Here it is just a few days before Halloween weekend and the end of October.  As we enter November and the colder months, this is always the easiest time to begin slacking off.  For instance this morning I had to wake at 5:15am in pitch darkness for a tough 6.70 miles of hill repeats outside.  Making things even tougher was the “feels like” temp of 35, 20mph winds out of the NE and a chance of sprinkles.  None of that sounded too appealing, but I knew if I got it done I’d be happy with myself.  And I did and I was.

Fortunately I have a pretty solid plan in place that will keep me motivated during the colder months and help get me through the winter.  For me the hardest part of the year is September through the year-end.  The reason is that the triathlon season is over and it makes it difficult to get motivated to bike and swim.  I find I usually go into run-focused training during those months and try to get a Half Marathon and a couple 5K’s onto the schedule to keep me honest.  January-March are easy for me because I already start getting excited about the Spring and enjoy these months in building my swim and bike fitness.

The last two months I have done a great job of keeping up my run focus and am right on track to race the Tyraneena Beer Half Marathon next weekend (Nov 5th).  I’ve been consistently running 5 days a week with a lot of variety including tempo & pace runs, as well as hills intervals and even some track work.  I believe all this variety makes me a better runner.  In addition, all of the experience and training is a necessarily part of the Journey to Ironman.

Speaking of Journey’s, I wanted to mention my little training journey to Tyraneena and my goals in this race.  This is a fairly technical course with a decent amount of elevation (see graph).    So even though this may not be the best course to attempt a PR, I am hoping to do so.  My current PR is 1:59:27 and that was on a fairly flat course.  With my fitness where it is right now I believe I could get into the high 1:40’s on another flat course.  But knowing the elevation of Tyraneena, I am going to shoot for a 1:53:00.  This is an aggressive goal, but realistic goal that I believe I can attain.

Not sure if I will BLOG again before Tyraneena, but I will provide an update and race report sometime after the race.  For now…tootaloo.

Today starts October.  Technically it is the offseason (for triathlon), but in reality there really isn’t much rest with Ironman coming up in less than a year.  At the current time I am training for the Tyranena Half Marathon in Lake Mills.  The race is just over a month away (Nov 5^th) and since the start of September I have cut down on my bike and swim volume so that I can increase my run training for the race.  Currently I am running five days a week and only biking and swimming once per week.  For the month of September, my volume looked like this:

September's totals:
Bike:	5h 31m 12s - 93.15 Mi
Run:	12h 20m 44s - 80.64 Mi
Swim:	1h 30m 32s - 4250 Yd

 
October will have significantly more run miles with similar numbers on the bike and swim.  I am looking forward to my race in November and hope to PR my Half Marathon distance despite the hilliness of this particular course (http://www.tyranena.com/beerrun/2009%20Race%20Routes.pdf).  My training has been hill focused which has included some tough intervals on a rather nasty .25 mile hill on one of my run routes.  The ole' body feels good and training runs have been going well.

After Tyranena, the last race of the season will be a Turkey Trot that Colleen and I do every year in Palm Desert while on vacation in Palm Desert.  This is a fun run 5K that we love doing every year on Thanksgiving.  Going into December I will start integrating more bike and swim into my weeks, but will continue with fairly light volume.  Once January 2012 rolls around, I will begin slowing increasing my volume in all three sports as I venture into the spring and the start of my very serious training. 

I will continue to update this blog on a semi-regular basis and will also provide details as I get closer to the Tyranena race including an actual race report with details of the event.