Confessions Of A Flabby Ironman

Posts from the road… June 30, 2002

Well, at the very least, I know that my computer is working as I ride along in the back of Ang’s Parents minivan. We managed to get on the road about 9:00 this morning and things never seem to go off without a hitch. Ang had to run home after she left so that she could get her Health Insurance card and then when she got to my house we realized there was no way in God’s good heaven that we were going to get my road bike into the car. Strike one against being able to go about a regular training week this week.

I had no conceptions of everything going off without a hitch workout wise since I’m going to be in the middle of Illinois corn country camping out with 40,000 other people, but I was hoping to get some miles in on my bike now that it’s back from the shop.

I’m still not too sad about bagging the quintuple century ride. I think I hit a little spot of overtraining. I kind of lost the short term desire to do longdistance stuff. I think next season I’ll focus almost predominantly on long-distance stuff. Maybe I’ll even get a Randonneur (Randonnay) thing going with the Twin Cities Bike Club. It’s a long distance type thing where you go through a circuit of Kilometer rides… in order to ride Paris-Brest-Paris or Boston-Montreal-Boston, you need to do a 200,400,800,1000,1200 km set of rides. Boston-Montreal-Boston is this year and it won’t be for another 4 years? So I’ll have time to be able to set my sites on that possibly.

Before that though, I need to focus on Ironman Madison. Not bringing my bike could be a good thing because it will allow me to focus on running and swimming this week which are probably what I need to be focusing on anyway. The bike is the given in the race for me. Albeit, I want to still train to make a decent split on the 112, but if I’m riding it and not necessarily racing it, I know that I can do 112. It’s the 2.5 and the 26.2 that boggle me a little bit and so I’ll focus on that this week. There’s a lake on the Cornerstone farm that I hope I’ll be able to swim in. I know there’s a swim area, but I don’t know how they feel about people that decide to swim the lake… maybe if I do it early or late.

There’s a little film festival going on at Cornerstone this year, and one of the things that they’re going to be doing is a “Make Your own Film at Cornerstone” thing. I don’t have a digital camera with me so what I think I’m going to do is this… I have my minidisk recorder and digital camera, so what I think I’ll do is to create a Cornerstone cartoon. I’ll tape all my audio there and cut together something like Waking Life. I think it could be an interesting experiment.

Anyway, that’s all from the road for the moment. We stopped at Wendy’s for lunch and I didn’t eat healthily at all. It’s going to be hard nutritionally this week. I brought a bunch of applesauce and granola bars for breakfast so that should be fine, but it’s the rest of the day that I’m a little more concerned about. We’ll see how it goes.

To all the ships that sailed the sea
Brian