).

Thankfully, as always, Mark was by my side trying to maintain a positive outlook. He was having fun with the camera most of the way and got a picture of me going under the "King of the Hill sign". That group was LONG gone by time we got there :-P

I probably encountered at least 2-3 panic attack moments when my mind starting wandering to "oh my god...I really am not going to survive Ironman, how will I ever make the cutoff if I am in this much pain after only 30 miles of relatively flat terrain? What the hell is wrong with me?"

But somehow right about the 7 hour mark we crossed the finish line. Damn near last. I think a few more minutes and we wouldn't have gotten a finisher medal, they were basically already tearing down by time we got there.

I was beyond frustrated, disappointed, sad and freaked out....

So much so that on that following Tuesday I completely readjusted everything on my bike myself. Having no idea what is good and bad to do, I just started wrenching to what I hoped would be a more comfortable fit.

Was it any better? Stay tuned to find out...

Gear West Splash and Dash v2.0

2009-08-17T10:38:00.010-05:00

Splash and Dash v1.0 was an interesting and fun experience so we came back for more. This time the weather was a bit better and Curt was happy that we doubled the field from 7 to 14 participants :)

Steve in a Speedo was there along with his wife Pharmie. Check out his blog for a good write up of the event.

Mark and I had a good time. We both managed to decrease our times from v1.0. I went from 8: something miles to 7: something. Yay :) Weather was much better this time so that may have helped. The swim is still so short that any type of technique goes out the window.

Here are the results. You can go to the Gear West Bike and Tri site here for a bigger image.

So that's all for Splash and Dash for 2009. Hopefully it will be back around next year! Thanks to Curt and Hannah and any other GW people that helped make this event happen.!!

Afton Adventures

2009-08-12T16:17:00.007-05:00

Last Sunday I finally decided I had to get my butt over to Afton for a hilly ride. Considering what I saw on the Madison course I figure the more friggin' hills the better off I should be come race day. Mark and I got up early and headed over there to meet Dana, Becca and Sean. We started out at 9am. There was a bit of an overcast so the weather was great for riding. I decided my strategy to try for the day was to stay out of my 3rd (largest) ring on the front and when I hit a hill climb, drop to the granny gear and give'r more rpms instead of mashing the hell out of my quads. So not long out of the gate we come to a long hill. I drop to my small ring and started slowly going up the hill. Felt pretty good. Wasn't moving very fast but I wasn't burning out my legs either. A few minutes into the climb, Mark and I were a bit ahead of Dana and Sean on this quiet stretch of road. We hear this "creek, crack, crack" coming from a tree. My first thought was it was an animal running out onto a branch but we quickly realized this huge limb was currently breaking off the tree and laying on a power line. Unfortunately Mark and I realized it right as we were underneath it so we scurried to the far side and got ahead of it. Dana wasn't up to it yet and luckily got off her bike and back down the road a bit before "crack, slam!" The branch broke off, luckily didn't break the power line and fell right across the road. Crazy!! I don't think I've ever seen that happen! Anyway, here's a picture.

And so we continued....

It was about an hour ride until we hit a place we had to stop and make a left turn to head towards Prescott. I unclipped, came to a stop and just as I put my feet down...."ssssss" was coming from my back tire. (This blog is kind of like a comic book isn't it? Slam! Pow!) I think there is a problem with my rim tape but in any case, we got the tire changed (but Mark forgot to put a little air in the tire before he put it in so he managed to do it this way and I managed to get a picture....

Then we had problems figuring out how to change the hand pump over to fit for my valve. That took probably 20 mintues before we were putting air in the tire. But all of a sudden. Pop! Oddly enough the stem broke in half on the new tire. Seriously??? Ugh....so now we are in a pickle. We are going to have to use Mark's spare tire to get me going but then we are riding with no spare. So now that our ride has been 45 minutes delayed because of this fiasco, I was stressing out on what to do. Do we head back to the car? Do we risk riding so I get my ride in? Luckily Mark's iPhone to the rescue, he found there was a bike shop about 15 minutes away. Off course but it was the only way we could keep going. I was so flustered by this point but I knew the rest of my day (Including Becky's bachelorette dinner) was going to suffer due to training. Something always has to suffer in order for me to get my training done.

The rest of the ride I can summarize by saying...ow, ow, ow.....it got to the point where my "girly parts" were so uncomfortable that my speed and climbing ability were severely affected. We were about 30 minutes from getting back to Afton and I just got the chills and my body was giving up. It was a matter of just surviving getting back to the car. Once we got back I was a sobby mess. Just couldn't hold it back. Ugh....I'll never survive Madison if I can't bike with some level of comfort.

I'll leave that there for now.

Sunday, we went to the Uptown Art Fair. It was a fun "normal human" activity. Especially the people watching. But this guy....

Really? no, not real

and this guy.....

is advertising Renegade Art :)

Madison Course Ride and Chicago Rock and Roll Half Marathon (Part 2)

2009-08-03T11:24:00.009-05:00

So now we were on to Chicago.

Traffic was pretty rough getting into the city so we had to go straight to the Expo to pick up our packets. Expo was pretty typical with lots of clothes to buy and lots of freebies for us to grab. After that we were both pretty hungry and decided on the Hard Rock cafe which is always a fun place to go. It was getting later in the evening so we decided we'd tour downtown more tomorrow and head to our hotel for the night.

Quick note.....unfortunately Hotels.com is now on our %^#t list for messing up the hotel reservations and then leaving us both on hold for a total of over an hour with no resolution on the place we were supposed to stay. And this was after 10pm. Thank you to Courtyard Marriott for being so helpful and having fantastic staff and getting us a room!

In the morning we were up at 4:15 to get ready to grab the Blue line downtown to the race start. Let me tell ya, Chicago is a VERY different crowd that early in the morning :-P

What all of us on the train didn't know is that there was construction going on that caused us to get off quite a few stops before our destination and take a shuttle bus. That took a little more time that we expected so we got down to the start with only a few minutes to get ready to go and find our Corral.

We were in Corral 8 of I think 21. 18,000 total registered runners for the event which makes it the largest event either of us had ever done. Corrals were divided by estimated finishing time. It worked out really well as we didn't have to shuffle or duck and weave through slower runners to get into a groove. We were off and running from the start.

Since it was a Rock and Roll event (the inaugural Chicago one actually), there was a band playing along each mile of the route. That was definitely entertaining. As usually it took about 2 miles before my legs felt like they were in their running mode but then I was feeling pretty good. I knew we were running a little faster than I was going to be comfortable but since it was a flat course, I figured I could get away with it and hopefully come out with a new PR.

Somewhere around mile 5 I could tell my engine was running a bit hot and "the wall" was somewhere around here but I just put my mind in a happy place and stayed on Mark's shoulder. He ran with me the whole way and kept me at a good pace. He even took a few pictures during the run. This one is from somewhere around mile 8. Looks are deceiving, I'm much more tired than that smile :-P

This was just after the turn around where we headed back along a bike path along Lake Michigan for the last 4-5 miles. It was a really nice run, a little crowded but not the worst we've had to do.

We hit mile 12 and then tried to burn the remaining gas in the tank. Picked up the pace a bit, put my head down and ran. Mark stayed just ahead to my side so I did what I could to keep up and not burn out. We crossed the line officially in 1:57:58. 5 minutes and 36 seconds faster than my old PR set earlier this year. :D :D

We spent the rest of the day downtown checking out the sites and caching our way around. But, first stop.....coffee coolers!!

It was a great afternoon getting to see the sites but wished we could have stayed longer. The train ride back was about as successful as the way into town once we finally managed to find the station.

We had to head home that night and stopped quite a few places along the way to stretch the legs and backs. All in all a fun trip and a great event to be a part of. Did I mention the cool medals? :)

Madison Course Ride and Chicago Rock and Roll Half Marathon (Part 1)

2009-08-03T10:39:00.008-05:00

Wow do I have a lot to say about this past weekend!

First things first.....Mark, you are a saint to have put up with my rollercoaster emotions and not go running in the other direction. You are my sunshine and never doubt that I am so proud of you for how strong of an athlete and a person you are :)

Random: Picture to the right is of
this odd troll statue outside our room

The weekend started with a late night arrival into Mt Horeb which is on the Madison bike course. Due to lack of sleep, we ended up getting up a little later than we originally wanted so our bike time got cut from what it was supposed to be (4 hours) to only just over 3. We needed to get out of town and down to Chicago for the expo before 5pm but more on that later.....

We started the ride and oddly enough were instantlly following 2 other people that were out riding the course. From where we started, we hit a few significant climbs within the first 10 miles or so and in my head I was figuring one or two of those had to be part of the "big 3 hills" I've been hearing so much about. Luckily the weather was cool, a few drizzles but all in all pretty good weather so far. You get to see a lot more of the deep farming country than I realized. The roads are a little narrow but very few cars and lots of cows. We came upon what I would call a 3rd significant hill, very long winding road that takes the granny gear for me to make my way up. After that, there is a very long downhill that is actually a little nerve-wracking since you had to ride your breaks or you'll go off the edge in the sharp 90 degree turns. But there....that must be all the "big" hills.....right? No....to wrap this up.....there was like 5 or 6 more that put me at witt's end. Thankfully my sunshine road with me on this one and honestly, if he wasn't there I think I would have given up and walked after being tired, slow, shaky, plowing through a heavy headwind and getting passed by like 50 other people out training that day. We did also get caught my a group of our friends that were out riding as well. That was a nice mental break for me to stop and have a chat.

We were coming back into Mt. Horeb and best I can describe it, I think I had a panic attack. I started to not be able to control my breathing, throat got really tight and I was on the verge of tears. Once we pulled up into the motel parking lot and mentally, emotionally I was a mess. We had to go out for a quick run afterwards and more than once during the run, I started thinking about the bike course again and panic set in. Nearly had to stop and walk just to make sure I could keep breathing.

What the frack did I get myself into.....

Mark (and I'll say it again), the saint that he is, helped talk me through all of that experience and I've come to this conclusion. I shouldn't have chosen Madison. It was not smart for me to chose a course based on what everyone else I know has done. I didn't look into it, research it, nothing. Just signed up for it. Not being a strong biker, I would have been smarter and felt better about what my goals are had I chosen to do a different Ironman. I feel I have failed Madison now without even having done it yet. I know I struggle with having a positive attitude about myself and my accomplishments but I don't know if I can fix that in the next 40 days, 19 hours and 51 minutes. I wanted to do Ironman as a personal journey, a way to help find myself amidst the mess that my personal life had become. But I feel like now it's more of a "dear God please help me not DNF this damn thing so I can get it over with and try better next time".

I know many of you are probably shaking your heads, thinking...."issues girl....issues..." but I'm just throwing out there all the honest thoughts that are in my head.

After a few hours in the car talking with Mark while heading for Chicago, the thought now is 1) hopefully not DNF Madison 2) consider doing IM Florida next year with Mark. It could be a warm course but is much flatter on the bike, and therefore a little more realistic for someone like me. There's a whole other discussion there so who knows what will happen.

Closing thoughts.....let's just forget that my ride ever happened for now k?

Chisago Lakes Half Iron Triathlon

2009-07-27T10:30:00.003-05:00

I have to say I wasn't in the mindset of having to race a half iron until I actually got on site yesterday morning. Could have had to do with getting up at 3am I suppose :)

Oddly enough I got the same bib number that I did last year - 69! I find it amusing and think I'll have to request it again next year if I compete :)

I got everything setup in plenty of time and jumped in line to hit the bathroom before the start of the race. Unfortunately the lines were moving very slowly and I got out just in time to jump into my wetsuit, run to the beach and 30 seconds later, my wave was starting the swim. I was in Wave 2 of 10 half iron waves.

The swim actually went pretty well. I can get into a rhythm much quicker now than I could in the past. But unfortunately I still have the knack for finding the guy with the sharpest elbows. Just after the half way turn around, I think it was the fast swimmers from Wave 4 were coming up past me and WHAM! Elbow to the face, big swallow of water and goggles off my eyes. I had to stop and very carefully get myself breathing again without panicking. I managed to get back going but shortly after that I was brushed in the face again. Not nearly as traumatic as the first punch but just enough to make me paranoid of anyone around me for the rest of the swim. I think that was the first time in a long time I was severely relieved for the swim to be over!

The bike started out great. I took the time to put my socks on in transition. (Normally anything shorter than a half I don't wear socks on the bike or run). As usual I had people flying by me on the bike the entire course but I felt like I was going much faster than normal. It was a new course this year and over 75% of the roads were newly paved and super smooth. Only one real hill to climb (and for me to say that, you know that means it was a flat course). Just as I was coming into T2, Mark caught up to me. I was relieved to know I'd have him to run with me for the next 13.1!

Luckily we got a bit of cloud cover for the run so it wasn't nearly as hot as last year but the rolling hills were still as 'un fun' as they were last year. Mark had some bothersome knee issues that caused him to have to do a run/walk combo but I stayed with him since it's a millions times better to stay together than to run alone :) I'll go on record for him saying this. It was worth sacrificing my sub 6hr half ironman to cross the finish line together. Congrats to Mark for now officially being a 70.3 triathlete!

Quite a few other TNT-ers were racing and we all met up for a picnic together afterwards. Jen K was nice enough to grill up dogs and brats for us and we wall pitched in snacks. And after seeing Sean with a bottle of Mt. Dew I decided I needed (yes NEEDED) one. That along with a DQ treat later were my celebratory indulgences :)

Body is feeling ok today. It's an off-day when it comes to training. Tonight I have to go get my bridesmaid dress alterations done for Becky and Dave's wedding. I'll have to start putting some effort into cleaning up the tan lines on my back too since the dress is an open back. Tough to do for a triathlete :-P

So if you are interested in my race stats, here they are.

Time Trialpalooza

2009-07-21T10:21:00.002-05:00

So as it was raining this morning and I desperately wanted to get my workouts done this morning and have tonight OFF, I jumped on my trainer and put in Spinervals. 1:20 Time Trialpalooza which at first was entertaining because the crew he was training was mostly from Gear West and they were in the Plymouth Lifetime Fitness gym. In there was Tony, Kevin OConnor, Dan Cohen, Jeremy Sartain, David Thompson, Jan Guenther....too funny to see all these people I know from around here. Then the suffering began. 20 minutes on steady effort 95rpm, then 5 minutes off, then 15 min on 90 rpm, 5 minutes off, 10 minutes on, 5 minutes off, 5 minutes on and cool down.

OK I think that thoroughly solidified how weak I am on the bike. Granted I can't really directly compare myself to that group of athletes but they were holding on their big chain ring, midway down, 90+ rpms with a heartrate of 165+ and I was dying on my big chain ring, all the way at the top, 85rpms and my heartrate wasn't going past 148.

Argh!!! Not to mention I still have a very sore spot from the century ride on Sunday. Details aside it's not very pleasant :-P

Had the morning off from work again but we're meeting to swim at Foss at noon and then start recapping on how the first MiracleKids race went.

MiracleKids Triathlon, Training and Life updates

2009-07-20T13:39:00.001-05:00

I've been absolutely swamped with work since the first MiracleKids Triathlon was this past Saturday. The weather was a little cool in the morning but it was a great day overall for the kids to be racing. I won't go into detail but everything went fine and the kids all had a great time. I was SO excited to meet Ali and Nina, a couple of the MOMF kids that came to be recognized at two of Mitch's All Stars. Both of them have battled cancer and are doing fantastic :) Love ya girls!

Training has been stressful to get fit in. I have very little breaks in most days to get it all done but so far I've been keeping up with the TriFuel schedule. Unfortunately I had to make Saturday a "rest" day since we ended up not finishing clean up until 5:00pm and I was exhausted!

Sunday I decided on getting in my first century ride for the year. The MN Tri Club hosted a 100-mile ride that for non-members was only $10. It was supported by 4 aid stations (every 20 miles) that had gatorade, power bars, fruit, and other snacks. Not to mention they were placed by gas stations so bathrooms were also available. It was a cool start at 7:30am but shorts and long sleeves did the trick. It started in Coon Rapids on Northdale Blvd, went north onto part of the Minneman bike course and then straight up and back on 47. Here's a crude little map:

At each of the aid stations I did stop to refuel. I found lemon lime Gatorade was totally doing the trick for me that day. I tried not to spend more than just a few minutes stopped at each station as to not allow my body to completely cool off. Somewhere around mile 40 I started to have problems with being uncomfortable on my seat. I'll spare you the details but around mile 70, it was much more about that then my legs being tired! I also was surprised when my knee started giving me problems again with down stroke power somewhere around mile 70 but it seems better today. All in all I had a total saddle time of 6:31:58 which averages 15.4 mph.

Now I know that was likely a much flatter course than Ironman but I've figured I need to keep up a 12.4mph pace in order to complete the bike portion by the 5:30pm cut off time. I've been worried about the bike all summer so this was a nice confidence booster.

Once I was done with the 100-mile bike I unfortunately had to go out for a 50-min run. Nothing fast, no speedwork, just keep the body moving for another 50 minutes on my feet. The next few weeks are the "big stuff" for Ironman training and most of the weekend workouts have no details other than to keep moving, no stopping.

This next week is 18hours 20minutes total workout time. I think our longest week is coming up early August and that is 19 hours. Here's a link to this week's workouts for anyone that is interested in peeking into my world: http://www.trifuel.com/triathlon/ironman-workouts/weekc07.htm

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As far as the "life" portion of this blog goes.... I'll do a very brief catch up for you. I'm not big on writing about this stuff but it's significant enough of information I figure I need to get everyone up to speed. Kevin and I filed for divorce (hate that word) a few weeks ago and now it's basically just waiting for the papers to come in the mail saying "your relationship is legally over, have a nice day". We've been working through things very well together and we are trying to help each other come out of this as best as possible. But I have some very hard moments dealing with it from time to time. My sister just finalized her divorce today and is handling it as best as she can. We NEVER would have thought we'd be sharing this kind of experience together. I'm spending as much time as I can trying to get my finances in order and figure out how I'm going to survive on my current income of two part time jobs. Biggest worry is my townhome loan. I need to sit down with a loan officer and see if they are going to give me the loan on my own or if I'm going to need a co-signer.

That's enough of that......

Today I actually have the day off from work so I'm trying to catch up on house cleaning, filing, dishes, etc. All the stuff that gets severely neglected most days. Off to the chiropractor here in a little while. I'm sure once he starts my adjustments, he's going to wonder what the hell I've been up to.

Next week - Torchlight 5k (for fun) and Chisago Half Iron on Sunday - 54 days to Ironman