Tagged - 5 Interesting Things

The funny thing is that much of what most people would consider "interesting" about me are commonplace among my fellow multisport athletes so where to take this thing…

1) I have lived in places, yes lived not just visited, where I have seen the sun rise and set over the Pacific Ocean and rise over the Atlantic. Still haven't lived somewhere that the sun set on the Atlantic.
2) I have climbed the highest peak in the Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western parts of New Mexico.
3) I am the current president of one of my national professional organizations.
4) The one and only sport that I would actually sit and watch is Rugby and despite my lifelong involvement in sports I could care less about professional sports of any kind. In fact, this has at times been somewhat of a conversational handicap because when people start talking about "Hey, did you see that game between…" not only am I unable to feign interest but I have great difficulty covering up my impatience though I try to be polite.
5) I'm not a big fan of Holidays. Sure I love time off and love to travel, especially by car, but formal holidays like Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving etc… even birthdays, not a fan. It isn't that I dislike them it's just that I really don't care about them. All those things that they are supposed to symbolize, I think you should really try and express every day and not horde your goodwill, remembrances, good cheer, recognition, gift giving etc… until one lousy day per year because, let's face it, that day may not come this year.

Now for an update. This weekend was one hell of a training weekend though I didn't really plan it that way. I have been working on meeting the Ultra Marathon Cycling Association's "Year-Rounder" challenge this year whereby you have to ride at least one century each month for the year. The rides can either be organized or personal and you have to send in either a tracking sheet or something like Garmin data by way of Motion Based if you do a personal century. Anyway, I had chosen this weekend as the one where I would do my December century and finish off the year so I headed out on Saturday and got in 101.2 miles. The average temperature was 29 degrees with a high of 31 but I got it done and am pretty glad to be done with the challenge because it really tended to get in the way of my various training and racing objectives but I am glad I did it and will now await my plaque.

Sunday I had my last long run scheduled before tapering down a bit for the Mississippi Blues Marathon on January 5th. I headed out to get in 18 miles and at mile 14 I really started to wear down. I thought to myself, "Well, I put a lot of climbing in this run and I am running it faster than I usually run the day after a 100 mile ride." At about mile 15 I was once again focused on how tired I was and then it dawned on me, "This is about equivalent to what I would be doing on a peak IM training weekend and I have not been training for an ironman." Duh! So I cut myself some slack and ran the last few miles at about a 12 minute pace wondering how exactly I missed the fact that I was doing 100 miles one day and 18 the next. Since I have been run focused I have just been thinking about that and not paying attention to the bike so I guess I just thought about the bike as something I needed to finish up and the run as my workout. Weird.

Finally, I'm pretty happy to report that I have 10 more miles to run and I will have done 1,000 miles for the year! Sure, not as much as some triathletes I know but it is a goodly chunk of mileage. I am also about 20 miles from getting 6,000 miles on the bike and about 50 meters away from getting in 113 miles of swimming. I'll do a comparison between this year and last year next post.

Oh, people to tag. Apparently this thing has been going around a while so I'll only tag fellow Outlaws, at least one of which will need to finally create a blog of his own instead of lurking and leaving the occasional comment.

So I tag:
Bones
MG
Mr. T
Deputy Dog
Muffin