Bullet Points within Bullet Points

Bye Bye August, you Bitch!

• This has been my seventh summer living in the Houston area and it has been by far the most miserable summer yet.  Look at the normal temperatures in the image above and you'll notice we average about 10 degrees more than normal each and every day. The worst part isn't even the 100 degree temps, it is the humidity, which has been even more brutal than the heat.  The term "Dog Days of Summer" held some real meaning to us Texans this summer.

• Annie and I are a mere 8 days away until we board a plane and head North to Rev3 Cedar Point. We are going to make a short stop in Pittsburgh and see my family and then drive out to Sandusky on Friday morning. My family is going to come out to Sandusky for the race too! And we are both excited to meet up with all of our blogger buddies and Trakkers Teammates, but we are ecstatic about spending time in temperatures that are supposed to be about 30 degrees cooler. It is going to be so awesome to be able to breathe normally while running and biking!

• My training for the Half Rev is quite different right now.  For the month of August I only biked 90mi and only pushed about 10K meters in the pool.  This are lame numbers for racing a sprint!  But the reason for the lack of swim and bike time is that I was able to drop 150mi running. My run fitness right now is superb! Swim and Bike fitness, not so much!

• Based on my training it is pretty apparent that Cedar Point is not going to be a PR type of race. The race mantra is: Float the swim, Coast the bike, and Hammer the run.  Got that?  FLOAT, COAST, HAMMER!!!  

• Why have I backed off on the swim and bike?   Three reasons: 
• (1) After the heavy volume from the end of last year and then the heavy workload from Ironman training in the first half of this year I am burned out. Looking back over my training logs I had gone about 2 straight years without any significant rest. Much like Government spending, this was unsustainable and a decrease in volume was needed or I was going to break down. 
• (2) I am doing a 50k Trail Run on November 5th and my first stand alone marathon on March 3rd. I really want to race both of these and in order to do that I needed to become a runner. 
• (3) Training for Ironman Mont-Tremblant is scheduled to begin the second week of March. One of the things learned about myself is that swim and bike fitness seem to come back much faster than run fitness. So the plan is to have an extremely solid running base going into IM training. 60+ miles per week for four months should accomplish this goal!

I hope everyone has an awesome long weekend!

Thanks for Reading,

Jeff