run this amazing day

Just a short update in between day after day of brilliant sunny sweaty being the last one up (but the first one down; bless you, off-season) the mountain on the bicycle.   Last summer when I started building my life towards a place where I could be coaching full-time, I did some research to figure out other ways I could continue to develop my education of the body.  My oft-injured past has given me relatively basic knowledge of the names and functions of the better part of the posterior chain, but it appears that most humans have quite a few more muscles than that so I eventually settled on the National Academy of Sports Medicine - Certified Personal Trainer course and exam. I chose this one because of the recommendation/certification of a few trainers I know and trust, and it seems to be one of the higher standards for personal training in the US.  There are a lot of different packages available on the website that include different levels of instruction as yo...

January got to a slow start, coming off a month of inactivity was rough on the body.  I think it took maybe two weeks of head-to-toe creakiness before I felt back up and moving cleanly again, before I could get out of bed in the middle of the night to pee without limping.  A thirty minute run covered less than a mile and required ninety minutes of foam-rolling to be able to walk the next day.  The first time I swam over 2000 yards I needed a three-hour nap and let's not even talk about the first trainer ride and what it did to the place where I once had many many callouses.   I do remember the first really "big" day of training I did, I went down to Denver to train with Sonja.  I think we did a forty-ish minute run (me gasping for air WAIT UP YOU GUYS), noon masters which is a short-and-sweet wham-bam awesome punch of swimming, and then maybe ninety minutes of riding with some hill repeats.  The next day I woke up so sore I coul...

My eating, diet, nutrition, time in the kitchen, whatever you want to call it, has been in a constant state of evolution, most of it tracked right here on these snarky purple pages. When I first refocused my life on health way back in the dark ages of the blog, I started it by looking at labels and counting calories.  I don't really advocate for this approach, but it was a very enlightening several months.  I had no idea there were so many calories in bread!  Yogurt!  CHEESE!  My precious Doritoes!  It opened my eyes to how much I was eating.  I don't remember a lot about my diet back then, other than when I finally decided to start eating breakfast for the first time in my life (except for in college when I drank a diet coke every morning), I started every day with a huge bowl of dry Cheerios and a large glass of chocolate soy milk.  And I ate a lot of chicken alfredo and grilled cheese sandwiches. As I turned the speeding bu...

There's really no way to talk about a (yet another) big scary life change, even when it's three months into the past, especially in such a public fashion as printed words on the internet (they last forever, I won't forget).  But so much of my life has been logged here, and I love that, and in fifty years when I'm rereading all my blog posts from my wheelchair and shouting at the poet because his hearing aids don't work all that well, I will probably wonder why the F I didn't talk about it. Way back in November, I left my job and moved into coaching full-time. For a lot of reasons, it was time.  My family of athletes had grown into the point that my life was becoming an unmanageable blur of phone calls, texts, emails and schedules all spread out into the hours that I wasn't trapped inside an office building, doing the same menial tasks, daily, and experiencing zero professional growth.  I was starting to feel like I was doing my athletes, this family, a...