Is Enough Enough?

Well after a much too long hiatus from the blog I decided to start back into it. Part of being an Everyman is getting lazy and letting something go for a few weeks until you can swing yourself back around so here I am. The nice thing about the blog is that it makes me feel guilty to continue to write in it if I am not doing my training. Guilt is a pretty powerful motivator and almost as powerful as fear. When you are preparing for an Ironman chances are both will come into play. I have 2.5 months until the Hawaiian Ironman and a little less than two months until I start my taper and I am nervous that I am not doing enough. I have been following my training plan pretty close but have stepped up the running a little bit because it didn’t feel like I was doing enough. I have had some pretty long running days which have hurt but felt great when I was done and I have had to switch around my schedule anytime life gets in the way. I need to spend some more time on the bike and I will try to do so in the coming weeks if I can manage it. The wife and I were able to sneak away for the weekend (an adult-only weekend) and actually run in a road race together when the typical requires one of us to become cheerleader and kid-wrangler. We ran in the BIX 7 in Davenport Iowa. We had a great time and enjoyed every step of the race. I think it helped that everyone kept telling us how hard and hilly the race was because we were prepared for the worst and really enjoyed the “not so bad”. Coming up, my wife has a triathlon at the end of August called the CY-MAN in Ames IA and a friend has challenged me to run in an Endurance Race being held at a state park nearby. I am looking forward to the endurance race because it should be hard and I think that will help me mentally going into Hawaii. We are going to do the Northface Endurance Midwest 50 miler at Big Creek State Park on Labor Day weekend. The run will easily be double than any distance I have run so far but it shouldn’t take me as long as the Ironman will so I think it will help a great deal mentally. The nice thing about races like that is that speed isn’t really an issue so much as surviving. In the end, that is all I want to do.