Laundry

I swear I have never done so much laundry in my life as I have in the last eight months since I took up Triathlon training.

When you're working out once or twice a day, every day of the week, you gotta keep up. I often come home from a workout, stand in front of the washer and strip naked, feeding my stuff right in.

Even if you have six sets of workout clothes for each sport (which I don't, although I have to admit I have incrementally "added" to my collection of compression shorts, technical T's, "really nice" running socks, running tights, warming sleeves and so forth) you simply can not leave a pile of sweaty stuff on the bedroom floor. Whether you're married or not, that will come back to bite you. And I know you wouldn't dream

Vitamins at odds with exercise?

Go figure. Just when you think you're doing everything right, you find out that the vitamins you're taking may be actually negating some of the positive effect of your workouts. XU69EG84GDWM

In this article in the New York Times, a study indicates that antioxidant supplements Vitamin C & E may actually defeat

Somebody's Hero

Every once in a while I wonder what motivators could possibly have driven me to, what most others consider, the extremes I've adopted as my new lifestyle.

NE Season Opener - Finish Line

One thing I'm very clear about is that I would never, ever, have undertaken this kind of training regimen without some very strong "pull" motivators. There are both push (stick) and pull (carrot) motivators in the mix, but for me, the ones that pull are stronger.

The push motivators are obvious: "gee I'd like to lose some weight" or "I really should get to the gym and get in better shape". You sense right away how little emotional energy those generate, and how non-specific they are. I've had these for years. They are the lazy fat slobs of the world of motivators. They opine. They gesticulate. They may even whine. But they don't kick ass.

They become a box you need to check - a nag. You usually don't put any specific goals around them,

Race Report: NE Season Opener Sprint - May 8th, 2011

Well, that was interesting! 

It turned out to be a beautiful day with sun breaking through puffy, scattered clouds by start time - which event organizers pushed back to 9:00am so the air temperatures could rise. It ended up being 50F by the start. 

The event was spectacularly well organized with a great sound system and D.J. spinning tunes so you could hear it all across the lake. It had sold out weeks in advance with 370 Triathletes and another 330 for the Duathlon. Copious instructions, route maps, race packs, email bulletins and updates were sent out to all competitors during the weeks before, so even though I had never done this event before, I felt pretty comfortable with all the logistics. Kudos to Tim Richmond and his team at Max Performance.

I arrived in the area early enough Saturday to drive the bike course before dark. That turned out to be a good thing to do. I had already studied the course,

NE Season Opener: projecting finish times and final prep

Projected Finish Times

Even as I started to figure out what events I would do this season, I began to wonder how I would do. At that distance though, I had no idea and I just kept telling myself, it's a warm-up event, it will be a lot of fun, just keep training and the times will take care of themselves.

Now that the Northeast Season Opener is less than a week away, I've got a recent running Time Trial behind me, and a I'll do an updated bike time trial this week, I've dialed in the expected timings a little.

For what's called the "Sprint" triathlon, the "typical" distances are 1/2 mile swim, 10 mile bike, 3.1 mile run. Strangely, there are no real standards,