Slow Spot

Yeah,
It has been a bit of a slow week for me. Been putzing around the house and the end of the haying season is winding to it's conclusion. The kids are back to school and the projects that are looking me in the face are firewood.....my chimney project and getting the closets done for the bedrooms so we can move all that stuff around. My youngest turned one years old today and the Abbie started kindergarten. Big day for the Ellis clan.
As for training, I did go for a quick 5k yesterday and really have plans to burn out 6-7 miles tomorrow morning. Worked 2p-2a last night so today was really a wash with sleeping til 11am. Tomorrow is another day.....

Great weekend.

Well it's monday and I've got wood and sheetrock coming from my local lumberyard to make closets in rooms for the kids, and cover a chimney that we put up last winter. Hey I know that should be done already, but I've been training. So that will be taking up the time today, with prep work and getting some stuff out of the way. I am excited, my wife and I are moving our bedroom downstairs and Abbie is getting her own room. The kids are excited, and the work should be pretty easy. I am looking to have it all done by the middle of next week. We shall see.
Saturday was hot and humid, but a quick 5k in the blistering heat and humidity was all I managed. I had planned another of the 6.7 mile loops from the other day, but Will was with me and he was not faring well in the heat. Probably didn't help that it was 11:30 am. Cest la vie! Did some rec swimming with the kids, interspersing a lap here and there with playing. Great day.
Sunday I went to the Timberman 70.3 in Gilford NH to watch. Not ready for that at all. My main goal was to go there and sign up for next years race. Unfortunately they hadn't opened the registrations yet. Have to wait til October. Anyway, it was hot and humid when I got up at 0300 to be there for the start of the race. Yeah I know I am nuts, but Gilford is three and a half hours away.....Mybrother in law Cliff went with me and we had a blast. The energy at the event was way cool and the 2600 racers was very impressive. Chrissy Wellington and Andy Potts were the pro winners and it was really cool to see them competing at such a high level. They are truly blessed with superior genetics....
More impressive is watching all the different types of people racing, all the crazy carbon junkies, and the people riding their straight up roadie steel frame. It was so cool. Cliff had to geek slap me as I started spouting off prices of some of the bikes in the transition area and the benefits of this and that. I realized that I may have stepped off the deep end on this one....
I was actually in awe to see so many people gathered together to celebrate the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. People of all shapes and sizes were competing and it was truly inspiring to watch the 60 year olds pop out of the water and sprint down the beach to the transition area. Sprint! So cool. I hope to be in half that good of shape.

Daddy Daycare

Today I am home with two out of three kids.The boys home with Dad, Abbie out with Mom on shopping trip. Gonna be fun, some Wii time with Will, probably a bath for the Benjamin. Good day.
Sunday is coming and I am so pumped to go to the Timberman 70.3 in Guilford NH. Gonna get up at 0330 to get to the start on time. This year I am going as a spectator, next year I am going to race! This will be the charge for my winter training batteries, so I can't wait to see all those people thrashing the water at the start. They have an expo area, and some of the best local microbreweries so my brother in law and I are going to have some fun. I am trying to get him hooked into the triathlon bug, but he needs a road bike, and his finances might hold him back. He started an envelope, so who knows if he will get enough squirrelled away for next spring. Would be nice to have someone to train with. I will have to settle for a run tonight after the wife gets home from the shopping trip, maybe even after the kiddos go to bed. We shall see how tired Cheri is by the time she gets home. Abbie can be challenging when it comes to shopping to say the least.

Time flies....

Well it is getting closer to the halfway point of my vacation and I am so happy to be relaxing, well relaxing from real work. Been swimming my butt off nearly every day.
Tuesday, many laps in the in-laws pool swimming with the kids, then dedicated no messing around by myself that night for about ten to twelve laps as fast as I could swim. Mind you that is still slow, but the freestyle is getting better every day.
Wednesday I got off early and put in 50 miles on the bike. Averaged 16 mph. I am not sure how folks on Trifuel are getting so fast but, over that distance I definitely fell off the pace. Swam with the kids a ton during the day yesterday, no distances, or times, but lots of swimming.
Had a wonderful night out with my wife of thirteen years, lots of conversation, good food, and good entertainment with a German Celtic group called Cara. They were very good, with two violinist, a flutist, a guitar player, and this behemoth of a guy who was vet/drummer. Great vocals, and some really flashing reels that got the blood pumping.Good time...
Today I am feeling the effects of yesterday's ride, so a quick 3 miles on my sore knees and that will be good. No swimming today. Well maybe a little. Feels good to be getting better at that.
Probably another ride on the bike tomorrow with a friend.

Monday morning, first day off in three and I am taking a break from mowing the rainforest. It is 80 degrees already and I am soaking wet, but its good for the weight loss program. Weekend wasn't too bad in the ER and I am off for the next eight days.
Saturday night got home from the ER and found the house to be empty and all I wanted to do was go run, so I did. What a run, 6.7 miles,and my personal longest run ever! The night was perfect, started about sunset with the hills of the valley I live in backlit by the westering sun. Just enough heat to get a good sweat going and I was off. Saturday night made me a little more cautious as I live in Redneckville USA. Teenagers and lifted four wheel drive pickups zooming along at 70 on a back road when they should be going 45. But the traffic was manageable and I just got in the groove of my playlist. When I turned on the Valley road and this massive hill is staring me in the face I just grinned and went. What a feeling to just be loving something this much. As the sun went completely behind the hills and darkness fell it was so cool to have my eyes become accustomed to the lack of light and just run in the dark. I could see the TV's on in the houses and I actually felt sorry for those people sitting in their houses and not appreciating the wonderful night.
I got back to my house, and as I had decided not to stress myself with a watch I was so shocked to see that I had made the run in an hour......What a night.

Early morning ride

Well, I got up yesterday at 0445 as my wife had to go to work by 0800 and I was running the daddy daycare for the day. Kids are Will 8.5, Abbie 6, and Ben 11months. They are cool, funny, and quite a handful. The house was thrashed and more than a tiny share of laundry to get caught up on but any ways. I was more than a little bummed about the prospect of cleaning the house with three noseminers vying for attention. ButI went out and just kind of got lost riding and thinking, before I knew it I had racked up 26.5 miles and had a huge fricking grin on my face. I love the feeling of the muscles pumping out the miles and sweat dripping of your nose. It just makes all of the other stuff just so much more bearable. I am so glad I got on this train. Oh, and by the by when I started biking some three years ago I bought this cool Team Ireland Louis Garneau jersey on ebay, but have never been able to wear it. Just was too ridiculous with the tire hanging out all over. I looked damn good wearing it yesterday.......Just keep triing.

Swim Lessons

Well, it was another overnight last night. I hate them, the lethargy and the overwhelming desire to just lay down and go to sleep is actually painful. I have been a get up and go get em at 5am guy since I was 10 years old. that has never changed for me so when I force myself to stay up all night, i get a little nutty. i slept til 1400 and got up to hang with my little guy while my wife swept the other two off to the dentist. After that i went to a friend of mine to her pool, and she helped me with my freestyle. i have such a hard time getting my body in time with the breathing and the stroke. I made some great progress in the 45 minutes that I was there with her. I am so excited to be getting a handle on this thing. Well, it is off to bed for me very soon. I hope to get in a long ride in the morning before my wife goes to work. I am doing the daddy daycare thing tomorrow. Working Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so tomorrow is my last little push to get good training in.

True confessions of a slow runner

So for the most part I have hated running my whole life. Running just for the sake of running has always seemed like a useless effort. You know if you couple it with running to tackle the quarterback, score the goal, etc then it was something to be tolerated. And to be honest I think that the reason that I have hated running so much is that I am slow. All the smirks, eye rolls, and general bad attitude to the track/ cross country teams was because I was so bad at it. I remember my coach in football switching me out of the starting lineup in football, just so that when the team was introduced to start the game that he wouldn't be embarassed to watch me poke my way across the field during warmups.
All that is to say that when I decided to do a triathlon that I didn't really do two thirds of the sports involved....I love to bike and have logged about 4000 miles in the last 2 years, but the other two disciplines were just something stuck on either end of the fun.
But let me back up, five years ago I finally admitted that I really hated my job as a machinist and my wife who knew that I had hated it forever, made me go back to school. I had always been interested in medicine, but with two small children couldn't go back to school to be a doctor, so nursing was the route I took. I hadn't been in school for almost 13 years, and stepped into an old school honest to goodness boot camp for nursing. I was forced to sit on my butt for days on end to study and so ended up ballooning to almost 260 pounds. My total cholesterol ended up being over 300, and I could barely stay awake during the classes. I begged my wife to let me get a bike in the spring of 06 and put on 1600 miles that first summer. I did the trek across Maine and felt a little bit better come fall to end out the program and help me graduate, but all the extra weight I was carrying around did little for my piece of mind or running around on the telemetry floor that I was working.
I moved to my local ER in the summer of 08 just before the birth of our third child and was still pulling 230's My waist was still a 38 and I knew that if I didn't do something that the genetics that I am cursed with were going to have me at a cardiologist before I was 40.
Knowing myself like I do, I knew that I would have to have some goal to get myself motivated to really do something about the weight. So this spring I decided that I would do a triathlon. I had watched the Ironman coverage growing up, and had always been fascinated. I would be glued to the TV for hours watching those people push themselves to the limit. I had always wanted to be the one there doing it. But hence the slow running, not ever been taught to swim... you can see the dilemma.
I decided that no matter how slow I did it I would finish a triathlon and signed up. I started to train, and having three kids and a very busy job in the ER I found the time that I had to devote to training was so small. Couple that with the fifth rainiest June July in the state of Maine's history and the time was quickly getting away from me. I did my first 5k a month before the tri and finished a dismal 30:06. I continued to pound away at the running but I have been unable to get any faster. Not to say that I haven't met with success, I have never run 3miles in a row on purpose ever! I have dropped a full three inches off my waist, I dropped a total of eight percent bodyfat (since January), and have seen about thirteen pounds come off that number peeking at me from the scale.
I have decided in the course of this little empowering journey of mine, and with the successes that I have accomplished that I would continue it and try to get to that Ironman dream. Who cares how slow I finish it as long as it is before they shut down the finish line.
To end, this morning I was perusing the web and Trifuel, and saw that one of the folks had posted about getting ready for the Timberman 70.3 in New Hampshire and decided that that would be my next step. I got so excited in fact that I went out and ran my longest run ever! I did a 10k and was able to keep my very lethargic time of ten minute miles! I know that the real triathletes out there might be sniggering, but for the few who won't or don't tri because they might be that slow, there is my confession. I am slow and I love triathlon. Keep triing!

Couple days off

I worked Friday night 7p-7a and honestly haven't overcome the lag.Night shifts always kick my tail and I can't even begin to say how people do it full time. Saturday, slept for nine hours during one of the best days of an awful freaking summer in Maine. June was one of the four wettest in recorded history. Anyway, I hadn't seen much of the fam, so I decided to chuck it all and take everybody for a day to the Desert of Maine. It is kind of neat, but not much more than a big sandpit in the middle of Freeport. Didn't think that it merited the 29 bucks for the tour.
I would love to say that I am going to jump right back into the training tomorrow but another 12 hour day in the ER and then a night shift on Tuesday. I can only hope to plug in a couple of quick runs. I am in awe of some of the folks on Trifuel and the such for their dedication to training. I am trying to build myself into that kind of athlete, but with the family and the job I am struggling. Anyway, I can't wait til I can get on the road again.