Daughter wants to try tri!

My most immobile daughter became a fitness freak and joined the Marines this year. She took a delayed entry so she could enter into the Indy Adventure Race www.indyar.com the beginning of this September. One of her team members could not make the race so I volunteered. What was I thinking? After doing that, I thought I had better start doing some training.

To give you some background on my previous training status, it included the couch, beer, and cigarettes! I USED to run something like 30 years ago when I weighed around 180 (6'3") and at about the age of 47 got up to 250lbs. I went on a diet, just counting calories and got down to 190 by the age of 49 but bumped back up to 220 by this year at the age of 53 so I started dieting again and bought a bike, running shorts, swim trunks, and a heart rate monitor (I would suggest this for any old fart). I did get down to 208 and seemed to level out there. So I started biking and would go 5 miles and end up in the lowest gear to keep my heart rate at a reasonable level. My daughter started a couch to 5K running group with people she worked with and I joined. Tough. She also need to learn how to swim so I got her a membership at a gym and started teaching her how to swim. I could barely make it one lap without panting like a dog.

I was concerned that I would not be able to finish the race but one week before, I was able to run 5 miles, bike 30, and my swimming?, well, let's just say that I could swim a very slow and sloppy mile. This gave me a lot of confidence. The race consisted of 9 miles of running/hiking and orienteering (finding crap on a map), 5 miles of paddling a canoe, and about 25 to 30 miles of biking, depending on how lost you got. Well, we got back to the start point about 3 hours after the leading team who finished in 5:34 hours. There was a surprise bike orienteering at the end and I was ready to go but one of the team members did not have enough nutrition and water through the race so we had to stop but I would say probably 2/3 of the teams did the same thing. The surprise was that I was ready to KEEP GOING!

Well, now that that is finished, my daughter wants me to join her in some races next year. There is a sprint tri here in town but that is about all I have looked into except for the next Indy AR race (they also put on an Urban race which we will do and I have been told is quite fun).

My next hurdle? My daughter smokes and so do I. She cannot smoke going into basic training so I have agreed with her that I will quit when she goes in since we both want to anyway. That will be the 15th of this month.

I am working on one of the beginning Tri workouts found on this website and should be in shape for something next year. I also discovered the Total Immersion swimming technique and am absolutely sold on it since it has reduced my stroke count, lowered the effort I have to put into it, and increased my speed. It has made swimming fun again.

My goal is to work on endurance for 2008 and work on increasing speed in 2009 with my heart rate monitor as my guide and friend.