Time for the Season to Begin!

It's an exciting time in the Adams household right now. Why? Well, the Padres season kicks off this weekend and so does racing season! All four of us start off with the Carlsbad 5000 this weekend. Yep, on Saturday Scarlett is entered into her 2nd Diaper Dash, while Taylor makes his racing debut! You should check out Amy's blog and see Scarlett in training. Then on Sunday, Amy and I do the 5k. We are looking forward to camping down at the beach with friends and just enjoying the weekend. Hopefully the weather holds up! Sure I've raced a few times this year already, but I've trained through all of them and haven't taken them very seriously. This week starts some much needed tapering. I'm currently fighting a cold that the whole house has, hopefully I win the battle because I really want to hit a fast 5k this Sunday. My running is really starting to come along now and excited for what I can do. This week my Avia Stoltz came in the mail. I guess these things are flying off the shelves because there's not too many off-road specific triathlon shoes out there. Although I ended up getting stuck with the ugliest color they are ridiculously light trail shoes (they are lighter than my road flats) and with my first triathlon of the year coming up in a few weeks, I figured I'd get some sock less running time to see if my feet get along with these shoes:


They shredded up the trails and felt soo light!

Unfortunately, they also shredded up my feet!...And trust me, I know I have ugly feet!

I'm bummed, with only an hour of running, they destroyed my feet. I figured I'd be OK since I run in my flats from time to time and in college/post college I ran in spikes sock less all the time. But my feet did not like these shoes. So I'm gonna have to figure out a way to get socks on quickly in transition which will slow me down...Oh well, better then making me suffer even more on the course!


Temecula Rec Center pool

 My swimming is really coming along and I actually look forward to going to pool. I feel that my (self-taught) technique is working and now I just need to develop some speed.  I've forced myself to swim bilaterally which is quite hard because it slowed me way down at first, but it's going to pay off in the open water because of better visibility and balance.  I haven't been able to find a masters swim that fits my schedule but I'm hoping that will change soon. And until my HOA gets it together, I'm forced to drive 15 mins away to the Rec center to swim which doesn't open until 5:30 (allotting me only 45 mins) as opposed to a 2 minute drive with the pool opening up at 5, which will give me 75 mins to swim. So I can't wait until they re-open that pool.

Over the weekend after I put in 2500 yards at the pool, I came back -grabbed some coffee and bfast and headed out to the dreaded trainer (it was pouring). I was just browsing through Netflix, trying to find a decent movie to get me through my 90 minute session. I came upon "Penthlon" starring Dolph Lundgren. Sweet...The tag line had me sold, "Play to win. If you Lose, You Die." So intense! It's an 80's flick with Dolph playing a world class Pentathlete---the Cross Country scenes where classic. Dolph didn't disappoint me and he helped me hold 20mph for 90 minutes with my average heart rate at only 127. My max is like 193ish, so holding that for 90 minutes at only 65% of max HR was a very encouraging sign of fitness.

Sunday Kevin and I manned up and hit the trails at Hodges for a trail run. It was pouring on the drive down, but cleared up just in time for the start of our run. I had found this hill on my mountain bike months ago and I wanted to attack it on a run. For those of you that have been out there, it's the water tower climb. The trails were actually in decent shape and as soon as we hit the single track we picked it up. I wanted to put in a real hard effort to try and emulate what Xterra Vegas will be like. I hear that the run is brutal - so I hammered all the way to the top. Of course I forgot my HR monitor, but I know I had it up there in the 180's. The view at the top was beautiful and after we linked back up to the main trail -we put in some more mileage and finished with a solid 13 mile trail run. I absolutely love trail running. Everything was so green and with the moisture, it didn't seem like we were in San Diego. There's something about the trails that help you (at least for me) just lose yourself where you don't worry about pace, time or really anything - you just run and I love that.

That's it. I'm fit, let's see what I can do these next three weeks.