Progress Report

Alright so another month has come and gone and we are now just a little over 5 months until Ironman. When I first signed up I couldn't wait for it to be this time of year but felt it would take forever to get through the winter, and now I feel as if the spring and summer will fly by and before I now it I will be walking down to Lake Monona to start the swim portion of Ironman.

Three months into the year, three months into full training and I am feeling great. My running has improved way beyond what I expected and while I am still about 10 weeks out of the half marathon I feel my target time of 1:45:00 is right on schedule. Last year at this time I was running 8 minute plus miles and could barely run for 45 minutes at a time. A year later and I have a long run schedule for Sunday of an hour and I expect all my mile splits to be under or very close to 8 minutes. I have put in a lot of hard work on my run since last summer and have been very determined to become a faster and stronger runner. It feel great to be able to start seeing the pay off with the drop in my times, while becoming stronger mentally each day running.

Biking has been a bit off this year. I started out great getting some time on the trainer in January and working on my speed and strength. By the middle of February it was becoming increasingly hard to get on the trainer each day, just to spin for hours on end going absolutely nowhere (I had also watched just about every Seinfeld) so my patience for warm weather was wearing thin. The month of March brought an increase of hours at work so I decided to take some time away from the bike while maintaining my running. Now with the warm weather back and me learning to schedule my workouts better I plan to get back on track with my bike. I was able to go for my first long ride outside yesterday just under 2 1/2 hours and it felt great. I will be in Madison next week for hopefully one of my final rounds of PT and I will try and get a loop of the bike course a spin as well.

I was finally able to get back in the pool last week and went for a second swim last night. I've only done about 1100 yards total, but my arm and shoulder are feeling great. Now I just need to continue to rebuild that strength and rediscover the efficient stroke that I was able to find last year and I will be good to go. I have thought about getting a few swim lessons to work on the mechanics of my stroke but I am going to wait a little bit longer before I make any decisions on that.

So here we are just 5 1/2 short months away from the big day and I couldn't be more excited. My fitness is just about where I want to be, and I am still hoping to see some big gains over the upcoming months as well to be able to reach my target time of 12:00:00 on race day. The weather is improving and the first race is only a month away!

Ben