Let's Go.

It has been 12 years since I last posted here. Wow. Time has flown. I thought about where to post what I hope to be a journal of my activities in the near future and this old BlogSpot website seemed like the best choice. Facebook is too cluttered with all my other stuff and it hits a wider audience than I am going for, which is mainly just me and perhaps a few friends. I could do a personal journal, but that is less public than I am going for, since there is little accountability in private journaling. Anyway, so I figured I would resurrect this blog for purposes of journaling my endeavor. 

I will not sum up the last 12 years in detail. I will devote only one paragraph to it. After the last post in 2011 I did indeed complete the Ironman Arizona in November, 2011. If you are interested in how I did, feel free to google it. The results can be found. After that I slowly started to lose my fitness until for the past few years, other than a couple spots of activity, I have been very sedentary. 

While maintaining the blog 12 years ago I was pretty transparent in my measurements, and I will be again. A month or two ago I was back to around my heaviest which is in the lower 250 lbs range. Not healthy. This is nothing new. I have not been particularly healthy for a number of years. in my last weigh in on Saturday I was 244, so about 9 lbs. down. 

But why did I let myself go? Well it was super easy. Kids got busy in their sports. Work started loading up. I am now a partner in a law firm. I handle a significant load of work and I help in the management of the firm. And when I am home it has been very nice to do nothing. Doing nothing in the evenings is the way I dealt with my stress. And eating a bit more than I should. In time it all added up. 

So why now? I am in my 50s. I do not expect to get back to as fit as I was. To be honest I am not sure what spurred this on now. Here are the recent facts. I went to Belize with my second eldest son to work on a humanitarian project for 17 days. There were many 16 and 17 year old kids there doing the work and I was one of a couple of parents there to help with the kids and organization. There were two other adults leading the group. It was very hard work. I pushed it quite a bit even though the 16 and 17 year old kids dusted me. I felt a bit better though when I arrived back home. 

My first week back I went and ran twice. I did not have plan then, I just wanted to stay active after Belize. I ran and walked 2 miles and then walked to cool down after hitting the 2 mile mark. My goal was to keep my heart rate under 150 bpm. My pace was 15:09 per mile. The next time was a bit faster at 14:38 pace, but I was cheating a bit more. I kept running too fast and then walking to get the heart rate back down. I think that the pacing yo-yo'ing worked to make faster pacing. As I have since found out that my continuous running pace has to be pretty slow to not break that heart rate threshold. Anyway, evidence shows that I had a budding desire to improve my fitness. 

I have developed some friendships with parents of kids on my daughter's soccer team. At this point I have known some of them for a few years. One of the parents, Rob, did Oregon 70.3 Ironman last year. That was cool, but it did not tempt me. He did another one this year, same event, two weekends ago. It was fun to watch his progress on the Ironman app. Then at the end we were sending texts of congratulations and Bridget, my lovely wife of now 23 years, took my phone and typed to the text group of people that were watching Rob's progress and typed:

 "Rob and Devin will do a full Ironman November 2025. This is Bridget"

I had considered it a little during that day watching Rob's progress, but I just kept thinking about how much training there was back in 2010 and 2011 to get read for it. it seemed a bit stupid and crazy. I thought about how horribly out of shape I had become. I really did not want to go through the trouble of trying just to realize I am too far gone fitness-wise to do something that extreme again. I told Bridget she was writing checks I was not sure I could cover when she committed me to this. 

So I started thinking (maybe obsessing). I had been thinking a lot about buying a new vehicle. I don't think I will now. The old one is not that old and has great fuel mileage. It is not my favorite vehicle but I think I just need to deal with it for a variety of reasons which are not the subject of this post. The point is that thinking about the possibility of doing an Ironman has been very distracting. I think that is a good thing. 

Ok so I ran again last week and upped my mileage to 3 miles and kept the pace even slower, again trying to keep my heart rate from going too high. Here is the data: 

July 25th THPRD run

I was running at the Tualatin Hills Park & Rec District area in Beaverton while Maddie was practicing. If you click on the link above you can see all the details. Slow. But that is totally ok. 

I went on another run last week. Here are those details: 

July 27th THPRD run

And while this run was also slow I felt pretty good. No injuries after 4 runs in 11 days. My opinion of my prospects about starting a training program was improving.

Friday I came home from the office and started going through some of my cycling stuff in the garage. I have not touched my road bike in 2 years. Serious. I basically have 3 bikes right now. Road bike, commuter bike and a cyclocross/gravel bike. I also have a mountain bike but I am selling it. I just don't get out much and it takes too long to go mountain biking. After considerable time I managed to locate necessary cycling gear, take off the stationary trainer tire I had installed on the rear tire of my road bike and install one in good shape road tire I had on a shelf. Here is the bike: 

 

I doubt any of you will have heard of the bike brand, L'Ecu. It is a lovely bike designed and perhaps built by Devin Zoller back in around 2012 or so. More likely it was built to spec in China, but that is ok. I picked this bike up 3 years ago from a nice fellow named Aaron that I know. It is a wonderful bike but I had just a bit of trouble getting the seatmast high enough to fit me. It was too short by about 3-5 mm. The last thing I did with the bike after I last rode it a couple of years ago was buy some used Speedplay pedals which have a lower stack height than the Shimano Dura-Ace pedals I had been using. This means that it increases the distance from the seat to the pedals, which is what I needed. I never even road the bike after putting the pedals on. As it turns out, those few millimeters made all the difference judging by my ride Saturday. 

The L'Ecu Module is a lovely bike. Not so much up-to-date these days, but it does well enough with its SRAM Red 10 speed drivetrain. Wheels are straight and true and the bike feels pretty nimble. It is a nice lightweight ride. But my rear end is not at all in riding condition. Knowing that, and knowing that my body needs to start slow I just went on a short ride Saturday. As it was it still hurt. The details below via the link: 

July 29th road ride

Not an exciting ride. And yesterday my low back was pretty sore. I obviously was not using by back correctly when leveraging it to try and ride up a couple of hills. Because my legs are weak things and I needed to use my low back muscles incorrectly I am guessing. But there was joy in riding. It was good. 

Later in the day we went to the Nike Employee Store. I picked up some running shoes. My current ones are at least 4 years old. 

One pair are is the Nike Zoom Fly 5 (or something like that) and the other is a Gore-Tex Nike shoe that I thought would come in handy when the rains come. The Zooms are super marshmallowy. I wanted to try them out and so I did a little run yesterday, which can be found here: 

July 30th run

 

Another nice slow run. But here the day after, I feel pretty good still. And importantly I feel like I am doing something good. My mental aspect, at least with this part of my life is pretty good. Now if I could just finish off a few of my cases and get paid on them... well life would be grand. But that will come too eventually. 

Ok, so long post, longer than I suspected. But for the first post in 12 years, shorter than it should be perhaps. 

What are my goals? Long term goal is to do an Ironman in 2025. That sounds a bit audacious to type that given my current fitness. But I think if I train reasonably for a year I can get to where I can truly train for the Ironman in 2025 so that in October or November (looking at either the IM California or the IM Arizona) I could compete/participate in the event with the goal to finish. Stretch goal would be to hit the time I had in 2011, which I thought back in 2011 that it could have been better had I not had some digestion issues that made me feel really bloated caused some pain/discomfort in my gut. 

I will want to have some smaller goals for along the way, but I haven't sorted all that out yet. 

Now with the long layoff not everything is the same as it was with fit of my gear. I am wider than I used to be. I really feel weird wearing my Half Fast Velo kits. I am so out of shape. When I rode on Saturday I did not wear the HFV jersey. I just felt like a total poser. I feel like I need some get riding more before and drop some weight I put anything on that has any racing feel to it. Frankly, I need some old fat guy cycling stuff to wear, on the casual side of things not just because of the looks, but so that it is comfortable. 

On the inside I will be pushing myself, but externally, I don't want to feel like people are rolling their eyes at the fat guy in the cycling kit. I should not care what others think I know, but I just don't want the mental baggage. Frankly, having to go out all kitted up in spandex would make me less likely to go out sadly. Maybe I need a therapist or something, but it is what it is and I admit it and own it. 

I hope Bridget knows what she started. And I hope I know what has started and that I keep it going. I really want this right now. I really want to do something big again. This might be a second midlife crisis, but I think it is on the healthy side of things. 

I plan to do regular updates. I think when I did this in the past it helped keep me going.

I don't feel the need to have it all figured out right now. In the end I wanted to post this to hold myself accountable in the future. I don't want to slide back into inactivity. So... let's go!