Road to the Ironman! : Holy Smokes, how many days do I have left?

13 days...13 days...holy smokes only 13 days! Well, I've been a slacker as far as blogging goes. Who knew it would be so difficult to not just blog about my training/experiences, but to even log my training in general. I looked back over my Daily Mile site today. I stopped logging my workouts at the beginning of June, and on Training Peaks, the site my coach has set up for us, I didn't log most of my workouts as completed for May & June. So this is going to be a quick blog to somewhat catch you all up to my life of training and such over the past few months. :)

A lot of has happened since my last blog. For starters, I married my best friend. :) Go big or go home is my tag line for 2013. It was a magical day full of love, family and the best friends I could ask for all in one place. I have to include some pictures. :)

Ok, I had to take a moment to reminisce. After the wedding, we were hard at work for the final few weeks leading up to the Inaugural Powered With Pride 5k Run/Walk, Meg, our friend Keith and an amazing group of friends and I have been organizing since last August. It was a 5k we wanted to add to the weekends Pride activities as a healthy, fun activity to showcase Pride and Solidarity in our community. It was amazing. We had over 400 paid participants in the first year and can't wait for our 2nd year already!

After the 5k it was back to work for IM training. In May I trained a total of 277 miles, 225 miles biked, 44.1 miles ran, and 7.2 miles swam for a total of 27 hours and 27 minutes. June was an even bigger month with training really taking a climb upwards in not only distance but time. According to my log, June was my biggest month, but that could also be due to my lack of logging my workouts in July. In June I trained 458 miles. I biked 378 miles, ran 67 miles, and swam 13 miles. June and July are when I really honed my swimming skills. Before the down pour of constant rain, I was able to swim in the Ohio almost every Monday in June ensuring I became more comfortable early on. In July I raced my 2nd half Ironman, ( I'll do a race report on this later), did some exciting training sessions one of which was a triple brick. It was a fun workout that went something like this. run bike run, bike, run, bike, run. Yep 67 glorious total miles that day. We cycled our first 100 miles in July as well.
Training was still going strong in July with a total of 316 miles. 248 biked, 57 ran, & 9 swam.

By the beginning of this month I was starting to feel extremely tired and ready for taper to be here FAST!Even though I've been lucky and had someone to work out with for the most part, there are still a lot of miles logged alone, and that's when things were the hardest for me. This is a big part of why I joined TNT. I needed a deeper meaning to keep me motivated to train. I'm not going to lie though, there were still days for my mental health I skipped a workout or shortened a workout here or there. It's about baclance, and sometimes finding that balance for me was difficult. My last super long weekend was August 3& 4th. On August 3rd I swam 1 mile, biked 112 and ran 3 miles. On Sunday I ran 13 miles. After that weekend, I wasn't sure if I was super excited to have made it to that point or terrified for the many more miles I would need to run after that 3 miles I had run. It was a hard hard workout. Probably the 3 hardest miles I have run yet. All the synappses in my brain were firing that afternoon. "Do you feel how tired you are?! You still have 23.2 more miles ot run on race day. You can barely breathe! What were you thinking? 140.6 miles? You're crazy.?" Ha it was a great day of training but also a scary day. Although, all the veteran Ironman athletes have said that I'll be amazed once I finish the taper and see how my legs and body feel on race day. I sure hope so.

This past Saturday I swam my longest swim ever. 2.4 miles in the Ohio River Open Water swim at Cardinal Harbour. I swam in 1 hour 53 minutes, and several people said that the swim was way harder than the Ironman Swim will be! YAY, something will be easier on Ironman Day! What?! Really?! YAY! It was definitely a mental training weekend. I was sick Saturday for the swim, but still finished and on my last long ride today I hit a piece of a cinder block going down a hill on Blakenbaker LN. Ripped my tire, blew my tube, but somehow, not sure how, but I didn't wreck. Whew, it was a close call. I could have easily flipped over the handle bars and come up with a fractured clavicle, or wrecked my bike and not have a bike to ride on Ironman day. Right now, I'm more nervous about making it in one piece to Ironman morning than I think I am of the actually race. Can I just hide in a corner for the next 2 weeks so nothing bad happens? No, that's weird eh? Anyway, it's officially taper time, I couldn't be happier. Below are some pictures from the past few months of training. I'll blog a race report from Muncie hopefully this weekend. If you haven't sent in your money for your IM race crew shirt for race day send it in! Can't wait to see you all out there while I'm on the course! Thanks for all your support!