123 Days Until Race Day

At week five of my training. Swam 40 laps today and jogged/walked for 25 minutes. Not too bad. The swimming is a piece of cake. The jogging? Not so much.

But before I get ahead of myself, welcome everyone. I had this "brilliant" idea of starting a blog to record my journey from never running longer than 35 minutes to swimming/biking/running for approximately two hours.

Why do a triathlon everyone asks? I want to push myself. Physically & mentally. I want to lose weight. I want to do something I said a very long time ago I'd "never" do.

When I was a kid, my family would vacation in Lake Placid, NY at my family's cabin. For some period of time, our vacations would coincide with the Lake Placid Ironman Triathlon. It was a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride and a 26.2 mile run. We'd watch the start of the race at the lake in town, watch the bikers make their way through the mountain course (part of the bike course went past the end of our street) and watch the finishers as they made their way back into town.

Now an Ironman is an insane distance and requires a ton of work. But I remember thinking, I could never do a triathlon. Even when I was swimming miles a day and in the best shape of my life (thank you professional high school swimming) I never even thought about it.

Fast forward to the end of 2008. At almost 24 years of age I had this ridiculous thought. I want to do a triathlon. So I googled ones around NYC and found one in Central Park. A couple months later I went to sign up and it was sold out. So I "officially" signed up for a race on August 16, 2009 at Harriman State Park in NY. It's a 1/2 mile swim, 16 mile bike ride and a 3 mile run. It's a huge distance for me at this point and I'm half scared/half excited. I've been following a 22 week training program that has me in the gym 6 days a week. So far, the gym part hasn't been the problem, it's the bad eating habits that I've picked up throughout the years. But hopefully through this process I'll find a way to make it through, learn to cook and eat healthy and work to finish the triathlon.

At this point, my only hope is to cross the finish line before the race ends. I could be the last person and I wouldn't care. It will just be amazing to finish.

So anyways, back to the blog. Here, expect to see training updates, physical and mental updates, random thoughts of mine and anecdotes about my life and what's going on besides the triathlon. I'm really looking forward to this journey and seeing where I'll end up in August. It's going to be one hell of a ride.