Tri Dad

Since my son was born in June, my training regime hasn't been training so much as exercising.  The lack of regular sleep makes it really difficult to get in planned sessions, especially of any significant length, so I take what I can get when I can get it.  Having a treadmill and bike trainer make that about 1000% easier, but still not perfect. I've done the Giant Acorn triathlon that past few years but decided to defer this year's entry to next year.  I would have completed it, but I'm pretty confident I would have broken my streak of consistent year-over-year improvements since I started tracking my results.  One race that I did not defer is my local community's Jingle Dash 5k/10k race (where the 10k course is just doing the 5k course twice).  I posted about my 2016 and 2017 results.  I went into this race with zero confidence that I would do well.  I didn't want to be disappointed so I set no expectations for myself.  As I mentioned, I wasn't trainin

Sleep is one of those things, like having a good commute, that you take for granted while you're getting it, but as soon as it goes away, everything is terrible.  My son is now almost five months old, and sleep has been a thing.   This post was actually a draft that I made shortly after my son was born in June.  It was only one line, so not really even a draft, but it was interesting to see some activity on here since Bub was born.  Honestly, this blog, with it's ~30 page views per day, is not exactly at the top of my mind as I wake up at 4am for the day to placate my son to allow my wife to get a few extra hours of sleep (this isn't common, but give me some poetic license here). Training in general has not been at the top of my mind.  I was working out 6-7 days a week, and  now I'm having trouble fitting in half that, if I'm lucky.  So far this week, I swam on Monday, and walked on my treadmill during a conference call for meetings on two different days (to

Last year, Nike hosted a big publicity stunt to try to get the first human ever to run 26.2 miles in sub-2 hours.  It didn't work, despite all of the advantages given to the runner.  I'm sure that one day, somebody out there will break achieve that goal and a 2-hour marathon will be like a 4-minute mile - something extremely difficult to do, but doable. That 2-hour number is completely arbitrary, but it sounds so good.  So good, in fact, that Strava hosted a competition (event? challenge? it's own publicity stunt?) to get people to do a half marathon in under 2-hours.  When this event kicked off, I was in the middle of my marathon training plan and I had a 16-mile run planned, which was at a pace that put me sub-2 for the first 13.1 miles of the run.  What I soon discovered was that the entire activity, regardless of how much longer it was than 13.1 miles, had to be sub-2 hours.  So my 2:02:49 16-mile run did not trigger the Strava badge for me.  Obviously the marathon I

Wow, it's been a long time since I've been here.  I hope my absence has not spurned you web-crawlers that are hopefully indexing this site and bringing it to a larger audience.  But, I've been busy!  Since the Jingle Dash 10k, I've started up my Hanson's Marathon Training Plan again.  This time I am doing the entire plan and I'm not subbing out rides and swims for easy runs.  I'm running all of those miles, shoes be damned. In fact, the plan officially started on 12/6/2017, and since then I've run 92 times for a total of 724.78 miles.  The plan has me running six days a week, if you do the math it turns out that I've missed four prescribed runs and failed one run.  That's over 92 hours of running to prepare for one race that I have coming up in a week and a half.  It's not like I'm going to stop running for the next ten days leading up to my race, but today was my last "SoS" run (something of substance).  From here on out it&#