Tri Dad

This Memorial Day weekend, I'm participating in the Jim McDonnell Lake Swim in Reston, VA.  My wife, who was unaware that she was pregnant with our daughter at the time, did the mile swim last year and really enjoyed it.  I chickened out and decided to do my first open water swim several months later as part of the Giant Acorn Triathlon.  Here's a tip for any aspiring triathletes - don't have a race be your first experience with open water swimming. During the Giant Acorn Tri, I managed to do the 1500 meters in a staggering 35 minutes.  That was really disappointing considering the huge strides I have made over the past several years in the pool (taking off 30 seconds/100m since 2011).  Obviously, in addition to putting the time in at the pool, I have to get out and do some open water swimming, so that's what I'm doing this weekend. If you're near the mid-Atlantic, you know the weather has been pretty awful recently.  As of about 10 days ago, ...

Nothing like feeling as if you're getting on track with fitness only to be derailed by another injury.  This is a new type of pain in a familiar place. When I was ramping up my marathon training last time, I got a pretty bad case of patellar tendinitis from doing an interval workout on a treadmill.  That was a pain that came on from overworking my knee and would flare up as I increased my workouts.  It makes sense since tendinitis is the inflammation of the tendon, so by overusing it I'm rubbing it and causing irritation to it, which makes it progressively get worse.  I had about 12 weeks of PT to get over it. This injury is not tendinitis, but is still of my patellar tendon.  I was doing some sort of benign movement and there was instant severe pain in my knee.  The remnants of the pain lasted for a couple of minutes, subsiding relatively quickly.  But then I kept reaggrivating the pain by doing a certain combination of rotations and weight bearin...

After four glorious weeks of Parental Leave, I am now back at work.  It's absolutely amazing how quickly that time went by.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised, the first four weeks I took off after my daughter's birth also went by in a flash.  I guess it just gives all the more weight to the notion of long days and short years. My training during that four weeks was haggard.  Since my wife was back at work, I got nightly duty, though saying that is misleading.  I was the first line of defense on the nights that my wife was working, but since we're not bottle feeding, my wife still had to get up on most instances.  However, I am weak and even that small bit of disrupted sleep wrecks havoc on me.  I still don't know how my wife does it. Training wasn't a priority for me during that four weeks, though.  My priority was bonding with my daughter, which was awesome.  Being the analytical and data-driven person that I am, I meticulously logged ev...