How's the Training Going?

Not bad. I'm glad you asked. :-)

Doesn't everyone's counter look like this? 

With IM Chatanooga a mere 230-some days away, JT and I can hardly think about anything else. It consumes our thoughts. Every morning we jump out of bed at 4am, diving into the first round of training, with one of us biking a couple of hours and the other one doing a set of full-body strength training and then cooling down with a five-mile run before we rouse the kids and then race off to our jobs. In the morning we periodically surf slowtwitch to see what people are saying about Chattanooga, and on our lunch breaks we scour the latest Triathlete magazine to see what we can learn about swim techniques while sucking down some green smoothies. Immediately after work one of us squeezes in a swim while the other feeds kids supper. Then we swap places. Later we log another hour of spinning with friends after putting the kids to bed. We end the night falling into bed, dreaming once again about the sunny skies of Tennessee, but only after a 30-minute core session with medicine and swiss balls along with a little stretching and rolling.

And this, dear ones, is what we call bologna.

Maybe at one time I pictured a triathlete behaving like this, but quite frankly, if we are (amateur) triathletes and this is what our lives should look like, then maybe we're doing something wrong.

Or maybe we just have a life.

This past week we did put some time in on the bike and in the pool. However, the road has eluded us once again. We're not super structured here, but structured enough to feel comfortable with 230-ish days until the big event. And quite frankly, I'm pretty sure that our lives will never look like the scenario above (nor do I want them to).

We do have a few things that make our home look a little different than our non-triathlete friends. In particular, the packages that arrive periodically make the FedEx guy wonder. Last winter as he delivered one more package from RoadRunnerSport, he said, "You get a lot of shoes." Why yes, we do.

A couple canisters of Perform, another jug of recovery mix, bananas, Picky Bars, and apples litter our counter. A Men of Triathlon calendar adorns the wall on the opposite side of the kitchen (thanks, Tyler Butterfield, for giving us a break from Jesse Thomas last week). Water bottles line the two shelves of one cabinet next to the tupperware and every day dishes. I'm confident that average triathletes have a similar kitchen. And I'm more than okay with being average for now.

This next week should provide a bit more structure. We have a sitter scheduled for Saturday so we can do a Swim-Bike-Run in one day. More on that next week. Until then, we press on with normal living that includes a little bit of triathlon training.