After days of sleeping in, overeating, and overdrinking, the real training has begun.  Day One of Week One of 18 weeks to my Half-Iron competition.  Today was a simple 3-mile jog to loosen up, elevate my heart rate, clear out the holiday mush.  The weather in Middle Tennessee has been dreary –  rainy and cold – so running on the farm was out of the question.  I took the lazy way out and just took off down the driveway for 18 minutes, then turned around and ran back.  It was cold, rainy, boring, and I loved every step.

There is real pleasure in running for fun, for health, for the sheer joy of feeling your feet pounding the ground, hearing your breathing, watching the sights roll by.  But there is equal pleasure in training to a goal, a race, an event.  We eventers relish the writing out of the training schedule, the backwards calculating from Race Day, through the taper, past the longest runs/rides/swims, counting the weeks back to Week 1, Day 1.  Which brings us back to today.

I’ll try to blog on training days from now til the big race…1 day each devoted to swimming, cycling, running, then one day a week the Brick:  triathlon lingo for a dual event training session.  Biking/running or swimming/biking since that’s the sequence in the actual race.  Add to that two days each week of strength training and that makes up the full training schedule…18 weeks to the 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride, and 13.1 mile run that is the Gulf Coast Triathlon in Panama City Beach on May 9.

Thanks for reading.