Past/Present/Future

The Past

2008 is just about done. Another good year with some mixed results.

Disapointments:

1. DNF at the Kinetic Half, but with the pain in my knee on the bike I knew after 1 mile of running that there was no point in continuing.
2. TTT Stomach issues. Whatever I had after the first race Saturday would not let me eat so I had 0 energy for the very hard half on Sunday.
3. Missing my goal at WV Half by almost an hour. I went 5:17 in 2007 and was confident I would be under 5 hrs easily but a flat tire, rain and finally some nutrition issues made for a long miserable day.
4. IMWI was not a total disappointment, but I was 27 minutes off my goal of sub 11. Riding 20-30 minutes before realizing I had a tire going down plus the time to change it plus the wasted energy trying to gain back time really hurt me the 2nd half of the run. Still a 20 minute improvement over last year but not what I wanted.

Positives:

1. 20th place at the spring 12.5 mile time trials in Erie. 25.8 mph avg, just missed going sub 29 minutes by 2 seconds, but still a 50 second pb.
2. 3rd place overall at the Butler YMCA sprint race.
3. 5th place overall at the Savageman Olympic tri just 2 weeks after IMWI.
4. Breaking 20 minutes in the 5k. This was done after a week and a half of basically doing no swim, bike or run training at all.

The Present:

1. Enjoying spending family time now that I'm not trying to squeeze in 20hr weeks of training.
2. Ramping up the running for the Disney Marathon in January. Best of both worlds, a mini family vacation and a marathon. Everyone wins.
3. Learning how to eat and fuel for workouts correctly courtesy of the fine folks at QT2 systems. I now have a better understanding of diet and will be a lean, mean racing machine next year.

Future/2009:
Plans are for no Ironman race, but a lot more races. 1 Marathon, 1 half, 4 half IM's, and lots of sprint races and olympic distances. 2009 is the year for me to build speed working on the shorter races. Still a lot to plan but so far I've got:

1. Disney Marathon on Jan 11.
2. Strong Like Bull training camp in Southern Spain Feb 5-15. 9 days of sun, mountains, snowcaps and lots of riding. Should lead to a good bike base for 2009.
3. VA Beach marathon weekend March 22. Probably just doing the half, family is going again and doing the saturday races.
4. The Dam Tri on June 28. Ok, so this one I'm one of the race directors so I won't be racing, but it will be a good fun weekend and lots of work.
5. Savageman at the end of September is my only other definite race. This time it will be the Half though. Lots of other races will also be done this year, probably including WV Half, maybe the Kinetic Half, Edinboro Olympic, Presque Isle Sprint and so on.

There's still a couple of 5k's and 10k's to be run this fall, but for now it's time to start looking ahead to spring/summer because we all know what's coming: