Pics from IMAZ /05 trip and race.

With the news of IMAZ moving to the fall, I thought this would be a good time to post some pics from my trip to IMAZ /05

The Van...

Inside the Van...

Me and Joanne on the lip of the Grand Canyon day after the race.

Me on the edge...

Chris and Victoria...

Victoria...

Nice View......

Joanne, Victoria and Chris

Me Chris and Victoria at the entrance of the Grand Canyon

Me Chris and Victoria

Me coming through town during one of the loops.....peddle Joe peddle!! .....Is that guy behind me drafting???

Me trying to catch a draft, but I can't keep up.

Racers getting ready to start the swim

Me at the venue trying out the endless pool, notice form and speed? 2.6mi/hr

Me posing by Tempe Town Lakes water edge a couple of days before the race.

Victoria at the top of A mountain in Tempe.

Joanne and Me.

A view of TTL from the top of A mountain

Me after my first Ironman finish. what a great day it was.

Ironman Arizona is moving

You heard it here first!!....or you would of heard 2 years ago if I had a blog back then.


North America Sports Just announced a second race for Ironman Arizona....http://www.nasports.com/news/fullstory.php?storyid=787

TEMPE, AZ - North America Sports is pleased to announce the addition of a second Ford Ironman Arizona Race to their 2008 event schedule.

The fall event will become the permanent date for this event going forward to 2009 and beyond.
This Is good news in my book. I love the IMAZ race, it is a beautiful venue. and the weather is perfect for me, I love the dry heat.

Being moved to the fall will make the race even better for me if I do it again, because then I'll have a whole summer of being able to ride and run outside to train rather then doing all my training indoors all winter as I did for both IMAZ/05 and/06 when it was held in april.

Biggest swim yet!

I did it! I swam 2700m this morning to finish up my Nov, challenge. Now the rest of this months swims are gravy.

The pool wasn't to busy, but I had to share my lane with 2 other swimmers. I met up with Ted from my tri club in the pool, he was going to try some easy swimming but didn't have it in him yet to do much. He had a bad accident on his bike one week out from doing his first Ironman in Aug. He broke a few ribs and punctured a lung, now he is trying to get back into swimming and biking slowly as he still has pain with breathing. I think it will be a while before he get back into running. Poor guy.

My swim...

I started with 1000m straight swim.
Then did alternating sets of 50 breast and hard 50 freestyle for the next 1000m
Then did easy straight 700m with a pull buoy concentrating on my breathing on every 4th stroke and my reach and pull of my stroke, being long in the water with a smooth glide.

Cold and Frosty

Boy it was cold last night. it's freezing this morning too! the penguins are setting up nests in the backyard getting ready for another cold and wintery winter. brrrrrrr

I have my coffee, Siiiipppp ahhhhh!.... but no sign of mocha my coffee drinking cat, I guess she is still sleeping. My wife Joanne is up and gone to work already, Victoria is also up and gone to school, she is in grade 11, and an my son Christopher should be home soon from work, he decided school wasn't for him after grade 11 and started working full time last year at one of the big food chains on midnight shift ( I got him the job with my connections, I used to work part time at the store for years and knew the manager) so he can make money to buy all of his neat toys, like his 50"plasma tv, guitars, amps, DVD's, beer money (yes he is of legal age and he is into partying with his buds now, not to say he wasn't before? ) and fuel his car. Typical adolescent.

Today's activity wil be going to the pool and maybe finish my swim challenge im in on with peeps on slowtwitch. My challenge at the start of the month is to swim 24km, and I have 2700m left, so I may stay the extra15 min and finish up today to complete my 24km swim challenge for the month of November, but I will continue the rest of the month with my swims every Mon, Weds, and friday's, throughout my journey to IMLP.

I was just going through my log for my first Ironman I did for IMAZ/05 and the most I swam in any month for that journey was 29km and that was the second to last month before the race in April, with my longest steady swim of 4km in one set. Right now with this swim challenge I haven't gone longer then 2500m and today if I finish will be my longest set at 2700m. I think if I keep up this pace I'm doing this swim challenge for November, I may exceed my IMAZ's longest month of swim training by doing 30km. and I'm like 8 months out from IMLP.....I hope I can keep this swim training up for the rest of the 8 months, if I do? I will do awesome in my swim at IMLP.

PUPPY'S AND PETS

My dog Amber....

This is Cinnamon

This is my coffee drinking cat Mocha.....

I love it when puppy's hang around!........DON'T YOU?

I got mail! and won the lottery

The mail came in and I got a pleasant surprise, I got a get well card from my co-workers wishing me a speedy recovery and to come back to work because they miss me. Awwwww.....

They all signed the card and inside the card were scratch and sniff lottery tickets, 4 of them!! so I scratched them and I won!! woo hoo!! I won! I won!..I won $20

The rest of the afternoon I just lazed around, made dinner, then jumped into the hot tub to soak my aching knees and feet.

Now it time to watch the WWE Smackdown ( wrestling).

Oh and a Happy Thanksgiving to my friends down south.

I RAN 4 MILES

I woke up to a fresh blanket of snow. It started last night and it is still falling at3pm this afternoon as I'm typing this. Most of the overnight snow was that heavy slushy stuff you use in a Slurpee, but I wouldn't eat it! hee hee, now it's fluffy and white and cold. Brrrrr...I hate snow and cold!

OK! after my morning coffee I went to the gym and did a set of weights while waiting for the treadmill. I'm telling you my knees were aching this morning. I finally got on the treadmill and started up with a 3.5mile/hr walk to warm up, hoping my knees would loosen up. No luck, they were stiff and hurting, so I hit the interval butting to get the mill going to my run speed.( I always set the treadmill up to do intervals with the low speed at 3.5m/hr and the run speed to 6m/hr that way I can toggle up the speed more if I'm feeling good.) As soon as the speed hit 6m/hr my knees were screaming so I toggled back to 5.5m/hr and ran with that a while. My knees where hurting like someone was sticking them with pins and after about a 1/2 mile they started to loosen up, but still hurting, but not enough not to HTFU and continue on. I then I hit the interval button to come back down to 3.5 m/hr or my walking speed for a minute to take some stress of my knees. I then hit the interval button again to take me back up to 6m/hr but I toggle it up to 6.5m/hr and kept it there for my anticipated 5km or 3.2mile run. I was feeling good at this point since my knees loosened up, but as the distance went on they were hurting more and more. Well by mile 2.6 I was saying to myself, ... " no! I Have To Keep It Going!!" .... which I did with my inner self, barring down and using my mind to keep it going. I know, I know, it the first rule in training, that if it hurts don't do it!?!? but I come from an old school attitude of .."no pain..no gain" and at this point I need to get my running going if I'm going to be able to make any effort of finishing Ironman LP.....

Your probably saying? "what about your foot? how is it holding up all this time while you are running through the pain of your knees?.....Well let me tell you! my knee pain was only half the pain going on, on my run, My left foot ( the hurt one ) was feeling stable with some pain and tightness, the orthotics overall are doing the trick, but for now I can't run longer then what I did today, and as soon as I get off my feet the pain stops in my foot. Now my other foot (the right one) I having more trouble with it then the left foot now with the orthotics? and it was aching the whole time I was running. When I take off my right orthotic, my pain stops and my foot doesn't hurt. WTF? I'm going to have to as my doc about that when I see him next month.

Back to my running on the treadmill.....29minutes I ran my first full 5km under 30min since I started back running since I can remember! Whoo Hoo!

Mind you my foot injury/tear has been on going since October 2006 and I haven't been doing any long steady running since then. Then I went on to finish with some speed intervals running 7.5m/hr holding it for 3 min and back down to walking until I finished with just over 4 miles in total treadmill miles.

I do have the fitness to go on longer as I've been swimming allot and biking, so the main thing here for me to get my run going is to basically slowly increase my distance over time and hope my aches and pains go away.

Remember yesterday I said I tweaked my knee somehow?....I figured out how, and why my knees were hurting today for the same reason? after all my running I was doing some walking on the incline, and BINGO! there it was! the pain was from doing walking on the incline, they were just over worked and stressed from the other day on the treadmill...Soooo, I figure after a few more session on the mill as my knees get used to the incline work and strengthen up I will be ride of my knee pain. So I hold true to my..." NO Pain No gain"... mentality.

I then went down for a 500m cool down swim in the pool.

Good work out day.

Crash and my friends on Mile141

I have to say this blogging is fun, specially since I've been off line for the past little while.

My computer crashed and I finally got it back on line after a lengthy battle of installing and reinstalling a bunch of programs.

When I finally got it up and running I was going through some links, and came upon the E blogger and thought, I've been wanting to try this for some time now. I usually go online with my friends at the Ironman site of Mile141.com ......I bet they miss me? I usually chat up the page with a bunch of tips, talks and well received camaraderie, as well as give lots of support for there training. I like to post my daily tribs, tribes, and workouts, trying to rally the troupes, specially when it's down time in the off season, which I find hard to do for me at this stage of the game with my lack of real training myself and with my bad foot? But I keep trying, even with the little training I do, maybe my posts will help some of the others see that I'm trying and will inspire them to train a bit harder.

The mile141.com pages are a lot of fun when you go there, you click on the chat side which is called the Goldrush page (which I am one of the founding fathers of the page, some say the quarter back of the page? I was also apart of naming it the "Goldrush page" back before the first Ironman Arizona race /05 back in /04 ) of the forum ( southwest chat page)

I also chat on the other page called the Arange page of the same forum. ( Florida page ) lots of great peeps and Ironman on both pages, and good friends! ......Note: there are the other pages on the forum but I don't frequent them as much, not to say they are not as good, they are good too! with a lot of nice folk there, with great advice and chat on tri's. The other pages are for for IMLP, IMCdA, IMCanada, IMWI, IMHawaii and International pages, but I have enough trouble keeping up with the two pages with all my friends, So I just read the other pages lurking as they say in cybor space. hee hee.


Ps. Trib and Tribes is my term for storys and nonsense, .......ie; "We had a ton of snow overnight and the penguins are getting ready to build there nests in my yard for the winter."


Have a great day!

Back from my swim

I'm back from my 2000m swim, and just finished making and eating my breakfast of 3 eggs 4 strips of bacon and toast with raspberrie jam, and of course coffee.

I felt sluggish today at my swim, and for some reason my right knee is sore. I don't recall doing anything different yesterday. All I did yesterday was my normal set of weights and a slow easy 3 mile run on the treadmill, but last night my knee was feeling tight and this morning it was hurting.....Oh well, must have tweeked it yesterday on my run.

For now I will lay back in my easy chair and watch some tv before I start cooking dinner for the family.

Spaggetti and meat balls!!......that's what todays menu is.

Later tonight, after dinner I will head down to the basement and get in a 30 min or so bike ride with a 1 mile brick run on my treadmill, then head outside to watch some tv while soking in my hot tub.

Checking my blog

After a good nights sleep, I rushed down to my computer to check out my new blog. WTF!! no one checked it out?!! Then I realized, I haven't told anyone I'm doing a blog. DUH!

The first thing I do when I get up is grab my first cup of coffee, ssssip, ahhh! nothing like a good cup of coffee to wake up with. ........Here comes my cat,............ she likes coffee too, so I let her sip a bit.

Well I'm off to the pool for a planed 2000m swim.

My first day Blogging

This is all new to me. It's like keeping a diary of sorts, but for my next journey i want to keep a record.

So here it is.....

My journey begins with my lead up to, and including doing Ironman Lake Placid on Jun 20,2008 which will be my 3rd Ironman.

So lets begin with what training I'm doing while I recover from my foot injury.

Since my diagnosis last june, of a torn planter fascia of my left foot, I haven't been able to do much in the way of training, most of the summer I did some biking usualy 30km per day, no longer as my foot hurt to much, and some swimming to keep some fitness up. I finaly got in to see a orthopedic surgeon on Sept 11 and he told me he would not do surgery on my foot, as if he did it might turn out worse then it is now. He said that it will heal in time on its own, and with the help of orthotics and a night splint he prescribed. So since I got my orthotics I felt some relief of my foot as I walk so I have been giving it time now so it will heal.

Now after 2 months, my foot is not much better today as when I first got my orthotic, which is a dissapointment, because I want to do more running to get my weight down.

I have started to do a little treadmill running as well as swimming in the pool and biking in my basement on my bike trainer over the last month. I need to lose weight first before my real training begins in the new year for IMLP.

SO, as it stands to date, this being my first day blogging, I will try to blog my daily training, and record some daily event's that goes on with my life and journey to Ironman Lake Placid.

As I start my training, I weigh in at a 235lbs right now, my goal weight for Ironman LP is to be around 180lbs. We shall see how the training and dieting goes as I focus and train hard to achieve my goal weight.

What other goals do I have? My biggest goal next to losing weight is to race the race of my life and finish in under 13hour at LP.

My last 2 Ironmans I came in with a 14:04, and14:33, both were good races but both had some setbacks with injurys, social issues and stress. I'm not saying this time around I won't have any of the same in this comming race. At least both my wife and I are working this time.

Today....

I went to the gym today and ran 3 miles on the treadmill and then went down to the pool to cool off with a 500m easy swim.

Other then that and setting up this blog, nothing much happend today.

Have a great day.