run this amazing day

The poet, he says I've changed. I'm not someone who likes change, who embraces it.  I like the safety of a routine, of creating a schedule, of knowing exactly what is coming and when.  But I have changed.  I look at myself a year ago, at a silly girl fussing with shoes and yogurt and mph averages, fussing fussing fussing.  Always comparing myself to everyone around me, never coming up good enough, strong enough, fast enough.  It's been such a process, training for this race, and so much of it hasn't been about the swimming, biking, or running.  It's been a process of working on my mind, my life.   Figuring out how to be more accepting of who I am right now.  Figuring out how to identify the things in my life that  are (and likewise, are not) important, because those are the things that are still here.  The things that matter.  And a lot of the rest has just fallen away. I almost don't want to talk about how I'm feeling right now...

1. I had a little bit of hard running to do on Tuesday morning at the end of my long run and it seems to have woken up my pissed-off-posterior-chain .  My left hamstring has been sympathetic tight the last few days.  It calmed down yesterday after some nice easy swimming while the pool closet was on fire , but I took ten steps out the front door this morning and it woke right up again.  So I shut it down.  Taken directly from my not-panicked-at-all-email to Sonja: I'm not that worried about it, but I'd rather skip a short run now than be annoyed by it over the next two weeks.  I've been doing light stretching and foam rolling, but mostly I'm just trying to let it chill out.   2. I was thinking, in my head the way I do, about starting to put together my race plan for CdA.  Just like I've said a hundred billion times, I don't plan on creating goals for the race based on time.  I did this for Knoxville and I think it served me well, mentally, whe...

If you knew me a year ago, which most of you did, you'll remember that I hated rest days.  It's even documented all over the history of this blog: a controversy , a random friday fact , and a 3TT .  When I was just a runner, back in the early days before I had a blog so people could yell at me, I mostly ran every other day and did nothing on the days between.  Then I joined a gym, and went through PT a few times, and started lifting regularly to address the many bizarre imbalances in my body.  And to be honest, the amount of (stationary) biking and (treadmill) running I was doing was so little - roughly 30-40 minutes a day at a slow pace - that I didn't really ever need any recovery. But then I bought a bike, and joyously realized that I had finally found a way to be active for longer than 40 minutes without breaking all my bones and tearing all my muscles.  The rides started to get longer, and harder, but I still never really considered the fact that I might ...

It's probably fair to guess that I missed all of my May goals before I even look back... May Goals Use the time off from working wisely.  Doctor's appointments, sleep, errands, doing workouts in new places.   Actually, this happened.  Do core work more than once a week while lifting.   Ugh.  No. Learn a second way to eat quinoa.   "Learned" but did not "cook." Use the foam roller even when things aren't cranky. A little bit...maybe. Discover and keep more healthy snacks in the house to avoid the 4pm "EAT ALL THE THINGS."   Total failure. I'm three weeks out from ironman, which means I'm right where I should be: as loaded as possible, and now it's time to very slowly roll downhill towards the race.  Swimming took a bit of a backseat this month - I feel like mostly what I was doing was either maintenance, to keep up with all the good hard work I put in this winter, or recovery, to give my legs a little gift to help ease the p...