Looking backward moving forward!

I am a lazy blogger, I apologize; I can barely keep up with the reading/comments without even thinking about putting fingers to the keyboard for anything substantive. The past month has been a bit of a blur but things are starting to settle down, sort of.

My day starts around 5:15, initially with a start but after four weeks it’s become a habit (a'la Jess’ 21 Days) and now I am up before the alarm around 5am. Breakfast is spent going through personal email, forums, blogs etc and then it off for a shower and all that good stuff and I am on the road around 6:15am. The traffic is mercilessly light and I am usually at my desk around 7am. I plow through the morning till noon, nip off to the cafeteria, yes it’s a big office, well site really there are 22 buildings and a gazillion employees. I grab a salad, usually DIY Cobb and head back, spend the time it takes to eat it doing personal stuff and then I am back in the groove by 12:45. To get home in decent time I can leave at either 4pm or 6pm, if I leave at five I arrive around the same time as if I had left at six; Thursday was a pain; it took two and a half hours!!! Usually I walk in between 7 and 7:30pm, just in time for a bedtime story with our eldest and phew that’s it. Fitting a training plan around will be tricky but doable, early morning runs are best for me but that’s a 4am or earlier start and I am pretty crap at going to bed at a reasonable time…at least for now.

Looking back I’ve pootled around the last month or two runningwise and while the freetime is nice my base is eroding and after a couple of runs this week I am getting the itch to get going again. After last weeks ITB issues I spent the last weeks evenings with some pretty full on one-on-one action with my foam roller along with some extensive stretching and that’s helping.

Right now the weather is a little bothersome, I am officially bored with summer; yes I now its just started but another week of triple digits is forecast and it’s not uncommon for it to be 80+ when I leave my house for work. Fall is another three months away but the summer can drag, hopefully it won’t this year. I would like to drop a few pounds also, thanks to Viv’s challenge I am now south of 170, somewhere I have not been for a few years, I want to get within the 160-165 range.

So now with half the year over it’s time for mid-year resolutions and thoughts about training again. My second A race; Twin Peaks is December 13 so I have to work out the training plan to back into that date, that sets me on the path with a start date for late August, the plan will envelop some race dates along the way, provisionally these will include; the Long Beach Marathon (Oct), PCTR 50K, (Nov) the Eco Marathon (also Nov) on Catalina Island, and I’ll probably throw in some Xterra races along the way as well as some cycling miles.

Objectives for this half year; a faster PCTR race (sub 6:00); this was my first ever 50k last year so I know what to expect this time around, a sub 11 hour Twin Peaks, (sub 10 would be awesome, but lets not get carried away, there’s a reason it has a 15 hour cut-off!) I want to hit my target weight zone as I start the training cycle so I need to drop just over a half pound a week for 7 weeks, wean myself of the Coke Zero and Popsicle habit (not consumed together) I seem to have developed and get a decent nights sleep, well anything more than 6 hours would be a start, and with that I hope everyone Stateside had a good fourth and has a good weekend, I am off to grab some zzzs!