I'm Good at this Blogging Thing

Happy New Year? 

I’m pretty sure that any and all resolutions I would have made have been broke, I’ll spare you the details.  Still drinking soda, eating fried foods and not enough fresh food.

January was an adjustment month.  After barely working in December, I needed to get back into the swing of things.  That included training.  I’m just over 8 weeks out from Ironman South Africa!  Crap!  I admitted, many weeks ago I have been looking past this race as the last several months have been not good training wise.  I’m still going, I’m still going to go as fast as I can and I am going on safari and surfing J Bay! 

There was a Half Ironman race last weekend.  I did well…3^rd OA and 2^nd AG.  It was immensely foggy  that morning, so the delayed the start by almost 2 hours then, cancelled the swim.  Fine, takeaway my slight advantage over some people.  They made it a 5km run (turn out to be more like 4kms) instead of a swim.  Remind me not to run 6:15s for that next time.  I think that destroyed me for the half marathon.  I made a good comeback on the last couple laps of the bike (there were 7) to come into transition less than a minute behind several people who passed me early in the day.  I averaged 37kph (23mph) for the bike for a 2:27 split.  Happy about that.   The run wasn’t pretty, something like a 1:45 split.  Not my best and I thought I had good legs for the day, but as I mentioned that first 4km before the bike hurt me.  There is a reason I don’t do endurance duathlons.

I haven’t been anywhere since returning to the UAE, so I have no photos.  Jen is leaving me for Paris next week (she’s taking an IB class for school), so I am going to do a relay on the east coast with some people from Finland – Team Suomi!  Should be fun, its only 75km between 4 of us, but we can go fast.  Jann finished the half just behind me and his girlfriend/wife is a fast 10km runner.  Our fourth member is a journalist from Finland flying in and writing a story for a Finnish “Runner’s World.”  There should be some good photos.  

I could talk about the economy, but everyone knows it’s in the crapper.  We aren’t escaping it over here.   I’m just hoping rental prices continue to drop so I can find a villa come June to rent. 

While not fully baked (like Phelps) I may be coming home in Portland after a quick trip to the Toronto area in August.  If I am home, I might have top jump in to the Hulaman Half Ironman.  I will have had a nice rest coming off France and watching the Tour.