Monday, February 29, 2016

Status Update

Hello everyone!

An update on what's up with your friendly neighborhood CPAGrrrl... 

WORK = CRAZY MID-JANUARY TO END OF FEBRUARY
I'm an accountant.  Other accountants need stuff from ME so they can start THEIR "busy season".  [Not to belabor the point, but I wrote this on Thursday and I'm finally editing, adding pix and links and publishing on Monday.] 'Nuff Said.  

RUNNING:
I have been in the habit of doing walk/run intervals for quite some time. I have begun to feel the walking breaks are more of a limitation I place on myself rather than a useful training tool.
One of my personal goals as part of training for my first triathlon, was to "step up my running game" a bit and use fewer breaks, get back to running at least 2-3 mile stretches without a break. Last night I had my longest stretch in quite some time, a 27-minute run!
More proof that my body does what my brain chooses to tell it to do!
[Bad blogger: no smiling post-run selfie!]

SPEAKING OF TRIATHLON TRAINING:
It's been going GREAT!  Here's a pic of my training schedule.  Yellow Highlights = completed planned workouts.

I'm into Week 5 of the 20-week plan and feeling great.  My shoulder was a little tweaky this week during my short swim.  I took it REAL easy and I'll see how it feels for my long swim workout this weekend.  If it still feels "off," I'll make an appointment with my PT to figure out what's up, but the swimming feels awesome, I feel so strong in the water! (My form is atrocious and my efficiency is low but I feel terrific.)

MILEAGE:
When I set my mileage goals for 2016, I had no idea there was a triathlon in my future!  I'm getting WAY more bike miles than I anticipated for the early months of the year (it's still WAY too cold here for outdoor biking), so I'm already anticipating blowing that 225-mile goal right out the water.  I'll need to reassess and revise the total mileage goal and the bike-specific goal.  And the # swims goal.  The plan was for 30 swims!  At this rate i should hit that by the end of April.

ONE AWESOME BIKE RIDE:
We had this ONE amazing day of spring weather last Saturday.  It was over 60 (SIXTY!) degrees, no wind, mind-blowingly awesome outdoor weather.  I had planned to do some laundry, take Coty for a LONG dog-walk and then do my long swim (as per my lovely Training Plan, sticking to that Plan, my friends, the Plan is my lifeline!) But when my awesome friend Raegan called and suggested a bike ride, I threw it all out the window.  I ditched the laundry, gave Coty a Quickie, dug out my bike helmet, and rode to her house.  From there, we went downtown for lunch, rode to the bike shop where I learned out what sort of bike I have (an "upright") and what sort of bike rack I could get if I was so inclined (the Really Expensive Kind), and Raegan gave me some pointers on tri suits, tri shorts, and the whole world of multi-sport gear!   Then we rode to the south end of The Trail, back up to the crossroads and east to the end of the Trail, then back to Raegan's again, where another gear lesson followed and I got to see her IMPRESSIVE bling collection. (We did talk about all sorts of things over the course of our 3-hour adventure, not just tri-stuff...) All in, I got about a 20-mile bike ride for the day AND got to spend some quality time with one of those people I always want to spend more time with.

A DAY OF HIKING:
The nice weather held on Sunday too, and The Hubs and I decided to make a trip to Starved Rock State Park.  I took about a billion pictures but won't bore you with those.  What I love best is that Coty got to join us for this adventure.  "Hiking" is something of a misnomer for what we did here, as the park is mainly accessed via man-made pathways - wooden paths, stairs (SO many stairs!) dominate, but I get why:  where there weren't pathways, it was MUDDY!  We had a blast and got about a 3-mile hike with the dog.  A VERY successful, ACTIVE weekend, I'm so glad I was flexible and chose to ditch my Training Plan for 2 days.  #wycwyc!!

I still have some other blog posts floating around in my head that I hope to get written up in the next week or so.  Things have cooled off at bit around the office so I'm thinking I'll be able to carve out some writing time in-between workouts over the next few weeks.  

I'll leave you with some pics from our day of hiking:



SUPER HAPPY #RUNNERDOG, EVEN AFTER THE HOUR-PLUS CAR RIDE.