run this amazing day

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 could barely roll over to grab the phone and

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 bullet disaster train of my life around and chug

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

Last year I talked quite a bit about making my circles smaller, about the universe shaking people through the colander and leaving me with the larger pieces, the ones that matter.  Relationships are never perfect, they wax and wane and need work, but I continue to learn that working on imperfect relationships is far better than tossing them all out the window and starting over.  I've been thinking about that a lot recently, the value of old friendships, and I've been trying to focus more on nurturing the relationships I have instead of hitting the "follow" button on 200 new ones.   Over the past month, I've been lucky enough to go and visit or be visited by some of the closest friends I have, and what a great reminder that the three-dimensional people in your life are so much more important than the flat people that live inside your computer screen.   And, without any big ridiculous declaration, I've been taking some tiny steps back.  I've realized