My New Challenge

Ive been meaning to write about this for the last couple of weeks, but just haven't had the chance. After finishing the Houston Marathon, I experienced what I hear lots of marathon runners experience, which is post marathon depression. I had been building to that day for over 8 months, and it was everything I had ever hoped it would be. It was the culmination of all of my hard work, fatigue, struggle, triumph, defeat and joy, all wrapped into one package. But then after a couple of days I felt so empty. I felt like I had nothing in the background to always think about like I had with the marathon. Luckily I had already decided what was going to take the marathon's place, triathlon.

I'm lucky in that after running the marathon, I had now been at least mildly experienced in all three areas of triathlon. I had been on a swim team when I was a teenager, I rode the MS150 just a couple years ago, and now I had run a marathon. I just had to stick all three together. I set my sights on the Lone Star Triathlon in April, but then the next decision, what distance to do. In triathlon there are basically 4 distances, Sprint, Olympic, 1/2 Iron Man and Iron Man. My first inclination was to start at the bottom with the sprint, and work my way up if I got into it. I planned to buy a book and set up a training plan since I felt I could have the self discipline to train on my own. I am sooooo glad I was wrong about that. I think I would have had the discipline, but the training Im getting now with my triathlon group is so many light years beyond what I could have gotten from a book, its hard to imagine doing it without them. Theres a dedicated triathlon store near me in town called Tri On The Run, and they have a group training program for the traithlon I was wanting to do. After talking with the coaches, they were pretty convinced that with my level of fitness, and more importantly my level of commitment and the time I had to devote to it, that I could actually go ahead and do the olympic distance. So the triathlon I will be doing is a 1500 yd swim (.9 miles)followed by a 25 mile bike followed by a 6.2 mile run.

So far the training is going fantastic. My swim stroke seems to still be lodged down in my muscle memory (how I dont know) and Im really enjoying cycling again, and of course, Im still madly in love with running. So I guess this blog wont just be a fat man running anymore, it will be a fat man swimming, biking and running!