Yum!

Hey guess what? I'm hungry! Apparently training for a half-iron makes you hungry. Who would've thought? I'm trying my best to eat lots and I thought I'd share my two newest snack food discoveries - White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Clif Bars, and Kashi TLC Dark Chocolate Coconut Fruit & Grain bars. Yes, they are both really as good as they sound and more than take care of any cravings for sweets. The first time I had the Clif Bar, I ate it so fast I was surprised when I went to take another bite and it was all gone. The Kashi bars really are as good as they look on the box. If only my grocery store would stop running out of them.

On a separate but related note - my grocery store stocks all the diet meal replacements, things like Slimfast, directly across from the chocolate and the candy. I just think that's really wrong! Not that I was getting Slimfast - they put the Clif bars with the diet stuff.

I love this woman!

I know it's been awhile since I've posted - I actually have 3 unfinished posts and 1 or 2 more floating in my head. Apparently I'm having some serious attention deficit with regards to my writing. Anyway, I just thought I'd take a moment to share this picture of Michelle Obama. She is preparing the ground for a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. The children are 5th-graders from a local elementary school, who have a garden at their school and will help to plant, care for, and harvest the White House garden. How cool is that? The garden will provide food for White House dinners and will be located in a spot that is visible to people walking on the street. Part of it's purpose is to help educate people on the benefits of eating healthy, natural foods. The NY Times wrote a nice article about the garden. Here's the link: Obamas Prepare to Plant White House Garden

So why do I love Michelle? It's a growing list starting with she's smart, educated, independent, fit, healthy, attractive, but right now it's this picture. Lots of First Ladys and Presidents have visited schools and taken part in the classroom, but when was the last time you saw a First Lady outside digging in the dirt with a bunch of kids? Those of you that know me well, know how important I consider outdoor education, so this picture is great to me. Sure it's a nice photo op and I'm well aware that she might never work in the garden again, but even if it is just a nice photo op, it still says alot about her that she chose digging a garden as her school children photo op instead of something more traditional, and regardless of wether or not she ever works in the garden again, those kids will get to and that's very cool.

Training Update

As most of you know, I'm not big on writing about the details of my training. There are a few reasons for this, one is that I know most of my readers aren't triathletes and so the details don't necessarily mean all that much to you, and the other, bigger reason is that I don't like to obsess about my training. I do this for fun and I choose to not let it consume me and be the be-all end-all of my existence. Also, I don't like to make a big deal about my training because while I do think that doing triathlons, especially the longer ones, does take a lot of work and commitment, I also think that most people are capable of doing a triathlon if they put their mind to it. That being said, I fully appreciate everyone's praise and of course I love the compliments - who wouldn't?

So while I rarely post just about my training, I do occasionally feel obligated to share. I've had quite a few questions from non-triathlete friends and family about my training schedule. What, when, how long, how often? Well, I'm not really one to track numbers all that much. I have a coach, Brandon Marsh - check out his blog for good triathlon training tips and amusing insights - and he puts together my daily workouts and long term plans so tracking numbers hasn't really been a huge concern for me. I log all my workouts and I could dig up everything from recent years and put together totals, but it's not really my thing. Anyway, Brandon has been using a spreadsheet for the past few months to track my workouts so the totals are right there. I actually haven't even been looking at the grand totals for the week, I just log my workouts for the day and move on, but it's time to start ramping up my training in preparation for the Gulf Coast Half-iron in May so I was curious about this week's totals.

My basic weekly training schedule is this - 3 set runs- Tuesday - quality, Thursday - tempo, Saturday - long, there are other runs that get scheduled, but those 3 are always there; 2 swim workouts Tues and Thursday, straight swim on Sunday, other swims get scheduled depending on volume for the week; bike - Wed - interval workout on the trainer, Fri - ride, Sun - long ride, other rides as scheduled or as I feel like. Sometimes I ride the trainer in the evening if I have time to kill before dinner or I feel like it. Sometimes I go for a ride if the weather is nice and I want to. I like riding. I have other workouts on my schedule - these are for core strengthening, so pilates, yoga, the stadium workout. Brandon started putting them on my schedule to help keep me motivated to do my strength work. So here are my totals for this week, which was an easy week. Swim: 1:50 hr, 4100 yd Bike: 6:45 hrs Run: 3:25 hrs, 20 miles Other: 5:45 hrs Total 17:45 hrs of training. 17:25 hrs was scheduled. This doesn't include the yoga classes I teach or any other yoga I do that is in addition to the specific core workouts.

I can't really put these numbers into much of a meaningful context since I don't have much to compare them to, but I do know that quantity and duration of several of the workouts will go up considerably as training ramps up. This is probably the last time I'll go into this much detail about my training so I hope you got your fill.

Happy Square Root Day!

I know this post is late in the day, but I totally spaced that today is March 3, 2009 - that's 3/3/09. It's Square Root Day! For the math challenged, that's a day when both the day and the month are the square root of the last two digits of the year. In today's case the square root of 9 = 3. The next Square Root Day is 4/4/16 so you better celebrate while you've got the chance. Embrace your inner math geek.

Square Root Day was first celebrated by a high school teacher in California on September 9, 1981 - 9/9/81, and he still publicizes the holiday to this day. I'm sure everyone remembers a high school teacher that would come up with some sort of crazy, loopy thing just to get students interested. If not then you definitely missed out. So celebrate Square Root Day and drink a toast to wacky high school teachers for giving us silly things to liven up an otherwise ordinary day.