Couch2Boston

So, the world is spiralling out of control.  How's that for obvious?  I think many of us are left wondering if there will ever be a return to normal again.  I don't know the answer.  I do know that I'm going to keep training for the 444 , but also I know that for the next few weeks training is going to be unstructured and heavily influenced by things that are going on outside of my athletic life.  It might also mean that these weekly posts start to look more like This Old House than a guy trying to transition to endurance cycling. If you are looking for swim, bike, run ruminations there will be none this week, just some navel gazing about what happens when real life needs to win out. Week 15 was dominated by work.  I did the full time job thing, but then spent every evening and long days on the weekend rehabbing a rental house that I own.  It is a long story, but let's just say everything needs to be fixed.  I tackled the bathroom first while...

  Here are some rules.... You can run 13.11 miles anytime on Sunday May 17th.  The course can be of any design you like. Uphill?  Sure!  Downhill?  Sure!  52.74625 laps of a 400 meter track?  Go for it, but you're nuts!  You can even run it on a treadmill if you like, but hopefully you'll be able to get outside instead. The cost to enter this highly professional and elegantly produced event is exactly $0.00.  There is no cap on the size of the entry field.  Please feel free to share the challenge with your friends, family, frenemies, dog, cat, goldfish or any other entity that might be interested in having a race on their calendar that won't get cancelled. The event will be a bracket race.  Never heard of one?  Everyone has an equal chance to win!  To "register" for the race follow this  link  to add your Name and Predicted Finish time.  You do not need to use your real name.  After you run 13.11 miles ...

I wasn't sure how to title this post.  I kept coming back to a Canadian TV show that I've seen a few times, " This Hour Has 22 Minutes ".  You see back in the old days before YouTube, a half hour TV show included about 8 minutes of commercials and much like a little kid waiting for the conclusion to a Scooby Doo cartoon the commercials seemed to redefine the concept of space and time.  Will this week ever end?  Can I actually find a way to put 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag?  No, but I'll be damned  if it didn't feel like it. Way back a lifetime ago, the end of last week on Sunday brought drama.  I hurt my Achilles.  Amanda crashed on her first bike ride and wound up in urgent care looking for broken bones.  By Monday morning my ankle had calmed down enough where it seemed clear that it was likely just a flare up of the tendinosis of my hallucis longus tendon.  Nothing to see here.  Please move along.  Not much drama, just nee...

The event will be a bracket race.  Never heard of a one?  Everyone has an equal chance to win! The first runner will start at 1pm. All runners must submit a predicted finish time to the timing judge by 12:45pm. The runner with the slowest predicted finish will leave first.  The fastest runner will leave last.  Each runner will be sent off based on the delta between their predicted finish time and the slowest predicted finish time.  The first runner to reach the finish line WITHOUT going faster than their predicted finish time will be declared the winner.  All runners that finish slower than their predicted finish will be ranked, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. based on the order they cross the finish line. Those that are bad at estimating their times and cross the finish line faster than their predicted times, (pronounced: LOSERS) will be ranked at the back of the pack.  The loser who has gone too fast, but has come closest amongst all of the losers to t...

This week started off pretty rough.  I got home at 1:30am from The Amazing Weekend .  My alarm went off at 4:10am to call me back to the pool.  I never heard it.  I woke up at 5:30 instead when my wife got up.  I bolted out of the house as quick as my tired body could handle and got in the pool anyway.  I only had time for 4,000 yards before they pulled the lane lines.  Those yards felt like 4 million instead of 4 thousand.  I was beat.  Mentally, physically and emotionally just empty.  But as coach Dori would say, I just kept swimming and tried to remember to open my eyes before I got to the wall.  Weight lifting in the afternoon was easier, but really it took about 5 days before I felt normal again.  I even pushed my Thursday hard/fast run to Friday and shortened it from the fatigue that had followed me throughout the entire work week. There were some nice highlights to this week though.  My wife has decided to take ...

This week felt like 2 weeks wrapped into one.  Monday through Friday was some well deserved and overdue rest.  The weekend was enough activity to make up for the rest. On Monday I started scaling back by shortening the planned swim and weight lifting.  Tuesday was a rest day.  A bonafide sleep in and do no exercise rest day.  It isn't that I feel like I *have* to workout everyday it is just that I do.  I'm a big fan of active recovery and I almost always feel better after a swim than I would after a day off.  So, on Tuesday after I slept in and got to work early I went ahead and updated my training log.  My old school, Excel spreadsheet of a training log.  I marked Tuesday as a "rest day".  That got me curious.  When was the last time that I had done that?  The answer was November 14th, 2019.  103 days earlier I'd taken a week off trying to heal my ankle and then later learned that rest was bad for tendinosis.  I gu...

The Olympic Arch With the excitement of the Olympic Marathon Trials concluded on Saturday it was time to get onto the next adventure, running 13.1 miles with no race plan on Sunday morning.  What could possibly go wrong?  I did not look at the course map.  I knew it would be hilly, but didn't check the course elevation.  I had been warned that this is, "not a PR course".  Bah.  Humbug. My legs were sore from standing for 8+ hours on Saturday while volunteering.  My caloric intake was spotty although I do have a new found love of Uncrustable PB&J sandwiches compliments of the volunteer food tent.  I wasn't drinking enough on Saturday either, unless 2 large beers at dinner counts.  I certainly felt like I had enough to drink by the end of dinner :-)  The race was set to start at 6:50 am and fortunately Amy (DrBart) wanted to get there early.  I like early!  I wound up setting my alarm for 3:30am and we left the house at ...

It is hard to put into words how unbelievably lucky I feel to have been a small part of this race.  The Atlanta Track Club put on an amazing event.  They went above and beyond to meticulously plan out every detail required to treat 698 of America's best marathoners like the rock stars they are.  One of the thoughtful things they did that set the stage for me to be so lucky was to have their team members reach out to their runner friends to recruit volunteers.  The thinking was that the more the volunteers could relate to the challenge these athletes would go through the better the athlete experience would be.  I liked their thinking and not only because I have a friend (DrBart) that is on the team.  DrBart (Amy) is one of many friends that I had the pleasure to meet through the Boston Marathon section of the Runner's World On Line forums before they were shut down.  The Olympic Trials became a chance for us to reunite.  Four of us from the RWOL ...