Week 3 of training complete! (Well, technically I guess it’s week 2.5 since I started with a half week.)

This week kept building up the length of my workouts and ended at 6.5 hours of training.  My coach had targeted 6:45, but it turns out my swimming is a little quicker than she anticipated which allowed my to shave off those extra 15 minutes. For those who are interested in my workouts here’s a quick snapshot:

I’m proud that I got through all of these without any issue, but my body is definitely feeling it!  My IT Band and my hip flexors are definitely tight which meant that I got to spend a bit of quality time with my trigger point rollers yesterday and today.  I need to be better about using them, and I’m going to try to make an effort to focus on that for at least 15-20 minutes each night when I’m watching TV… which I am currently addicted to… thank you Netflix for bringing Breaking Bad into my life. I know I’m late to the party on this series, but it’s seriously addictive once you get into it and I find myself needed to regulate how many episodes I can watch.

Ok, so moving on from all the training stuff, since I’m sure not everyone is as excited as I am about it… some other cool things that happened this week:

I received my team in training shirt for my 100 mile bike ride! I’m so excited to take on this challenge and to do it for a good cause. I will be posting more about this soon, but until then, if you’re interested in learning more – hop on over to my Tour de Cure page. Also, if you would consider donating, I would really appreciate it!

Speaking of shirts…. I found this amazing shirt at Cyclology Clothing and couldn’t resist! (Plus the exchange rate between Australia and the US played in my favor…). My favorite line of the shirt: “this athlete fueled by bananas and coffee” <— Pretty accurate.

Bronco was up to more antics this week. I gave him a huge rawhide bone early in the week, but he chose not to actually chew it. Rather he brought it to the top landing of the stairs and played “keeper of the stairs” for about 3 days where he would not let Roxie pass out of fear that she would steal his bone. The crazy pup even slept out on the stairs at night to keep guard. Luckily on Friday he finally dug into the bone and this game has ended… however, even though I felt bad for Roxie as I had to help her up and down the stairs to get past Bronco for 3 days, it was pretty entertaining to see him react this way to having a big treat. Guess he just wanted to savor it.

Most of the week we had quite the warm up here in CNY, 40 degree temps and lots of walks with the pups mixed in with all the training, but alas, Friday brought in a snowstorm overnight and Saturday we woke up to a few inches of snow.  After shoveling, the pups and I headed to Green Lakes for a snowy hike.  Along the trail, I found the tree below. Talk about a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree, it was the most beautiful tree I saw this year… unexpected little bit of happiness for everyone to enjoy!

I saw this floating around the internet this week – and I’m a bad blogger since I did not remember to mark the source, but I thought this was a good little reminder. Maybe the answer isn’t running for everyone (although I swear it really does feel good once you get in the groove and used to running… well most of the time…), but we should all really worry less. Worry = Stress, and worrying over things never helps or solves any problems.

Finally, I hope to be back to more routine blogging again, but I’m not going to be pressuring myself to do so, more of when I feel like it! I hope you enjoy following along.  Best wishes for a fantastic week to each and every one of you!