TriTryTri - A Summer of '17 Adventure

Today is June 21st, the first day of summer, the summer solstice.  It's both an end and a beginning, and I'm taking full advantage of that concept - something ends, something else begins. What's ending for me is a very stressful Spring, one in which work pressures were paramount, and tended to crowd out other obligations and opportunities.  Those other priorities included being a race director for an annual 5K, preparing for a speaking engagement at a conference, training for some races that I'll be doing this year (including the subject triathlon) and, oh yeah, being a husband and father.   There was rarely a day that I didn't have to be out the door for work by 6:30, and rarer still were the nights where I was home before 8.  Even those nights were spent 'watching TV' with my laptop open and active, addressing mail or trying to just stay on top of the pile of deliverables that were due within 24 or 48 hours.  Urgency became my only measure of importanc...

Weight: 211.7 pounds Workouts: Sporadic and unstructured for the past two weeks The fact that this blog post comes two full weeks after my last one points out the challenge (futility) of my triathlon attempt.   Everything I read (and there’s lots of it) tells me I need to be able to do 6-10 workout sessions per week, and I’m just going to run out of time. My favorite training plan for a first triathlon seems to imply that I should be working out three times per week in each discipline, and then find time to do my strength training, stretching, yoga, and likely get a massage pretty regularly.   That may be okay in the early days, when some of those workouts are only 20-30 minutes long, but later in the cycle, each one of those workouts would take an hour, and some take 2-3 hours, like my long runs and long cycles.   I wish I had that kind of time.   I know that some would say I can scrape it together by not doing some of the ‘non-valuable’ time ...

No, that's not a typo in that title, it's the theme for this summer, the summer of 2017, and hopefully the summer of some transformation for me both physically and spiritually. A bit of backstory: I've been a runner for about 18 years now, having run my first 5K in 1999 after almost 30 years of being overweight (I got an early start on that).  I progressed up the distance chain, running 10Ks, half-marathons, marathons, and even one 50K race.  That one took me just under 6 hours, so I'm not a fast runner, but I can endure. Odd circumstances got me into my first triathlon.  I had been swimming (took that up very late in life, too) and was doing some cycling when my bike broke down.  When I went to get a new one, the owner of the cycle shop told me one of his athletes was hurt, and couldn't do the local triathlon that weekend, asking if I wanted to do it.  Sure, I figured, why not? To make a long story short, I did the race. It was downright awful, and at lea...