My four days off has come and gone. I was REALLY hoping that we had made some serious progress with the daughter during the 4 day. It was looking like we had when she slept the whole night through on night #4. I didn't want to jinx it and talk about it too soon, but it doesn't really seem to matter at this point. She has yet to replicate that night #4 of sleeping. It didn't help that the next night I wasn't there, and we had 2 other kids sleeping at the house with their mom in labor. Understandably, Shawna didn't want her crying to wake them, so she was with Laney during the night. The following night when I was home, she was back at the crying, only I got up twice with her, and then once with boy #2 because he woke at 430, and told me he wanted to watch cartoons. Needless to say, I didn't let him, nor did I get out to the pool early yesterday am before work to get my swim in. With the sleepless nights, it's definitely taken it's toll on the performance. Case in point, the swim. On day four I went out to the pool. I was feeling ok, not super tired, but not refreshed either. It only took a couple of laps for my fatigue to set in and really remind me of what I had been doing the last 3 nights at home. I then had to quickly adjust the workout for some shorter intervals with more of them to get the same distance out of the day. While on the bike and during the run, I was really working on my pacing this last week. It's a hard thing to do though; not go too balls out on the first couple, so you're last couple of rounds are still almost identical. But pacing is important for when the race day does come around. I think that I will either borrow a friend's Garmin for the big race, or maybe try to find one at an REI garage sale that I can get for cheap and have Garmin fix for me. It will really help during the run so I can gauge my pace at any given moment, instead of when I hit a mile marker.
I'm still in total shock about my friend Gabby and her cancer diagnosis. I can't stop thinking about it, and it just seems like a bad dream. It has made me more determined to get to Seattle though. My training for the stairclimb is not what the rest of the guys are doing. Seattle is not a main event, in racing terms, for me. I'm going to go, have fun and do the climb for Gabby. My biggest goal is to complete the event and not get injured. The triathlon training has to continue as that's the most important race for the season. To get ready for the stair climb, I'm continuing with the Crossfit Endurance, but for the Strength and Conditioning parts, I've added my weight vest. This is the same weight vest that I wore last year for the Robie creek run, only this time it has 20# during the workout instead of the 40# that I had for that half marathon. So far I've done 2 workouts with the vest. One had a 1/4 mi (400m) run, chest to bar pull ups and double unders with the jump rope (2 passes of the rope for one jump). The other was a 1/2mi (800m) run, 30x 115# thrusters (front squat to overhead press as one movement) followed by another 800m run. The vest definitely adds another dimension to the suck factor, especially when I use it right after I did my endurance work like I did yesterday. But this is for Gabby, and I am going to finish the event and not let a little discomfort stop me from completing a workout or getting to the top.
I am continuing to research the nutrition for the event, and have finally gotten all the nutritional info that I think I need. Now, it's just a matter of finding an hour or two, comparing it all and making a choice. Then there will be the fun of the trial and error to see how well I feel it works. On a related noted though, I did buy the TorHans aero hydration kit, and Shawna told me yesterday that FedEx dropped it off. So I can't wait to get home and mount that thing! Pics and reviews to come shortly, but I'm anticipating a really good outcome. I will probably have to mount it when I'm at work tomorrow, but we'll see how today shapes up. I got up around 2 this am for a call and there was snow on the ground! I know it's winter here, but this has been an extremely mild winter for us, and only the second time that we've had snow like this in the valley. I was hoping to maybe get outside on the bike today, but that's not going to happen. Hopefully, the snow will melt away and clear out by Friday so I can take the bike, with the TorHans, out for a road spin.
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