Biggest Week I Can Remember

For some reason, I was on a mission this past week. I guess it started with the sleepness night I had last weekend where I was frustrated that I had not started a fundraiser to fight cancer like I've been wanting to do. Some of you have probably seen my project which is to essentially have donors pledge a certain amount for every mile of training I cover from February to May. For followers of my blog, you know my biggest training vice is consistency. So this week, I wanted to take my training to the next level to prepare myself for the rigors of this fundraiser. It all started with having Monday off from work for MLK day. I finally set up a Computrainer training space in my room and decided to give it a try. The result ended up being an hour and a half ride of intense riding on Cadence (my time trial bike).



One day I'll have to give you a tour of all my training and racing toys, but this is what the Computrainer looks like. The Computrainer is basically a trainer that I hook up to my bike up to so that the resistance changes automatically for any specific course or workout I enter into my computer. As you can imagine, staring at the wall during this rides isn't so fun and it gets really hot and humid in my room, so I'm forced to air it out by opening up the windows to free the room of man smell. Kinda gross. The first 10 minutes of my Computrainer workouts are always really dreadful, but at some point my eyes fix on one point on my wall and I'm basically unconcious for the next hour or so. When I'm in the zone, I think its one of the few times I'm closest to my mom.

So this week, after 10 hours of training including 3km of swimming, 100 miles of cycling, and 29 miles of running, I accomplished one of my bigger weeks in recent memory. I hope that this is an indication of things to come. The new year has been good for training and I'm really feeling stronger these days.

I raced in the New York Road Runners Manhattan Half Marathon this past Sunday and it was definitely the coldest race I've ever participated in. I looked up at the CNN sign overlooking Central Park after the race and it said that the temperature was 17 degrees. I was pretty much freezing my ass off the whole race. I wish I had taken pictures, but the image of the frozen sweat that came through my two layers of hats would have given you a pretty good idea of how cold it was. I went into this race not wanting to push too hard because I wanted to be able to recover fast enough to train hard again this week. I started at the back of 5,000 people before the race and I was debating whether or not I should go through my pre-race ritual of hitting up the port-o-potties. I decided against my better judgement and ended up torturing myself through the first 6.5 miles at a 10:30 min/mile pace as the chicken and rice from the previous night sloshed around in my stomach leaving unpleasantries for the runners behind me. Sorry everyone. I guess to sum this up, Will Ferrell said it best. "Milk was a bad choice." For me, "Chicken, Lamb, Rice, Pita, with white sauce and hot sauce was a bad choice." I probably looked a little like this right before I stopped during the middle of the race for a quick port-a-pottie stop finally.



After I finally got some of it out of my system, I ran hard for the rest of the race. My goal was to accomplish a negative split before the race. That means you run the second half faster than your first half of the race. So for the second half of the race, I just pushed really hard through the paths of Central Park. One of the nice things about starting at the back is that you run with the slow people, so it was a nice confidence booster to pass everyone. I kept a pretty strong pace and strolled into the final mile. Whenever I get to the end of a race, one thing I learned to help distract me from the pain of running faster is that I put a target on certain people's back. I say to myself "by the end of this turnaround, you have this pass this fat shit." I'll keep saying that to myself. There's always one person I can't catch, but I didn't want that to happen this time around. So for the final half mile, I sprinted and sprinted to a point where I looked like a complete psycho. I know because I heard people talking as I passed them saying "what the hell?" Anyway, I was able to finish the second 6.5 miles at around a 7:30 min/mile pace. It was a pretty awesome feeling to finish. I almost forgot after taking so much time off from racing how great of a spiritual experience the finish line could be. After that split second though, it was business as usual, and I headed back to my car and started thinking about recovering and my next workout. End preview week 1 of the project...

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