Peaked and loving life

You know what to do

Happy Memorial Day to everyone. Thanks for your service to those of you who have served. Go eff yourself to everyone else. But seriously, go eff yourself everyone.

Kelly likes the big slide, though she cried the whole way down. Big baby.

I'm a little grumpy today, with a sore left foot and a strained right calf. This last weekend looks to be the peak of my Ironman Coeur d'Alene training plan. I rode 100 miles on Saturday. Sunday was spent hauling two 25-pound kettle bells around a water park, trying to keep them from drowning in the baby pool.
Finally Monday morning I ran 18 blistering miles with a good friend. We managed a pace that's a full minute-per-mile faster than my last 18-mile run, Ironman Arizona training.

No good speed goes unpunished

The extra speed comes at a cost: sore legs and feet. Today I'm a hobbling mess. I have an appointment with the sports chiro at ironcare, so hopefully I'll be able to run again this week. If not, maybe I'll aqua-jog or something equally as horrible.
My long ride, a century in the wind and hills of North Scottsdale, took me through the nicest neighborhood I've ever trespassed into: Troon North.

Troon North, our maids have maids

Now, I've been in Troon proper, and it's sufficiently tawny. Troon North makes regular Troon look like Skid Row.

Not that Skid Row. Dammit, Siri.

Big glorious taper

Next weekend my long ride is 85 miles and the run is 10. These are the sort of numbers I like. I have some concern about the volume of my training plan this time around, and I'll post about that on Monday. See you then!

Penultimate Peak Week

One more hard week

I found out on Friday that this coming week will be my peak Peak week (week). I expected two more hard weeks, so this is a bonus to my little brain. All of that means that this past week was my penultimate (second to last) peak week.

Penultimate peak week

Swim

I try to swim a long, nonstop set every 2 weeks. Last week I did 2500 without pause, and it was good. Usually I have insane thoughts, and my mind wanders to terrifying places during the 45 minutes of silence. I am actually getting used to this, which is good right?
Observation of the week: Women look much better under water than they do when they get out of the pool. As soon as she climbs out of the pool, "How you doin'?" turns into "I'll bet you were something before electricity."

Bike

I found friends to ride 100 miles with me, and we had some laughs. At one point we stopped at a fire station to steal ice and water. Did you know they give away ice, water, and gatorade to cyclists? In Arizona they do.  I watched as the one girl in our group flirted with the fireman. It was entertaining. 

Run

My coach is kind of an ass. She prescribed my long run last week as: 30:00 bike, 10 mile easy run, 30:00 bike, 7 mile hard run.
My friend, Bobby, did the weird run-bike-run with me. He didn't ride at all but he did both runs. Bobby kept me moving when I really wanted to lie down and die on the trail. Bobby is nearing 230 days of his running streak. I think when he gets to 500 I'm going to rufie him and show him a good time. I'll have to LITERALLY show him the good time since he won't remember any of it.

Lack of photos

I don't think I took any photos this week. I know no one wants to read a blog without photos, so I apologize.

Final recovery week

Recovery week

Before I can write about my last recovery week, I need to define some things. Endurance training involves periodization, which means you break from building volume and intensity every 3 or 4 weeks to allow the body to recover. After 3 weeks of hard work, last week was about 75% of the previous week. That means today I feel a TON better than I did last Monday.
I rode 80 miles with some friends on Saturday. Next week is 100 miles. I hope I find someone to ride with.
Sunday I ran 11 miles. Then I went to a Mother's Day brunch with the family.

Why do people buy my kids ridiculous stuff?

Ironman Arizona vs Coeur d'Alene

Phoenix is heating up; 104°F today, 105° tomorrow. I've got 5 weeks of training left, each longer and hotter than the previous. Training for Ironman Arizona 2 years ago, the last 2 months of training got cooler each week. This year I'm in for increasing heat for my long rides and runs. Even the mid-week runs are getting uncomfortably warm. This is going to be a challenge.

7 weeks until glory-part-2

Mobile app development

Race Pace was approved by Microsoft and is now in the Windows Phone Marketplace. If you have a Windows Phone go grab it; it's free and fun to use. Send some feedback, and help me make the app better.

I'm currently working on porting Race Pace to Android. It's fun learning a new language, Java, and a new OS, but wow these development tools aren't nearly as nice as the Windows Phone tools.

I can't decide how I feel about Android

After Android I'll move on to one more mobile platform, a much trendier and hipster-er platform. Speak of the devil this just arrived:

This is going to get expensive, isn't it?

Ironman training

Easy to calculate, hard to run

Less than 7 weeks until Coeur d'Alene!

Last week I rode my first century in more than a year. The kicker is I did it alone. I planned to meet a local triathlon club for their regular Saturday long ride. Unfortunately, there were a few races going on, so no one else showed up. After all of that it ended up being a pretty uneventful, but solid 100 miles in the saddle. Every time I ride more than 5 hours alone I question my choice of hobby.
The next morning I planned to run 15 miles. I organized a small group to do the run together. Immediately we started out way too fast, putting down 6 miles at 8:00/mile pace. I knew I couldn't keep that up for 15 miles. 
I fell off the back of the group at mile 9. That's when shit got sideways. The group kept running father and farther away from home. I was constantly doing the math, and I knew we were not going to make it back in 15 miles. I was right, the whole route ended up being 17 hard miles, and I ran about 16.5 of those. I had run out of water and food, and my legs were en fuego. It was a breakthrough workout for sure, but I'm glad I made it.

Kids

My kids are busy being cute as hell. Kelly turns 1 this week, and she's trying to walk. That's a handful right there. She's much more adventurous than Leah was. Kelly has a few words: Dad, Mama, Pup, Leah (sometimes), Hi, Bye, and That (as in "what's that?" or "give me that".)

Happy Birthday, Churro!!

Also Leah sat on a mini Donkey to celebrate Cinqo de Mayo. As usual, she managed to make this photo really awkward, looking like a Craigslist ad for donkey/child combo sale.

Mexican Gothic?