Getting it on paper...

I suppose this could be a a True Confessions Tuesday post, in that I'm planning out the rest of my year (goals and workout focus-wise) so that others know my plan and can hold me accountable.  :)

I have officially, mentally committed to running the Wine Vine Run half-marathon on Nov 13th.  This will be my fourth race of the year.  :)  I am hoping to PR this race, and given that my first and only other half-mary was at elevation and I feel like I am in much better running shape now than I was then, I'm thinking this is a good possibility.  Dare I say I'm hoping to break that 2:00 barrier?  I don't know, but its a secondary goal to PR-ing it.

After the Wine Vine Run I will be switching gears and begin to focus more on my cycling and let running take a back seat.  I say this with kind of a heavy heart because I so do love running, and love running in the cold and rain, and sometimes snow even more, but I need to work on being a stronger cyclist.  I can still run 1-3 days a week and enjoy all the things I love about running in the winter.  Here is the real problem with switching gears to cycling mid-November.. I am the biggest fair-weather cyclist there ever was.  I love to complain about it being too cold/windy/wet/cloudy/etc on rides.  So I'm also hoping to overcome this whiny part of myself.  Learn to love like it, or maybe even just tolerate it.  And pick up and extra 1-2 mph along the way.  I have planned my first tri of 2012 for early March, so sometime around the beginning of the year I will also get back into the pool and re-build what I'm sure I've lost there.  That will probably be when I drop the weight training that I have begun doing, it will just be too difficult to fit it all in.

Here is where I'd really love an idea of two... I would really love to find a hoodie that says the following:

On the front - Winter Cycle Training
On the back - Whine less, pedal more.

Anyone have any ideas on where I could find something like this, or have something like this made at a reasonable cost?  Any ideas would be great.

So there are the next 3+ months in a general idea.  Just hold me to it, m'kay? :)

Here we go again...

I'm on the weight loss bandwagon, again (kinda).

I struggle with this because the truth is, I want to lose weight not for vanity reasons like I have in the past, but to be a better triathlete.

That's the honest truth.

No really.

Ok, so maybe a little bit for vanity reasons, but for the most part, I'm pretty happy with how I'm looking these days.

But when I read that you can speed up something like 6 sec per pound lost per mile on a run... Ummm, yeah, sign me up.  If I lost the 6 lbs I'd *like* to lose, I'd roughly be 36 secs faster per mile just because of the weight I lost.  That's over 6 minutes off my half-marathon time. 6 MINUTES. 

But the reality of losing weight, cutting calories, counting calories (which I nearly refuse to do!).... I just don't know that I have it in me.  And then my dear friend April reminded me that there is a possibility that I could eat too few calories for all the workouts I'm doing, which is the LAST thing I want to do (over-training is ugly, and I don't want to go back there).

So I really don't know.

I'm started a weight lifting routine.  I've got 6 weeks mapped out for me by a trainer I paid for years ago and then never really used.  Its not what one would call "triathlon" or "running" specific, but I figure with my lack of weight training anything would be helpful at this point.

So for now I'm trying to be mindful of what I eat.  More whole foods, less processed stuff.  I indulge from time to time... and I don't think at this point I'm ready or willing to give that up.

But all in all, I'm pretty on the fence about this whole weight-loss thing.