Giving it one more try!

Message to my FaceBook family:

Okay for those of you who normally follow my antics on FaceBook, I apologize to have to do this to you. I know you’re devastated. As I mentioned in my last status update, I am taking a ‘vacation’ or ‘sabbatical’ from FaceBook until the New Year. I am going to concentrate on preparing for this race in Napa. I’ve given myself one last shot at qualifying for Boston, so need to make it count and hopefully some of you can come out to on March 7^th to support me on race day.

That’s not to say I won’t be communicating with any of you. My weekly blog will automatically feed to FaceBook as a “Note” without me logging on. FaceBook mobile has been disabled and I have turned off all notifications, so you can still send me messages or wallposts if you want, I just won’t know you have. However, I’d still love to hear from you and you can contact me directly, my information is located in “Info” tab on my FB profile. So no more ‘hourly’ status updates from me, no more pictures of food and no more videos until January.

I am qualifying for Boston in March!

…No Distractions, So No Excuses!

Day One:

Today marks the first day of my 7th quest for Boston. Actually I started a few days ago, doing some light running, to get ready for the San Jose Rock-n-Roll Half Marathon on Sunday.

For the next 3-months I am going to be concentrating in these three areas:

1) Overall fitness (back to my ’04-’06 form)

2) Flexibility

3) Speed, Speed and more speed

Overall fitness:

A few years ago I would have to say was when I was in my best shape. I was seeing a personal trainer regularly, working on core, strength and stability. I was getting a personal best in almost every race I ran. However over the last couple of years I stopped seeing a personal trainer and although I was still running well, I was never at the same level of fitness I was back then. I was just a real fast fat guy!

This time I decided to give CrossFit a try. A good friend of mine introduced me to it several months ago and I took my first class last week to check it out. It was more of an introductory class, but it still kicked my ass. Despite how wiped out I was, I am going to stick with it and hopefully it will pay off in the end.

Flexibility:

One of the biggest issues for me has always been cramping on the last few miles of the marathon. Although I have improved in this area quite a bit since my earlier days of running marathons, I still haven’t run a complete marathon without experiencing some level of cramping that didn’t ruin my race.

This go around I am going to be placing a bigger emphasis on flexibility. I’ve always been pretty good stretching, hydrating and paying regular visits to the massage therapist, but I’ve decided I would take some yoga classes. I haven’t really decided on which one yet, maybe some of you have suggestions. There is Power Yoga, Bikram and this one yoga class I heard about a few years ago called, “Stiff Guys Yoga” in Willow Glenn. In any event, I need to do this.

Speed, speed and more speed:

Alright I don’t care what anyone says. Training for an Ironman does not make you faster! It makes you slower! One of the things I kept hearing from some of my friends that join the Team in Training IronTeam before I did in 2007, was that if I was planning to race a marathon afterwards, be prepared to be slow. After my first Ironman last year, I noticed quite a bit of a drop off in my running. My endurance was still there, but I had no speed.

For these first few months I will be trying to build a base of about 25-30 miles a week, before I start putting on the big miles in January. The emphasis will be mainly be on speed, ‘tempo runs’ and ‘track workouts’, with some trail running up at Rancho San Antonio on occasion. I have a few races in between that I will use as markers to track my progress. The races that I have signed up for are the San Jose Rock-n-Roll Half Marathon, The Big Sur Half and the Kaiser Half. The San Jose race will be used to see where I stand at this point, as well as Big Sur. By the time I get to the Kaiser Half-Marathon in Feb, I hope to be running my half-marathons comfortably under 1:30. There will probably be some 10Ks here and there, but for the most part I’ll be halfs.

Other Stuff:

As many of you know, I really like producing videos. So in between all this training I’ll be working on some side projects as part of an online course that I’m taking on video editing. I will post some of my projects on occasion. I might even ask some of you to be subjects.

Well that’s it for now. I’ll post something probably Sunday, after the Rock-n-Roll Half to let you know how things went and will update this blog weekly thereafter.

~Jerald