Subject: Best stretch since 2012 I am sitting on top of my best stretch of training since 2012 and loving it. So what's different? 2013, surgery to repair torn bicep tendon. 2014, knee surgery. 2015, apathy, family problems. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, I was so busy making a living that I forgot to make a life. October 2019, retired again, from teaching this time. I'm not really sure what changed around Thanksgiving but I started going to the Y to "work out". LOL, nothing organized, just basically filling time. I wasn't even going to bother logging or anything. Then I heard from my youngest brother that just before Thanksgiving he had completed his first half-marathon. Honestly, I was surprised. I would have thought he had done one ages ago. I remember Jack telling me once that on a good day he ran 3 miles, but on a bad day he ran 5 - 8 miles. Seemed kind of backwards to me since I hate running. He explained that he ran the extra distance to get the endorphins to improve his bad days. Uh huh, still seemed backwards to me. Anyway, I told Jack that I was thinking about trying to train for the local Lumberjack triathlon in August. He said he'd love to train for it and he'd drive up from TN to do the race with me. Oh man! Now I was committed. But you know what? It has resulted in my best training since I left the Corps (1982) and has been a real source of motivation. I started planning my training, something I've never done before. I used to just do whatever I felt like doing on any given day. But I used the Custom Plan creator to build a basic template, then sort of started playing around with it. By the end of December all of my workouts were longer/harder than the custom plan and I did not want to ease back to the suggested times/distances because, IMO, that was like going backwards. So I used the holiday weeks as recovery weeks and used my last workouts as the starting point for my new plan for January. Since I started this new plan I have only missed one strength session in December and one swim in January. I chose to pass on that swim after a slip-and-fall on the pool deck the day before. My back didn't feel up to the twisting and pulling of swimming. As always, my training log is open access, if anyone wants to look. |