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.