One Month In

Well, I'm about a month into training and all seems to be going well. I have worked through some normal soreness, but as I am building my base miles that seems to be going away. I did just run into my first minor setback. Toward the end of a 50 mile bike last Saturday, my bike started making a loud clicking sound on each revolution. Took the bike into the shop, and they said I have a bad bearing in there somewhere so they are ordering the part and getting it fixed. Good thing this past week was a recovery week so I was planning on dialing back the miles anyway. It did force me to ride the stationary bike at the Y yesterday for 2 hours though. I'm thankful for the Dan Patrick podcast which helped me get through that. Although sitting on that seat for 2 hours was way more painful than the 3.25 hours I spent on my bike on that 50 miler. I will be happy to get my bike back this week.

I have been keeping a log of all the time/miles spent since I signed up for this race, which was on March 14th. That was a Wednesday, and my log starts on March 17th. There must have been a few days of shock that had to wear off before I got out the door for my first training run (or I was too preoccupied by March Madness to get started right away).

Official count as of today:
19 hours swimming
523 miles biking
181.5 miles running

No idea if that is on track or if I'm not getting enough miles in. I go back and forth quite a bit on feeling pretty good that I'm doing enough, still being almost 4 months out, and sheer panic that I'm not doing nearly enough. I guess I need to trust the training plan I have laid out, and time will tell which feeling is correct. My guess is a little of both.

Another side benefit of this, that I counted on going in, is that regardless of what happens I will get in shape and shed some unwanted lbs. that have accrued over the last year or so. I use a scale at the fitness center at work, and I have no idea if the pounds are correct but I figure if I use the same scale throughout I can at least know how many lbs. I lose. I started the year on that scale at 245, which was my final playing weight at Iowa 20 years ago and have no reason to carry that much weight around now. At last check a couple days ago it read 219. So down 26 lbs. I still have more that I don't need to be carrying for 140.6 miles, so hopefully I can drop another 15-20 and see how I feel.

Trust the Process.