I got my bike ride in!

I'm just going to recap today. I swam my lats off in the morning with a swim. I'm still surprised that I was able to hold those paces for that 8x100m. I'm starting to put some things together about using my lats more and stacking my hips when I swim. It's progress and it feels good. I then took a 3 hour nap that felt great. After that, I went for a 2:10 bike ride. BTW, I'm a bit grumpy when I wake up from naps and it takes awhile for me to get going. The first 30 minutes of the bike ride reflected this. It was a bit of a harder bike ride with my heart rate in the 140-150bpm for the entire time. That isn't super hard, but it's harder than what I've been doing and my heart rate was pretty consistently in that range. Also, my legs were pushing it almost the entire time. After that, I came home and did about 3 hours of yard work. Yard work is enjoyable, but it is exhausting. I mowed, put some sod down, and then put down fertilizer, fungicide, and bug treatment. For dinner, I went to Zen because I was starving and didn't want to wait for dinner to be made. Now, I'm sitting my butt on the couch, icing my foot, and watching The Girls Next Door which is one of the best TV shows ever!

Overall, I had a great day.

The Weather Man Sucks!

The weather man sucks! He's almost always wrong and he ruined my workouts this weekend. I went to swim this morning and I had a great swim. At one point, we did 8x100m on a 1:55 interval. I did the first one in 1:30 and all of them were 1:34 or lower. That's awesome! Afterwards, I wanted to go for a 2 hour bike ride, but it is raining. The only other thing that I'm suppose to do today is some yard work. However, I can't do that when it is raining as well. The forecast yesterday said there was a very small chance of rain. I'm going to take a nap (yay, naps!) and hopefully it'll dry up so I get go on a bike ride and do some yard work.

I didn't get a workout in yesterday. I was about to go on a ride, but it was 58 degrees. That's a bit too cold for me and I was going to be miserable. I ditched the ride and was going to do it today, but the rain issue came up.

Friday was a weight lifting session and a 1:15 bike ride. My weigh in was 190 on Friday morning. My foot is still bothering me. I'm about to try wearing an air cast to see if it'll help me heel get better. Well, it's nap time for me now.

Great Swim, Lazy Bike Ride, Part II

Yep, I pretty much had a copy of my workouts on Tuesday. I swam in the morning and I actually had a pretty good swim. I lifted weights yesterday and I could feel my muscles feeling a bit better today. My shoulder wasn't as wonky. The main set of the workout was a 600m swim. I was able to do it in about 10:06 which is about 1:40/100m pace.

The afternoon workout was a bike ride with Texas Iron. Everyone else did a transition workout at Barton Springs. However, it wasn't a good workout for me. I just did some 1 mile loops after a 20min warm up. It sucked and I didn't feel like I did much of a workout today at all. I tried to do one mount/dismount but as soon as I dismounted and started walking across the parking lot bare foot, I stepped on a rock with my left heel. That is the one that is hurt right now and it was quite painful. I decided to not do that again. I'm grumpy now.

Great Swim, Lazy Bike Ride

Well, that was my workout summary for yesterday. I had a great swim in the morning with T3. It was early but I made it there. After getting pissed off at my usually Tuesday meeting that pisses me off, I went for a bike ride. It wasn't a great bike ride for many reasons but the main reason was because of the wind. I estimate that I had a 20mph or so wind pretty much the entire ride but sometimes it was coming at my straight on, sometimes it was a crosswind, and sometimes it was a tailwind. That made the ride very difficult because the crosswinds would blow me all over the place and I couldn't get into aero because of that. When I had a tailwind, I would be in a 53-12 pedaling and my heart rate would be low. Headwinds are just miserable. I did get out for about 1:10. I have weights today and then a rough repeat of Tuesday's workout on Thursday and I'll definitely have 2 good workouts that day.

I want to run!

I want to run so badly right now! However, this damn foot is still holding me back. I may try to start running again next weekend because I think I found the magic bullet to this issue. I have a Dorsi Wedge that I've used in the past. It's kind of cumbersome sleeping in it though. I've been sleeping with it on every night for the last 4 nights and my foot feels great today. Absolutely fantastic. I'm going to get in the habit of sleeping with it every night to get this cleared up really quickly. Between this, the exercise, and my orthodics, I think I have this thing nailed. The only thing that Laurie tells me is that she doesn't want me running until my heel pain is gone. I want to run, damnit, so I'm going to do everything that I can to get rid of this now. The only other symptoms that I have is that my heel is sore when I'm on my feet all day long.

This past weekend wasn't much. I did a 1:45 hour ride on Saturday and then a good swim practice on Sunday. I went to go do yoga on Sunday, but it was closed for some sort of religious holiday or something like that. My weigh in this morning was 191. Damnit! On a good note, I did have a good swim on Sunday morning. After feeling like crap on Thursday morning, I've been building myself up mentally since then for a good swim on Sunday and it was successful. The interesting thing to note was at the end of the workout, we had to do 6x100m fast on an interval. My times for the first 4 were 1:34, 1:35, 1:37, 1:35. Mo told me to stack my hips more when I was swimming since I was getting tired. I followed his advice and the next two 100m intervals were 1:31 and 1:32. Not bad at all.

Hard bike ride with Texas Iron

I had a hard bike ride with Texas Iron last night. We did the Shoal Creek loop. Most of the others did a brick workout but since I'm not running at the moment, I just did a bike ride. I did 4 loops and each one was in the 9:28-9:38 range so I was pretty consistent. My heart rate was in the 160-165 range for each one with a few spikes and drops in there as well. My LT isn't high enough at the moment to push 170bpm or higher for nearly 10 minutes. Even doing 170+ for 4 minutes kills me at the moment. I'll break through that pretty soon though.

Yesterday morning was a horrible swim. I just felt completely off and uncoordinated. Chrissie said that my stroke looked fine, but I felt horrible. I cut it short after about 2600m. Here is the thing that. I really wanted to have a good, strong swim workout.

I didn't work out on Tuesday or Wednesday due to my anatomy lab test which kicked me butt. I don't know the score yet. Also, I blanked out and realized this morning that I misidentified the cerebellum. How the hell could I do that?

My weigh in this morning was 190 even without working out 2 days this week. Woohoo! I was hoping to break through the 190 barrier but I guess a weekend of spinach and rice cakes will get me there on Monday.

Done by 7:48am

Well, my workouts are done for the day. I'm sitting at work munching on breakfast and my workouts are finished. That's a nice feeling. I got up at 4:15 this morning to go swim. Surprisingly, I was pretty wide awake. I swam 3100yds at Courtyard and I was pushing it a bit as well. I was feeling really good. The main set was 16x100 and I did pretty well the first half. It is weird because my swim stroke can vary greatly even during a single workout. I did the first half of the main set fantastically because I was focusing on using my lats. I really wasn't changing the position of my arm at all but I was using my lats to propel myself through the water. I really like this feeling because it feels like I'm swimming very strong. Also, it lessens the burden on my bad left shoulder and my shoulder thanks me for it. Unfortunately, my lats aren't too happy and when I really concentrate on doing this, I can get about 700-1000 yards before my lats are done and my form goes to shit.

Other than that, my weigh in this morning was 195. I don't know how the fuck that happened. However, last week I've decided to forage from the candy jars at work a lot less. We'll see how that helps but it should help greatly. The problem is that last night I made some chewy gluten-free chocolate chip cookies and they are absolutely delicious. I'm a huge fan of chewy cookies and these are almost like eating raw cookie dough. Hopefully the lard asses at work will go through them by 10am today so I don't have eat anymore myself. BTW, xanthum gum is freaking expensive.

Also, I got chafed in my armpits when I rode yesterday. I didn't realize this until I sprayed my armpits this morning with deodorant. That woke me up a bit.

I'm done!

I'm done with my workouts for the weekend. All that I did was 2 bike rides. I did about an hour hard yesterday. I was going to do more but I got called in to help out at Performance Wellness in the afternoon. It was fine. Today was a 2 hour bike ride. I really think that my bike legs are coming back pretty well now. I'm not to the point where I was last October, but I'm not far off either. The reason why I say that was today was windy as hell. I was able to power through the wind pretty well and my legs felt fine. They were burning a bit, but they weren't anywhere near giving up. Also, I rode 2 days in a row and my crotch wasn't sore and that's a good sign! I was going to swim this morning, but I skipped that. I went to Sue's party last night with every intention of leaving by 10:30. I didn't leave until 12:30. I felt like I needed to sleep instead of swim but to make up for that, I plan on being at the pool at 5:30 tomorrow morning.

Light Weight Lifting Session

The only workout that I did today was a light weight lifting session at lunch. However, I'm exhausted right now. I've been running around doing errands all day long. Also, some good news. My morning weigh in was 191.5 this morning. I'm actually losing weight again!

Breakthrough

As I've mentioned before, I'm not running. It's because I have some heel pain that I've been battling for 2 years now. It finally got pretty bad and that is when I went to see Dr. Laurie. I've been seeing her since December or so and I've made a bit of progress, but not what I was expecting. But I made a breakthrough last Monday. Laurie noticed that when I tried to dorsiflex my foot, it would try to dorsiflex but would also tend to evert pretty badly as well. Long story short is that the neuromuscular connections had gotten off somehow and/or the muscles in the posterior compartment of my lower leg had become really weak. With them weak, the muscles of the anterior compartment were pulling on them all the time which caused the inflammation where the posterior muscles inserted into my heel. I started doing some exercises to strengthen the posterior muscles and I've been doing them pretty regularly as well. Then, I also put my orthodics back in my shoes. Today, she was working on my foot. She was doing stuff that had me jumping off the table and sweating after 30 seconds not even 2 weeks ago. Today, it didn't hurt at all. Fucking hallelujah! I may actually be running again soon. I'm so happy that we've finally figure out what the hell is wrong with my foot and I'm amazed at how quickly it healed when the problem was discovered. I'm happy if you can't tell.

Today's workout was a tough training workout with Texas Iron. It was a good one and I needed it. Time for bed soon because I'm exhausted and I've got only 6 hours of sleep each of the last 2 nights.

Before I talk about my workouts, I want to talk about my orthostatic hypotension. It's annoying and it seems to be getting worse. However, I seem to have gotten really good and running around lightheaded with my vision going black with being on the verge of passing out.

I swam this morning. I haven't swam in the morning in over 2 months. It was tough. I almost Colleened the workout when I woke up this morning since it was so cold and dark. However, I powered through and went to the pool. I got in about 2800yds this morning. It wasn't bad. I'm trying to do more morning swims. It is nice because it gets me up and moving early and I'm at work by 7:30 or so which means I can leave early. In addition to that, my normal schedule is class on Monday and Wednesday and swimming on Tuesday and Thursday. This doesn't leave me any more weeknights to do other stuff. Since I'm starting to do more two-a-day workouts, I need to balance my time a bit better. At lunch, I did a brief weight lifting session. I had to cut it short because I had a "homework" assignment to do. I'm shadowing Dr. Phil as part of my requirements for getting into PT school. He had me look up some articles on femoroacetabular impingement. I looked up a few of them and really read one of them. I found it pretty interesting and stuff like this just reinforces my career change as the right thing to do for me.

Attack The Hills Ride

Before I talk about my workout, I want to complain about cycling. With swimming, all you need is a suit, goggles, and a towel. With running, you need shoes, socks, and shorts. With cycling, you need a bike, pedals, shoes, helmet, glasses, blowout bag, water bottle, gloves, cell phone, keys, air pump, jersey, and shorts. Before my ride today, I forget the shoes, air pump, and water bottle. Damnit.

I rode after work today. It was perfect cycling weather, too. It was sunny and about 70 degrees without much wind. You don't get cold but you can sweat a bit if you work hard. I was going to ride right after work, but see the first paragraph for why that didn't happen today. I came home and quickly got everything ready and left. My goal for this workout was to "attack the hills" and knowing how I ride, it turned into "attack everything". I only wanted to ride for an hour so I went out Southwest Pkwy. It has some OK hills I tried to attack every single one. I got my heart rate up to over 170bpm a couple of times. When I would crest the hill, I would relax a bit and then I would feel like I was going too slow so I kicked it up a notch. This went on for the entire ride. I only got buzzed once too and I was surprised at that since it was the middle of rush hour traffic. Overall, it was a great ride and has put me into a fabulous mood for the rest of the night.

Weekend Workouts

Not much new this past weekend. I did my 2 hour loop from my house. I think it is funny because no matter how fast or how easy that I do it, I always get back to my house in about 1:55. Sunday was a morning swim and then an afternoon yoga which I haven't been to in about 3 weeks. Laurie adjusted my back on Saturday morning to see if that would help out with my low back pain when I biked. It was better and didn't start hurting until about 1:15 into the ride. I have some gunk built up in my left shoulder when I swim and that feels weird. My foot is feeling much better, too. Oh, my weigh in on Monday morning was 192.5. I guess that's it.

I'm not a wuss like Colleen

Yesterday was a nasty day in Austin. It was cold and rainy for most of the day. I decided about midway through the day that I just really didn't want to swim that night. My typical schedule is class on Monday and Wednesday nights with swimming on Tuesday and Thursday nights. This leaves me no weekday nights to do stuff. Skipping the swim workout would be nice since it would allow me to have a weeknight off. I left work latish and was driving home and was determined to sit on the coach and/or do stuff around the house. It was going to be fantastic. However, at one point in the road, I go left to go home and I go right to go swim. I was going left until about 30 seconds before the split in the road. I decided to go right. Damn! I ended up getting to the pool about 5-10 minutes late but I jumped in my lane. It was freaking cold, too, and the wind was blowing pretty fiercely as well. I swam about 3000m last night. Also, I noticed that I'm getting faster, too! I can now swim 100m in 1:35 pretty easily where I was struggling to get it under 1:40 about 2 months ago. I feel better, too. I got out of the pool and quickly got dressed. Yes, I was out there in the cold unlike Colleen, but it still wasn't comfortable.

This morning's weigh in was 192.5. That is up 0.5 from last Friday, but down 2 from Monday's weigh in. I have sub-190 in sight, now! Within 2 weeks, I'll be under 190. Damnit, it is going to happen.

Windy Ride

I needed to get some good cardio in today so I brought my bike to work. I rode during lunch and it was a perfect 65 degrees which is my ideal temp to ride in. Unfortunately, it was windy and as usual, it was the windy from the southeast. It was about 27 miles or so and I did it in 1:40 for an avg speed of about 16mph. However, that time is including stops. Also, it was windy as hell so going out was a bitch but I barely pedaled coming back in. I saw about 4 other cyclist and it was just a great ride today.

For some more news, I put my orthodics back into my shoes on Monday and my feet are feeling so much better now. It's quite amazing. Also, my gym is having political issues so I don't have any access to it until the new one at work opens up which may be next week or next month.

Good Swim

Not much to write about. I had a good swim tonight. I was swimming strong and I felt like I was really pushing it. The workout was fun and I told Mo about it as well. I was pushing the other 2 guys in my lane. At the night practices, I'm usually one of the fastest people there. I haven't been to the morning practices in awhile and there are usually faster people there, but the lanes tend to be more crowded as well. My weigh in yesterday was 194.5 which was expected, but my weigh in this morning was 193.5 so I'm going down after splurging this weekend.

I killed Bambi

Before I get to my story about how I killed Bambi, let me review last week really quickly. Thursday was a pretty good swim with T3. I swam people out of my lane so that was a nice feeling and I was the fastest in the water that night. I'm afraid to go back to mornings because I'll definitely get my ass kicked. I do feel like I am getting faster though. My Friday weigh in was 192 so I've lost about 6 pounds since February 5th. That's a good sign. My weigh in tomorrow won't be close to that because of what I did this past weekend.

This past weekend I did the Leakey Death Ride. It's a ride put on by Richelle every year. I keep hearing that it is a fun time and I wanted to actually go this year and break in my sleeping bag and tent that I got last year and haven't used yet. I decided to go about a month ago and was actually looking forward to it. We camped at the Lost Pines State Nature Area in Vanderpool, TX. Each day is a ride if everyone feels like it. There are also some trails for those that want to run.

I meant to leave at around 1pm on Friday. I left at 3:45pm. Yeah, I was running behind but oh well. The trip up there was uneventful for the most part. The roads were very scenic, twisty, and turny. It was fun. I don't venture out of Austin into Texas much so this was a nice break. I was driving along and there were deer all over the place because it was getting close to dusk. I came upon a group of deer with about 4 on the right side of the road and 1 on the left. I thought it was pretty effective to honk my horn when I got near them to spook them away from me. Well, this time the one on the left ran in front of me at the last second. I was going well over 60mph and probably close to 70mph when it ran right in front of me. I heard a thud from where it hit the front and then there was a definite pause of a second or two. Ok, it could've been less than half a second but this was one of those time stands still moments. After this 2 seconds, I hear the thud, thud as my car tires run over something.

I pull over to the side of the road to make sure that the deer is dead and to see what happened to my car. I check out my car first. You hear all of these stories about people hitting deer in the road and it nearly totals their car. I checked my front bumper and found no damage because deer guts and deer hair. I check it over pretty carefully and I see no major damage at all. I walk down the road to check out the deer. It's out in the middle of the road and the speed that I was going as well as running over the damn thing, I'm pretty sure that it didn't suffer. I get up to it and check it out and it is definitely dead. It's still twitching for a few seconds but it stops pretty quickly. I'm glad that it was dead because I didn't want to have to run over it again to put it out of its misery. There are guts all over the place and then I see why it really didn't do much damage to my car. It was only about 40 pounds and it was definitely a fawn because it still had white spots. Yep, I just roadkilled Bambi. I drove back to the campsite which was about 5 minutes away and took these pictures. BTW, my car still smells like deer. I was calm, cool, and collected through all of this. I don't know why, but I was surprisingly. I felt bad for killing the deer because I don't like killing innocent animals and this is only the 2nd time I killed anything with my car. I did learn that I should be a lot more careful when there are deer out and about.









Got to the campsite and pitched my tent and slept that night. I have to say that my recent tent and sleeping bag purchase were damn good purchases because I'm really happy with both of them.

The next day was the ride. Richelle and Sharron tricked me into doing a 58 mile loop instead of the 40 miles that I wanted to do. I had brought my road bike because it has a triple chainring and I've heard about the killer hills here. I got out on the road and my hands went numb in about 5 minutes. Not a good sign but I get going. The temperate was fantastic. It was the low 60s and overcast at the beginning. It got warmer and the sun came out later though. The majority of the big hills are at the very beginning of the ride. I think it took us nearly an hour and 20 minutes to go 18 miles. The first hill was the worst though and I think that hill was a mile long. I got warmed up really quickly after that. It was very, very pretty though and the descents were scary as hell. After those 20 miles or so, it was more or less flat the rest of the way. One bad thing was that there was a lot of chip seal which is very uncomfortable to ride on. My ass and my arms were sore about half way through the ride. We chatted in our group and didn't have any major incidents during the ride. It was great. Sharron and I picked it up a bit at one point, put it in the big chainring, and was hauling ass. That was fun. We got back to the campsite and I think I nearly ate everything in sight. I had couscous and a package of tuna for dinner and that was a decent camping meal. The temp the rest of the day was nice but it was windy as hell. We all went to bed and the wind kept up the entire night. It was tough to sleep through but I got a decent amount of sleep that night.

We got up the next day and almost no one rode. The wind was brutal and I hate riding into the wind so I had no problems skipping it. Without a ride, that means it is time for breakfast! Rob and Cindy were heading to breakfast while most other people ran. I joined them because I wasn't running. We got to the Lost Pines Cafe in Utopia, TX and had a damn good country breakfast. I had French toast, ham, and hashbrowns as well as Rob's hashbrowns and Cindy's bacon. Yum! We headed back and I found out that Lisa and Lynda were now going to breakfast. Alright, second breakfast! We went there and I had some scrambled eggs and a bit of Lisa's delicious hubcap sized pancakes. When we were leaving, we saw a stray dog across the street. I walked up to it and it scurried away a bit but I worked my dog whispering magic and it came up to me and enjoyed me petting it. It was a sweet little dog, too. Lisa came over to pet it and then Lynda went back inside to get the dog the leftover pancake. She came back out and the dog definitely was hungry. You could tell it was protective of its new food and it was really funny. At first we thought it was trying to eat the entire pancake at once but it was just trying to get it all in its mouth to walk away and eat it somewhere else. It would try to pick up all the little pieces and when it would pick up one, two would fall out. Imagine carrying your laundry around the house. It finally put down the pancake, ate a bit of it, and then carried the rest off the entire time it was dropping a piece here and there and picking it back up. It did seem like a sweet dog.

We were off from the cafe and about 5 minutes around the corner, we saw the last bit of a wreck. Apparently, a couple of guys were riding their motorcycles when one lost control and bit the dust. Since both Lisa and Lynda are two (very hot) nurses, they pulled over to help. The guy that bit it was off to the side of the road sitting down. His buddy was pushing the injured guy's bike out of the road. The nurses took over and were examining the downed guy. He seemed to be doing pretty well and he was very receptive for the help. Luckily, he was wearing a helmet, chaps, and a ton of protective gear. He seemed to have his wits about him and was doing decently well. Another couple of guys pulled up and called the ambulance. Within about 2 minutes, we heard the sirens starting to wail and they were there in about 3 minutes. The nurses relayed all the information to the paramedics. He probably had a concussion and the patient realized it. He was actually pretty cool. I know a lot of tough guys that'll just try to get up once something like this happens and try to walk it off. Luckily, this guy didn't do anything like that, just sat down, and was very cooperative. He got strapped to a stretcher and loaded into the ambulance. He had a neck brace and that was just a precaution. I snapped some pics with my camera phone and they are below. I thought this entire ordeal was interesting and it makes me glad that I am going to go into the medical field soon.












The guy seemed like he was going to be OK so we went back to the campsite. We exchanged numbers and email addresses because it seemed like nearly everyone wanted to go to Big Bend so we'll keep in touch about that. I really want to go now! I miss how much fun backpacking is and I've been browsing REI all night long for gear that I want, I mean gear that I need. The drive home was uneventful. Now, I have to finish cleaning up and I'm going to hit the sack soon. My back is really looking forward to having my bed again.

Overall, I had a pretty kick ass weekend. The good thing is I think I've met some more people to hang out with because even though I've been here for nearly 4 years now, I still have issues meeting people to hang out with.