Last year at this time I was telling you about the not-so-smart choice I had made to race the 5430 half ironman and Timberman 70.3 on back-to-back weekends. This at the tail end of a summer where the most strenuous event of the previous eight weeks had been an Olympic distance race here in Boulder. It turned out alright – it turned out well, in fact, and I managed to squeak into sixth at the 5430 half and seventh at Timberman 70.3.
This summer, I’m signed up for both of those races again! But instead of several weeks of solid training underneath me, I have three desperate weeks of post-ironman recovery. The first two weeks felt fine, surprisingly, but this past week has been awful. I’d heard that the post-IM fatigue was going to hit pretty hard eventually, and it sure did. But I dragged myself through a lackluster training week and I’m now ready to have a go at my hometown half ironman.
Also, because I’m not really ready to let go of the cool stuff that’s been happening since IMLP – here’s a photo of a newspaper vending machine in downtown Lake Placid the Monday after the race. Yep, that’s me on the ground.
And, the fine folks at slowtwitch.com interviewed me as part of their series on pro athlete interviews! You can read the interview here.
Well … new theme for my blog, at any rate. I did it myself … can you tell?
I learned a few things: CSS is pretty hard, I have at least an idea of what I want my blog to look like, and I do not have time to write a blog and design a blog at the same time. It still needs polish, a few spacing adjustments, and to have its margins fixed in internet explorer, but all in all I am quite pleased with myself.
Aside from that, it’s been a long winter! I had a great vacation, hernia surgery, and am now full-tilt back in to training. I am racing for a NEW TEAM this season! The Craft / Cervelo / Karhu multisport team, with support (ie. wetsuits!) from BlueSeventy. I am very excited about this, there are two other guys on the team and I am hoping that we can make a bit of noise this season.
Finally, to atone for not posting for the past six months … here is a video of my nephew munching on some french fries.
Roses are red Violets are blue All of my base Are belong to you
After a few weeks of not being able to go into a store without hearing someone’s horrible interpretation of a Christmas album, I can’t be the only one ready to not hear any more of it for a little while.
Enter a new kind of Christmas music: the best christmas song ever written.
I wrote an Apple Dashboard Widget the other day. It’s pretty neat. You get two little programs: one that you use to note whether your baby is asleep or awake, and one that you send to friends that automatically updates itself to show whether your baby is asleep or awake. The way it works is, you click a button (“Awake”, for instance) on yours, and it sends a message to theirs (“Francis is Awake”) automatically. So they don’t call and accidentally wake the baby up while he is napping.
I’m selling it for six dollars, which I think is an eminently reasonable price. Actually, I’m giving it away for free, it just costs six dollars to get a “channel code”, which is the part that lets you send the messages. The channel code is valid for six months and can be extended after that if you like.
Anyway – I uploaded it to Apple.com’s Dashboard section – and this morning it is on the front page!! So that is pretty cool.
You should check it out. It would make a great gift, hint hint :-).
I haven’t written in a while, because I’m trolling for work again. Updating my resume on monster.com, calling companies I’ve worked for in the past, dealing with a few of the hundreds of recruiter-spams I get each day, it can be a bit draining.
My favorite is updating my resume on Monster though. They have a pretty detailed interface, so recruiters can see and download your latest resume, see when it was uploaded, et cetera. So it baffles me that close to one hundred percent of the many emails I receive contain the following, practically verbatim:
Dear Will Ronco, I saw your resume on Monster.com. I think you may be a good fit for a (DBA/Analyst/CIO/Sales/Developer) position we have available. Please send me your resume. Sincerely yours, Yet Another Recruiter
I’ve highlighted the relevant parts. How much work experience do you think I have gained in the last 24 hours? I am going to start sending these people my racing resume. “Oh yeah, all that Oracle DBA stuff and multithreaded development in C# … yeah, that was my old resume. I do triathlons now. Same hourly rate.”
Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.
I am just about ready to put this week to bed. I can tell that I am feeling the effects of An Appropriate Training Stimulus – I am crabby, tired, hungry all the time, and have missed only one workout. Yesterday it was supposed to rain. In Colordo when it rains it gets quite cold, so I wore long underwear, a hat, and a windbreaker. Then, because in actual fact it was eighty-nine degrees and humid, I had a thirteen mile run in my own private Hell greenhouse. So far this week I have fallen asleep:
The final indication, to me, that things must be going as planned is the following actual excerpt from an email I sent to Paulo:
“That swim workout was hard – I threw up in my mouth a little – but I got through it”
Well it’s my second to last night in Colorado Springs for a few months and a bittersweet time. I brought Steph to the airport this morning – she’s off to Greece for three weeks – and came home to the large pile of packing still to do. Ugh.
So here’s what’s going on in the meantime: I’m going to Boston to visit my family on Thursday. This weekend is my old church’s 25th annual retreat, and my 25th time attending. Not that I’m the posterchild for maintaining your roots, but for whatever reason there are some things in life that I don’t feel like giving up even for a little while. Also I get all nostalgic and weepy when Steph is not around. She has been gone for eleven hours now, hmm, yes, check back with me in a week or two.
The other thing that I’m doing this weekend is testing my fitness at two races. Then I’ll have two weeks to chill out in Boston, visiting my family and training a lot, before I deliver myself for a summary ass-kicking very competitive race in Maryland.
Then back to Colorado. Steph and I will be in Boulder all summer, and I will be staying through the fall to do my buildup for Ironman Florida. I planned to race there in ‘05 and ‘06 as well, but circumstances prevented me from actually doing it. So this year I’m Making The Commitment, so to speak, and I’m going to hole up in boulder all through the fall and train like a madman. Which is probably exactly what I will be.
This whole plan just begs for a little elaboration … which I will maybe get to, after I pack 500 more boxes.
With a week’s worth of allergy medicine, and a new asthma inhaler, I have been feeling a bit like a superhero for the past few days. I won’t lie, this is pretty awesome, but I am wary of it. Over the past few months my health has been teasing me, giving me a couple of weeks of solid training to get my hopes up, then dashing those hopes with a sinus infection, a head cold, or a touch of hantavirus.
So I am approaching health warily – forty-seven times bitten, forty-eight times shy, as they say. There is a malady among cyclists and hikers called “climbers syndrome”. People who have been riding or hiking uphill for long enough begin to distrust any downhill section of trail, knowing that any elevation they lose will only have to be reclaimed soon afterward. Any crest can only be a false summit; any corner will inevitably reveal a new hill to scale. I feel that same way about being healthy, which is too bad, because I’m not enjoying feeling healthy as much as I want to.
On the other hand, as I said, I do feel like a superhero. Every morning when I wake up, I think “Oh, OK, NOW I am healthy, wow, this feels good, much better than yesterday!” And – cautiously – I push a little harder in my workouts, feel a little better. I must be the most circumspect superhero on earth.
Also, I got a new bike helmet! Pointy, eh?
Sniff.
Haven’t written in a while because I am a big self-pitying lump. It turns out that staying positive ( sorry, Staying Positive, it’s not just a proper noun it’s a book title ) is just about as hard as any other thing you might try to get better at. Ugh! All these things to practice! It would be nice to have something that wasn’t so goal-driven to do. I do know that stayin Staying Positive is not really something you’re supposed to try to be good at, and that in fact like many head-things it’s counterproductive to try really hard to be good at it. But at the same time, how do you improve except by trying? It’s a true conundrum.
I think that I might, finally, after many months, have begun to get the unnaturally-fragile-health thing under control. I have ne drugs to keep my asthma and allergies (allergies! who knew?) under better control. Also strict, explicit instructions to use one of those god-awful sinus washers as often as possible. So I may not stay healthy but darn it if they ever have a contest to see whose nostrils are the cleanest I am going to WIN, baby!
So I am back in to bread and butter training this week, feeling more or less good and cautiously optimistic about my chances of staying healthy for the foreseeable future.
Well what?
