Apologies for the Delay

Howdy folks! You may be asking yourself, why is it that ActiveSteve seems to be perpetually two weeks behind in all his postings? Well, that’s a pretty valid question, and with this little post, I hope to enlighten you a bit as to why that is. Essentially, it’s a question of time. You might have noticed that I tend to get a little verbose when writing up my postings. Ihonestly don’t mean to, it’s just that I seem to have a rambling writing style. I’ll decide to just write a little paragraph about a certain leg of a race for example, but when I get down to it, I start describing a whole lot of little things in it. I’m not sure why that is, I guess I just want to make sure that my readers are getting a true sense of my experiences. Where and/or what will this ever get me? Well, not a hell of a lot, other than when I’m old and wrinkly, I can bring all the old stories up (I hope), and relive my ‘youth’. So there you have it. But I digress. This post is about my training, not my rambling ways, right? Hee hee, see, there I went again.

Well, here it finally is folks. My post about the recent completion of my journey to become an Iron..Man. I can’t use the term Ironman itself, as this term is trademarked, and the race I took part in isn’t an ‘official’ Ironman event. Whatever. I still did the distance, endured the pain, and went through all the training. So I still feel pretty damn good about it 😉 As you’ll note, I’m calling this a journey, because it isn’t as simple as just doing a race. Getting to this start line involved about 9 months of training and sacrifices. I really couldn’t be a big party animal on weekends. Instead, I was up early mornings pretty much every single weekend, doing 6 hour bike rides or 3 hour runs or putting time in the pool. Often times, I actually had to do more than one of those per day. Yup, my weekly training regimen consisted of between 12 and 20 hours a week! Of course, rather than always just training, keep in mind I also raced during all this time, doing numerous triathlons and adventure races throughout the early season as well! But, since you’re reading this, it means that I made it to the other side. This post will be all about my race day, as the rest is essentially history at this point 😉 In order to help you understand the most about the day, I’ve done a few things for you. First off, head over to flickr for a folder full of race pictures. Secondly, since I had my Garmin on during the race itself, why not have fun and browse the Google map that I created, that includes some of the pictures? Good enough? Excellent, now on with the story.

As the title of this post indicates, last week marked the longest week in my marathon training program mileage. From Tuesday to Sunday, I ran a total of 80 km, culminating in a 32km run on Sunday! I repeat this same week twice more in the next 5 weeks, and then it will be the final taper to the marathon. I’m pretty sure I could finish the marathon with no problem tomorrow if I had to, but I’ll still need these next 7 weeks to tune up my engine. Thus far, I’ve had pretty good luck with my training program, avoiding both injury and illness, the bane of any endurance athlete’s existence. That changed for a me a bit in the past week, with me coming down with a nasty little bug. At first, I was worried that perhaps it was my old friend strept throat coming back to haunt me, but as I write this, I think it’s just a nasty cold brought on my who knows what. All I know is that it has caused me to take 2 days off work to basically sleep. Normally, on a sick day, I try to catch up a bit on chores, but this time around, it was sleep central for me, not getting up till after 1 pm both days. It also caused me to yet again seek out medical advice. I still have not gotten a family doctor, and at this point, figure I won’t be getting one anytime soon. Instead, I just keep going to Appletree Medical Clinics. This time, I even signed up to be part of their ‘group’. Essentially, it makes them my family doctor.