Road to the Iron Man

EJG had emergency brain surgery last night - as opposed to elective brain surgery, I guess. I’m not ready to write about that yet, maybe tomorrow. Sometimes, real life isn’t fun. MJ is guest posting about it here. Instead I’m going to whine and complain about how hard it is to run in the Florida heat – again. I’m going to finish my first triathlon before I’m forty and the training started last week. I’m trying to do this right. I swam this morning, which is insanely hard because my technique is horrible, but I can already tell I’m getting better at it. After the swim, I ran for an hour. It was 92 degrees, even though it was ten o’clock in the morning, and I was really having difficulty keeping my heart rate under 150. That’s the new goal. I need to control my heart rate. That’s how endurance athletes endure. Everything was going fine. I even set my watch to only show my heart rate. Unfortunately, I was listening to my iPod and a really cool song came on. I sped up without even knowing it and by the time the song was over my heart rate was over 170. My fat ass can’t dissipate that kind of heat in this kind of weather, and even though I was feeling good, I slowed down, ultimately to a walk, so my heart rate would drop. It took almost fifteen minutes to get back into the 120’s. A lot of that had to do with some hills. I had a real problem walking when I wasn’t tired, but everything I read says my approach of pushing it only leads to injury. I didn’t fuel or hydrate correctly either, which frustrated me when I started to cramp a little bit near the end of my run. Doing dumb stuff because I’m dumb is fun, but I hate doing dumb stuff because I’m lazy. Changing training philosophies after more than twenty years is tough, but I swam 500 yards and ran almost six miles in the sweltering heat, and the only downside was a little dehydration, which can easily be corrected. I’m on my way to being Tony Stark. He’s Iron Man for those who don’t know.