Love the Hurt: Back to it...

San Diego is as beautiful as ever and I've been back at it for a few weeks and its amazing how balanced your life feels/becomes once you get back to your old routine. For me it's always hard that first week or two and then it's almost like you gain momentum with your motivation after each week. For me the less I swim, the more I hate it. The more I do it, the more it becomes a routine/a part of my life and I actually enjoy it because I'm seeing progress. Where as, if I'm not swimming enough, I feel fat and slow. Same goes with the other two sports.

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My beautiful bride hanging out with my mustache.[/caption]

Besides enjoying the nice weather and going to a fun holiday Gala event, my "official" Ironman training has started. That means some early testing in all three sports so I can track my progress which is huge for me. Flanny's philosophy is to incorporate speed/intensity now and volume later - something I completely agree with. Traditional plans call for those long volume base miles and then add intensity as you get closer to the Ironman. Trouble with that is - you're risking injury when you combine volume and intensity at the same time. This way avoids that scenario and definitely fits me better as I am prone to injury.
The other cool thing about doing it this way is I can gear up to rip a fast 5k, 10k, 1/2 marathon this winter. So I set myself an early season goal. A couch to 1:13 half marathon plan haha. My (over 30) half marathon PR is 1:14 which I did in 2012. I never ran one this year so my tentative plan is to race the Surf City Half Marathon in early February and try and dip under 1:14 with only Ironman winter training under my belt. We'll see. My early testing this week shows me slow and out of shape. I'm sure the fitness will come back pretty quick but I have a long way to go to hold 5:38 pace for 13.1 miles!

Besides drinking good holiday brews, I've really been putting a lot of time in at the pool. Past few weeks I've been getting in the water 5 days a week and for the first time in a long time adding in some drills I've never done before. When I first started swimming I worked a lot on drills, got comments that I had good form so stopped doing them. Tons of volume later, I really haven't improved a whole lot. So Flanny has me on a custom 12 week program a la "swim camp." He's incorporating drills into certain workouts that really get you in-tune with body awareness and water feel. After only one week, I can honestly say I feel a lot better in the water and even feel faster. I'm excited to see where I'm at in 12 weeks.

I've got the first half of year's race schedule for 2013:

Feb. Surf City Half Marathon
Feb. Palm Springs Century (Sat), Palm Springs 1/2 marathon (Sun)
Mar. Desert International Tri
Mar. Black Dragon/CEC Training Camp
Mar. Ironman Oceanside 70.3
May Wildflower LC or Ironman St. Croix 70.3
June IMCDA
Rest of the year: TBD

There's no doubt this is my favorite time of the year. Especially when you participate in Movemeber! Check out my page here. You also get a little time off to refresh mentally/physically. You get to eat what you want and drink a lot of great holiday beers. You get to see family more than often. You get to set your goals for the next year.
You start dreaming.

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