A Week of Firsts

This past training week was a week of firsts for me. Thursday morning I hit the gym at 5:30am to swim 1200 yards as I normally do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Being that it was Christmas Eve, the pool was pretty quiet accept for another swimmer knocking of lap after lap. I started doing my laps and when I got to 1000 yards, I was feeling pretty good and decided to push it up to 1500 yards (the distance of an Olympic triathlon swim). When I hit 1400 yards I thought lets just take it up to 1650 yards (1 Mile). I made it through the 1650 yards and then another 50 yards of cool down and felt great. My first time swimming a mile, I did it in 41:17, granted it was a bit slow, but 6 months ago I struggled to get through 200 yards. I will now try to do that 2x a week for the next month or so and then I will increase it to 2000 yards.

I left the gym and headed home and ran 7 miles with five 1/2 mile pickups (10K pace) in the middle.

Christmas Eve starts what I call "The 24 Hours of Christmas" at our house. We start with an open house on Christmas Eve followed by family on Christmas morning and more family in the afternoon. When the last person leaves it is about 24 hours after we began on Christmas Eve. This year we had to extend the day by 3 more hours for my daughter's MIL birthday party. Now I was tired and was looking at running 16 miles in the morning, but I went and had dessert and then came home and went to bed.

My marathon training plan called for 10 miles long this week, but since I am heading to Orlando in 2 weeks to run the Disney World Half Marathon, I thought I had better switch weeks and run next weeks 16 miles, this week. I had my PB&J and banana before I left and loaded my water belt with Gatorade G2 and 1 bottle of Hammer Perpetuem(wouldnt use this product again) and headed out the door. It was a beautiful sunrise (see left) and the weather was perfect, cloudy and about 50 degrees when I left. Started knocking down the miles, at mile 9 I stopped at LA Fitness for a pit stop, got some funny looks wearing a fully loaded water belt to the gym, little did they know, I wasn't staying, I was heading back out for another 7 miles. By mile 14 I was a bit tired, but just kept pushing through and made it to mile 16 and felt pretty good. I immediately waded into my pool waist deep for about 5 minutes and I think that definitely helped with recovery. So when it was all said and done...16.1 miles in 2:45:46 (10:19/mile)...a new first!



Next up...The Disney world Half Marathon in Orlando...then...vacation!