That’s me at Ironman Florida – 317.  I think that’s a good number, primarily because it will give me a constant reminder to HTFU on the Marathon and run – need a run split under my bib number.

Training has been pretty good, I’m starting to feel pretty sharp.  This past weekend I did a swim, followed by a long ride, followed by a 60 minute run.  Alll three went very good.  The bike got really hard towards the end, but what can you expect after 4 and a half hours on a trainer?

Last night was a different story – did a 90 minute run and I wanted to die.  My diet of the previous few days rebelled against me and I had the worst heartburn I’ve ever had on a run.  It lead to me feeling a bit weak because running ”easy” was uncomfortable, and running “normal” would have killed me.  On the bright side I proved to myself that I can knock off 7:30 min/miles even when it’s miserable.  My HR for the run was 132 – very good.  I don’t think I’ll be interested in Mexican for a while.

Looking to hone the sharpness over the next several days and arrive at IMFL with the Awesome*.

*I’ll talk more about my made up term sometime in the next week

19 days from now I’ll be in Panama City Beach, FL and hopefully about 8 miles into the bike of IMFL. (It’s 8:15am as I write this).

I don’t know what to expect for the race right now.  On the one hand, I have been fanatically watching the water temperature and am thrilled to see it come down to 74F, from the 84F it was a week ago.  Keep falling baby – I would be thrilled with a water temp in the mid-sixties.

My run has also been showing me some good things – and am feeling moderately confident in that.  However, I’m definitely not overly confident with everything in general.  Swimming – my stroke feels good, but not strong.  Cycling my endurance is definitely present, but I just haven’t had any impressive rides of the likes I laid down in August.  None that I’d call depressing (i.e. Saturday was 5 hrs @ ~209 watts, with the last hour @ 220), just not awe-inspiring.  Hard/long workouts leave me toasted – I passed out for a couple of hours after my ride on Saturday, then I went to bed for the night about 3 hours after waking up from my nap; I was *that* tired.

So where does that leave me?  Flat.  My natural tendancy when feeling flat is to attempt to force things until I get what I want.  This morning while swimming, I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever gotten past the “flat” feeling by forcing it.  I should know, I’ve been trying these past three weeks.  The result, things just aren’t going in the right direction.  I wouldn’t say they are getting worse, I just have not turned the corner that will lead to feeling like I can conquer the world.

So I’m revising my last 3 weeks or so just slightly – mostly by eliminating the running intensity and the FTP bike intensity, hopefully this will allow me to roll out some better performances in my long workouts and arrive in PCB not feeling flat.

Mary and I went up to Stevens Poin this past weekend for the biennial Alumni swimming meet.  It was a hoot, got to hang out with some old friends for a while.

I also swam just about every event they offered at the meet.  I was pretty surprised to swim the 100 free (SCY) in a 53.4.  Definately not an amazing swim, but I was surprised by it.