30 weeks.

The start of this week marked 30 weeks until Ironman Coeur D'Alene. My "official" training plan was not supposed to start until 24 weeks out (Jan 11th) but I simply cannot wait any longer. I miss the pool and the long bike rides. All of the running for the Rocket City Marathon that I have been doing the past three months is really starting to wear on me. So I tacked on 6 weeks to make my "official" plan start this week. I can really take my time now and build slow easy mileage, I think this will pay off in the end and hopefully aid me in avoiding any type of over-use injuries by going to hard to soon. The extra six weeks will essentially be a scaled back carbon copy of the original first 6 weeks that were supposed to start Jan 11th.

Today I got back in the pool for the first time since probably August. The workout was 1,600 meters broken up into 300 warm up, 4 x 50 drill/swim, 6 x 100 @ moderate intensity, 4 x 50 kick, and 300 cool down. I didn't have any trouble finishing the distance but I certainly am not speedy in the pool right now. Later I'm going to give my revamped tri bike a spin for an hour and start working on dialing in the fit so that it's 112 mile worthy.

I'm in taper mode as far as the running goes. Rocket City is in 11 days! I had a good 12 miler yesterday where I was able to run about 15 seconds under my goal pace very comfortably. I've got an 8 miler this weekend with a few shorter runs in between. Here's hoping the five 20+ mile runs I did in Oct/Nov pay off in those last 6 miles. Which I believe it will as long as I don't get rabbit feet. I'm certainly more mentally read for Rocket City than I was for the Philadelphia Marathon last year. I did 4 out of 5 of those long runs solo, and the last two were 21 and 22 miles respectively for good measure.