I have a pretty cool gadget I bought that I’ll review tomorrow/this weekend – it’s helped with two of my biggest weaknesses. No, not my gut – my lack of organization and my somewhat suspect memory. Stay tuned.

10-8-6-4-2 reps of the triplet:

pull-ups
Box jump, 12-15 inch box
Sit-ups

This means 10 pullups, 10 jumps, 10 situps, 8 pullups (no rest in between), 8 jumps, etc…

Now, I did this at home tonight while Tracy was out with the girls at basketball. I have no pullup bar, nor a box. So I adapted,improvised, overcame:
for pullups -> subsituted “reverse pushups”. Hard to explain, but lay on your back on first step of stairs, one hand on each railing with feet out as far as possible. Pull up! This is good for me as I really suck at pullups, so it’s assisted ones for me for a bit anyway.
Box jumps-> jump up 2 stairs. Takes a little more balance not to jam your toes, but if I can do it so can you.
Situps ->situps. Don’t be a wuss.

It’s not impossible to do, and the regular workout is 10-9-8-7-n…2-1. I am trying to take extra care not to go gung-ho like normal so I minimize the chance of doing something stupid and hurting myself.
It didn’t take long to do, but if you do them in a continous loop you’ll feel it by the end. Give it a try!  After I finished, I threw on my compression socks to help with recovery and my  legs felt nice.

1) After seeing how quickly my summer has filled up with some awesome life experience items + my motivation to ride my bike hours at a time has remained tragically low, I’ve come to the conclusion I’m not going to get any half or full Ironman distance races in this year.  I’m trying to use the time to balance out my body’s weaknesses and strengths.  Looking back at last year, I forgot about the 30+ trips to the physical therapist for various deep lower back (core) & upper ass (core) problems I had.  I don’t want to suffer through those again.   So, I’m slowly easing into CrossFit workouts, while trying to correct some of my more glaring running form issues.  I’ve always “sucked” from a form standpoint as a runner.  I remember Coach Walcholz and Labinski both making fun of my Stevie Wonder-like gait, and it’s only gotten worse.  Luckily my wonderful wife has done wonders for herself through Chi Running.  She’s liked what it’s done for her issues so much she’s taking the classes to teach others, and using me as her guinea pig.  So far, so good for me.  I’ll have more on the CrossFit stuff later.

2) I found out I am eligible to activate my Italian citizenship.  I started doing genealogical research after my grandma died, and found a cousin that got his Italian citizenship four years after starting the journey.  Expect to hear much more about this going forward as it is a large paper chase with some interesting history wrapped in.  There will be some good drama too I’m sure.

3) I’m doing the Chicago Marathon with Tracy for our anniversary.  She’s likely to try to make a run at qualifying for Boston.  I just want to get through it uninjured.  It’s easy enough for me – I just need to drop 25-40 lbs.  And seriously, that’s easy enough on paper as well.   I have to this point just lacked the willpower to do it. 

So here is my testimonial to the world – I’m going to be under 200lbs by the time I toe the line in Chicago on 10/10/10 with the Open Heart Magic charity team.  I’ll be chronicling my journey on these pages, so stay tuned.

I’ve also got some web design hobby stuff going on that might be interesting.  And at work, we managed to be the Category Kings in both of our funds (Small Cap Growth and Mid Cap Growth) through March 1st.  Not easy to be the top fund for very long, and we’ll see if we can keep it up for the year.  I don’t usually talk about work on here because it bores most of you and I’m afraid I’ll say something that compliance wouldn’t like, but I wanted to give the Portfolio Managers (Patrick and Ken) congrats for all their hard work.   They have the hard job – listening as I pitch the latest goofball tech or clean energy idea dejour.

I have to say one of the things that makes Ironman so much fun is just how significant each decision is during the day.  The only analogy I can draw to illustrate from other sports is in golf – you face decisions on where to push or place safe on most holes.  Your score on a hole will be very different if you decide to layup rather than drive over a river at 225yds, depending on how well you execute.   Most people should layup, but few do.  This leads to scrambling to save a score.

Now imagine that what you do on the first shot of the first hole will have a direct effect on ALL the remaining shots of the round.  That’s Ironman-racing.  And much like my golf game of old, I shot around “bogey-plus” for the day.  I got into trouble early, stuck to the plan to try to recover for about an hour, and then blew apart my day.  Once I realized what I had done I did what I could to make sure I’d be able to run the run – but this came at the cost of a slow bike ride.  In the end, I finished my first Ironman Wisconsin in 14:24.   My “C-Must accomplish-to-feel-successful” goal was to finish the race.  I didn’t tell anyone but Tracy, but my A-goal was to finish somewhere between 12:30 and 13:30. I knew it would take a nearly perfect day of racing for me to do that, but Endurance Nation’s execution training certainly provided me with the knowledge to attempt to pull it off.  Last Sunday wasn’t to be that day.

I’m going to cover Thursday-Friday in this post, and then Saturday up to the race itself in the next one. It just fits better that way.

I came into the week in a bit of no-man’s land. I’d been feeling pretty crappy for 3 weeks running, but just starting to get back to full-strength. This was unfortunate because it seemed like my biking power peaked the end of July and had fallen off by mid August. I was marking it up to cumulative fatigue, but after two mediocre race rehearsals I wasn’t sure what I was capable of doing during the race. My runs were holding up fine – slow, but still near the peak for the year. Now the cold had made me bag a few bike workouts into and during taper, which I was pretty sure wasn’t going to make me faster .I knew I could get through the bike but wasn’t expecting the 18+mph (~6:10hrs split) that I was after seeing my results YTD on my long rides around the end of July.  I had ball-parked a 1:30 total swim, 6:35ish bike (17mph), and a run from 4:30-5:00 as what I could expect for my effort.  I really didn’t know though since I’d never done anything this long before – no marathons, no half irons.

Thursday Night: In the following video the opening introductions were from the team dinner on Thursday night. I was in charge of organizing it and it took up more time than I expected. We ate outside at the Great Dane and I enjoyed two of their finest dark malt beverages with my meal.  Calories baby! I think most everyone enjoyed the night – if not they are more than welcome to try their hand at cat-herding by running it next year There’s a lot of cool race footage in there as well including some of this insanely hard-working fast guy that has shown me the template for success in 2012.   He earned his win through hard-work and dedication – congrats Matt.

After dinner I scooted quick so I could get back to Barb and Kevin’s.

Thanks again Barb and Kevin for everything you did during the weekend. I really appreciate it.

They were nice enough to let me stay over, and I didn’t want to keep them up waiting for me since I didn’t have a key.  (Thanks again guys!)

Friday: I drove on down to the Monona Terrace to get into the water to do the practice swim by 8:30am.  A bunch of EN’rs were there, so I swam with them.  I didn’t feel awesome, but the water was much cleaner and less stinky than the day before.  I forgot my watch but swam a 1.2 mile loop somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes.  That seemed like a good pace for raceday – in retrospect that wold have been perfect.  It was also the pace  I swam during the Madison Open Water Swim race three weeks prior.  Luckily, the drunk guy that drowned Tuesday night didn’t surface until Sunday after the swim – I was a little freaked that I’d be the lucky guy to find him.

We dried off and headed upstairs for the Four Keys Talk by Rich and Patrick.  I can’t be more plain about this – IF YOU ARE RACING IRONMAN YOU NEED TO GET THE DVD OR SEE THE TALK.  Period.  It’s common-sense information but nearly 95% of the people racing were doing the exact opposite of what they should on race day. It was cool to see how many people just walked by and stuck around to keep listening.  Eventually the Ironman officials “soft” kicked us out because a pro was about to have a press conference behind us.  There were probably 100 people at the talk by the end of it.

Of course, my red shirt didn't fit (I grabbed a kids large, no dice there) so I'm the Zen-master in the black in the middle.

Ended up going to lunch with Jesse and his wife, Josh and Tony at a random Thai restaurant on Willy Street.  I was a little nervous about spicing it up 48 hours out but the food was really good.  I love Thai anyway, and it didn’t disappoint.  Josh made a good call.   We walked back up to the Expo (I bought some cowbells), and then parted ways.  I checked into my hotel room and tried to sleep but it wasn’t happening.  I made sure to get off my feet and laid around waiting for Tracy to get into town.

That night, I skipped the mandatory meeting at the Terrace and instead had a wonderful cookout with Barb and Kevin/their kids/our kids.  They were great neighbors, and the kids had a good time playing with their old friends.  I’m glad we don’t have a trampoline though; they’d never get off of it.  I stopped over at the waterpark with the kids and then went back to the room to try to get my last good night of sleep.

This is where it sucked.  I couldn’t fall asleep – I think I finally did around 12:30.  I knew it was going to be my last night of rest so I just transferred all the anxiety forward.  Brilliant!

The first race rehearsal last Saturday didn’t go well. The good news is that most first race rehearsals go poorly. I had stacked the odds by never having ridden the route before, and that hurt. Within 2 miles I had to take a detour, ended up getting lost and then going the wrong direction. I fell so far behind I was afraid I was going to be late for the Brewers game that evening so I cut some distance off by skipping a loop. I only got in 90 some miles.
The train wreck began when I attempted the run. For some reason I only took one little water bottle with me for a six mile run in 92 degree heat. That was dumb. I ended up losing a ton (8lbs) of weight, and having the shivers from dehyrdation after the run. Lesson learned for next time – run nutrition is just as important as bike. It’ll be easier on race day with food/water every mile of the run, but still would like to nail the next rehearsal so my hyperactive mind doesn’t latch onto that worry.

This Saturday was a great weather day. I ended up doing the Madison Open Water Swim. I competed in the 2.4mile wetsit division. I was very disappointed in my sighting. If I wasn’t sick right now, I’d draw a nice diagram of how I participated (maybe later I’ll stick it in here). I’ve been a legit 1:10-1:17 swimmer over this distance in Pewaukee Lake, so my 1:23 was disappointing. Part of it was my oncoming cold (that’s foreshadowing….)

I quick scurried out to my old pad on Hidden Cave Road, parked the car and got on the bike. I never seemed to get in the groove. I had also forgotten my power meter so I didn’t have that to guide me, just my Garmin. Anyway, I was sweating bullets even though it never got much above 70. I covered the 50 miles in 3 hours which is slow for me. At that point I just called it a day. My throat was sore and I just had no omph, and with Sean being sick I had a feeling I was coming down with his cold. I spent some time with Barb and Kevin our Madison neighbors (thanks for the chips and drinks), and then went home.

Fast forward to Sunday – full blown head cold. Great, last bike bike workout and I can barely breathe. I agonized over weather I should just suck it up and do the workout or not risk making this thing stick around for longer and take it easy. By 1pm, the decision had been made for me – I felt so tired I had to lay down. I woke up at 5, still feeling like crap.

The logical part of me knows Saturday’s bike wasn’t my healthy effort and I’ll be better on race day, but the worry part of my brain is now freaking out non-stop that I’ll have trouble pulling 7 hours on the bike, that I missed an important bike workout, etc. I think I might just try to get a 2 1/2 hour ride in tomorrow if I’m feeling better just to shut my brain up, and then start preparing for the last race rehearsal week. I might even head up to the course to do it – just to try to benchmark how long two loops should take on with all the aero gear loaded up and ready to go.

Anyway, it’s the last deseperate shot at buying some speed for the Ironman. I think it really works too – I took it out on a 2+ hour ride this afternoon on onee of my standby bike courses. I ended up being about 1mph faster for the same power production.
And hell, I actually like the look. I think my son Anthony is the only human that thinks it”s cool. I’ll take it though.

(and this was taken after hurricane Sean had woke up and worked his 20 month old magic on the house. So there!)