Supposed to be a tempo run with 1 milewarm up, 3 miles at 11:40, 1 mile cool down. Still lots of ice mountains and GINORMOUS puddles to dodge, so slowed me up a bit. On a positive note, I changed the battery in my heart rate strap and guess what? It works again. Imagine that..... (PS - even though I was slower than crap, it was AWESOME to run outside again!!!!! SPRING IS COMING!!!!!!!) Activity Route: -- Elev. Avg: 862 ft Location: Rock, WI Elev. Gain: -23 ft Date: 03/12/08 Up/Downhill: [+219/-242] Time: 04:48 PM Difficulty: 2.6 / 5.0   Weather: Mostly Cloudy   43 F temp; 64% humidity   43 F heat index; winds SE 14 G 23 Performance Distance: 5.71 miles Time: 1:11:15 Speed: 4.8 mph Pace: 12' 29 /mi Heart Rate: 174 bpm (Avg) Calories: 732 190 bpm (Peak) Map   Elevation (ft)   Pace (min/mile)   Heart Rate (bpm)   Heart Rate Zones Zone Range (bpm) Time In Zone Distance In Zone Zone 5 167 - 185 0h 58m 81%  4.98 mi Zone 4 148 - 167 0h 13m 18%  0.97 mi Zone 3 130 - 148 0h 01m 2%  0.08 mi Zone 2 111 - 130 0h 00m 0%  0.01 mi Zone 1 93 - 111 0h 00m 0%  0.00 mi (none) out of range 0h 03m 4%  0.25 mi Splits Mile Pace (min/mile) Speed (mph) Heart Rate Elev Gain actual +/- avg actual +/- avg 1 12' 04 -0' 25 5.0 +0.2 167 -32 ft 2 12' 44 +0' 15 4.7 -0.1 173 -33 ft 3 11' 40 -0' 49 5.1 +0.3 174 -14 ft 4 10' 13 -2' 16 5.9 +1.1 171 -6 ft 5 13' 06 +0' 37 4.6 -0.2 173 +17 ft 6 12' 37 +0' 08 4.8 -0.1 182 +72 ft end 12' 07 -0' 22 5.0 +0.1 184 -26 ft Versus average of 12' 29 min/mile

Posted from bimactive.com

One for my Sisters (Real or Spiritual, Don't be Shy!)

Take the Quiz.
The Princess Bride Personality Test

Yeah, I was Buttercup. you wish you were me.

Caution: Bike Porn

Well, we took a trip to Bike-O-Rama tonight at the Alliant Energy Center tonight.


I had to touch a lot of pretty bikes, there were hundreds to choose from. Remember the Orbea Diva that Di and I drooled over at the Chicago Accenture Tri? Here I am petting her again. God she's beautiful!







Here is a cool one with a lightning paint job. That's totally hot.















How about this paint job? What Spiderman fan wouldn't want this bike????














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How do you think she looks in my kitchen? I am going to have to ride this bike for the rest of my life, but at least it will be fun.

Snowshoeing: part Deux

Well my ACTUAL snowshoes arrived today while I was at work. Mike and I took a turn around the cornfields across the street for an hour checking them out.

Mine are quite cute, much smaller, more difficult to secure, much less flipitty-floppity, in short they are LADIES snowshoes....... you know all dainty and shit just like their owner.

Oh yeah.... and the little "feather" shape of the back of my RedFeather Pace snowshoes is PERFECT for flinging craploads of ice at my back and head. And I mean lots of big ice chunks.

Mike posted my video on his post and you can see the ice flying in action. It's really quite cool except when it pelts me in the back of the head. I would post it myself but it seems pointless to post the same dang thing as he did. So go check it out. It's OK, I'll wait right here.

Done laughing yet? Good.

So the snow went through a major metamorphosis since I took my solo mission in Mike's shoes on Friday. We had a lot of melting so we lost melting, then on top of that we had rain, then a little more snow, then a little more melt. It made the snow really thick, almost plated, and crispy. I think that's why the snow chunks kept flying around me.

I do think I like Mike's snowshoes better, but I will keep my own since that's what I chose! (Anyway, I'm not sure I am comparing apples to apples anyhow since the two trips were on much different snow conditions)

Tagged by Steve

So Steve tagged us and I need to share 7 random facts about me. I'm not what I have shared before but here goes.
My 7 random facts:
1) I am an educational perfectionist. I graduated 7th (of 313) in my HS class without hardly cracking a book open, just doing my homework. In college (at least in nursing school and at Ball State for my BSN), anything less than 100% was unacceptable. I had a 4.0 GPA at both places. Bordered on neurotic I know.
2) Prior to starting the VLCD diet and returning to regular food, the only vegetables I would eat were corn (I know - technically not a veggie), and lettuce (iceberg, please), and raw carrots or raw cauliflower. Now, I try something new all the time. I practically live on onion, peppers, squash, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, and a ton of others. Who knew I was missing so many good things?? I learned the trick is to cook things only to the point of getting warm. If you cook them til they are a mushy mess, it still makes me gag just like I when I was a kid.
3) When I was little, I had an imaginary friend that kept me company in the bathroom. I don't remember her name anymore, but I do recall she was just a couple inches tall and fit in my pocket when I wasn't in the bathroom.
4) Also when I was a kid, I was convinced that I was adopted (I wasn't) for the sole purpose of doing chores. I envisioned that my little sisters were midgets that zipped out of their "kid" suits at night after I went to bed. What's funny now is I don't remember being asked to do any super huge amount of chores around the house.
5) It was very important to get to the bathroom right after each meal growing up. There were 2 bathrooms and 3 sisters. First 2 to the bathroom sat there until it was certain that the third one was finished clearing the table and loading the dishwasher. I don't think we ever did much more in there but read People magazine until the coast was clear.
6) There is nothing on earth I like more than watching kids play sports. With nothing on the line but pride, all you see is heart. When you start getting into the college and pro level, it becomes less about the love of the game and more about what the game can do for you to get ahead. Unless, of course, my boy makes the NFL - then I might change my mind.
7) I am taking a stab at writing a book about our experience. It comes in fits and starts and random thoughts jotted on scraps of paper. I have no idea if I will even finish it, but writing it is kind of cathartic.

I have no idea who I have or haven't tagged in the past, so if you want to be tagged next you're it.

BIM Active log entry

Here is my first try at publishing from some new training software. bear with me. BTW if anyone has any idea how to get my HR strap to capture my HR better, I am open to ideas. I am pretty sure I didn't run a avg HR of 69 for real. 169 - maybe....... 69 no way. Activity Route: -- Elev. Avg: 853 ft Location: Rock, WI Elev. Gain: -20 ft Date: 03/02/08 Up/Downhill: [+311/-331] Time: 10:12 AM Difficulty: 2.8 / 5.0 Weather: Partly Cloudy 46 F temp; 70% humidity 46 F heat index; winds S 17 G 25 Performance Distance: 6.61 miles Time: 1:26:22 Speed: 4.6 mph Pace: 13' 04 /mi Heart Rate: 72 bpm (Avg) Calories: 797 125 bpm (Peak) Notes Very slushy and Messy, lots of ice to navigate and big puddles, salt and sand messies. Slow avg pace - mostly due to need to slow down to navigate all of the above. Stop at hospital to lose some clothes (dressed too warm!) and refill water bottle. Map Elevation (ft) Pace (min/mile) Heart Rate (bpm) Heart Rate Zones Zone Range (bpm) Time In Zone Distance In Zone Zone 5 167 - 185 0h 00m 0% 0.00 mi Zone 4 148 - 167 0h 00m 0% 0.00 mi Zone 3 130 - 148 0h 00m 0% 0.00 mi Zone 2 111 - 130 0h 06m 7% 0.23 mi Zone 1 93 - 111 0h 05m 5% 0.35 mi (none) out of range 1h 25m 98% 7.31 mi Splits Mile Pace (min/mile) Speed (mph) Heart Rate Elev Gain actual +/- avg actual +/- avg 1 12' 49 -0' 15 4.7 +0.1 90 -56 ft 2 12' 07 -0' 57 5.0 +0.4 71 -13 ft 3 13' 18 +0' 14 4.5 -0.1 57 -7 ft 4 20' 12 +7' 08 3.0 -1.6 61 -13 ft 5 1' 21 -11' 43 44.2 +39.7 73 0 ft 6 13' 47 +0' 43 4.3 -0.2 70 -4 ft 7 12' 30 -0' 34 4.8 +0.2 79 +30 ft end 11' 25 -1' 39 5.2 +0.7 74 +42 ft Versus average of 13' 04 min/mile

Posted from bimactive.com

Stupid Cross-Training Tricks: Snowshoeing Edition

Today was a day off for me, a well deserved day of rest and relaxation after several 70+ hour weeks, including last week which ended in a double shift when I was trying to leave early to take back some hours (I am salaried, so if I work over 40, it's my treat. When this happens I try to flex my hours down the next week to even things out... sometimes it works, more often than not I get the weenie.)

Anyhoo.....

I got up this morning after sleeping in til about 8:30. Did some yoga - I need to spend some time on the core again. It worked..... I can feel all of my stomach muscles tonight while just sitting around, which tells me tomorrow they will be good and sore.

After the kids left after lunch, I got ready to do some snowshoeing. Mike's new snowshoes arrived yesterday, but for whatever reason mine got rerouted and hung up in Utah UPS limbo and were rescheduled for delivery on Monday (*sigh*). I decided to give Mikey's snowshoes a try and took off across the cornfields around my house. I learned a lot today, mostly the hard way. Here are a few of the myths I dispelled:

1) I should have no problem running in snowshoes. After all I run all the time!

I had envisioned strapping them on a taking off jogging across the top of the snow, kinda like a gazelle. Um yeah.... about that....

I took off down a gentle downward slope at a little jogging pace. The snowshoes have kind of a flip flop action and before I knew it I was catching my toe on the snow which stops the foot's forward motion and pitches you face first into the snow. But I'm sure I looked graceful as I flung forward full force. Also, when you jog in the snow you sink into it on the downstroke more than walking so each stride felt kind of like a high skipping/striders drill. And it made my heart rate skyrocket. It didn't take me long to change my pace to a really brisk gliding walk.

At one point, I got the back part of the flip-flop hung up in the snow and when I picked up my foot, I flung a huge snowball down back of my pants .... while still standing upright. Quite a feat! There is nothing like a snowball rolling down the crack of your ass to get your attention. Lot of opportunities to laugh at myself today.... I guess the first order of business is to work on technique!

2) I won't need anything to drink!

I was out there running around for more than an hour. I was really thirsty! After a while it dawned on me I was running around is fresh powder undisturbed by anything for miles around. None if it was yellow. I ended up keeping a pristine white snowball in my hand and eating it like a snowcone the rest of the way home. That worked great! I haven't eaten snow like that since I was a kid, so really kind of fun.

3) Patches of burrs are dormant in the winter, so it's not a problem to go trucking through a patch.

At one point, I was coming down into a gully full of brush. Now I know that in the summer I stay away from that kind of stuff because they are full of briars, burrs, and other prickery stuff. But in my mind as I headed into the thick of it, it was winter so all the picky stuff and and burrs had fallen off these plants, like leaves from the trees in the fall.

I ended up spending 10 minutes picking big wads of burrs off my mittens, jacket, wind pants, and out of my hair when I got through the brush patch. That was just the big chunks - I spent another hour at home picking off the little pieces. Just so ya know.... burrs stay on the stem ALL.YEAR.LONG. My little public service announcement. You are VERY welcome!

4) Snowshoes will keep me floating over the top of the snow... I couldn't sink!

So when snow blows around, it pulls the depth off the high point of hills and into the low areas, so everything looks to be about the same rolling elevation. I did great on the hill crests. In the gullies, I had to be sure to keep moving or I started sinking. I had a fair amount of float going, but it certainly doesn't keep you from sinking into the drift a little bit I'm sure if I took the snowshoes off and tried to walk through the gully, I would have been up to my hips, but I still was sinking up past my ankles in several spots.

5) It's winter, the critters are all hibernating.

We had a fresh dusting of powder overnight, so for the most part the fields were pretty much untouched looking. There were several paths of critter prints I found along the way. For a while I was interested and followed alongside their paths. For a while, there was a red-tailed hawk circling over the top of me in a full-on vulture like mode. I imagined it was waiting to swoop in and peck my eyes out when I keeled over. In reality, I think it just thought I was probably disturbing the hiding spots of field mice and other critters and was just waiting for an opportunity to find an early dinner. The further I got into the fields and woods, the bigger and more numerous the footprints got. It was kind of cool for while. Then I ran across a ginormous raccoon that hissed at me for a while from up in a tree. Tough to turn around and put your back to the grouchy little guy to retreat......

A while later I walked through what looked like dog tracks. A lot of them. Like the place where a pack of canine type things had hung out for a while. I got to thinking and realizing that they had to be pretty fresh tracks, I hightailed it out of there. There have been rumors of coyotes around there and I have personally seen a couple of foxes running into those woods. I really didn't want to meet a bunch of them face to face.

So there you have it, my first snowshoe foray. Overall it was pretty fun and something different to do. It was a lot tougher than I thought it would be, but I assume it will only get easier with practice.

Anybody have any tips for my next trip?

You Can Thank Me Later

Well peeps, I have done it. Winter should be over Thursday by about noon. I am talking about no more snow, the big thaw, birds chirping, flowers springing forth from the ground, grass growing, the buzz of lawnmowers...... basically the whole nine yards of the arrival of spring.

You are probably wondering what exactly will bring about this big turn of events. The answer to that is simple. We decided to spend some of our tax refund. What did we buy? I bought SNOWSHOES and SNOWBOOTS, not just for me but for Mike too. The UPS tracking numbers have them arriving on 2/28, so my best guess is that Spring will arrive right about the same time. Once we decided to make lemons from lemonade and found something fun to do in the all this snow, it should all melt and we will never see it again.

See, this year we all did our part to bring about a snowfall that broke the record yesterday for most snowfall in a season with more than 70 inches so far. For our part, we traded in not just one but TWO 4WD SUVs for two tiny Toyota clown cars. Much easier on the wallet at the pump, but definitely put the wintry fix on us.

By my best estimate, once our little packages arrive we should have seen our last snowflake for at least the season, if not for several years. We once bought a roof rake (for raking snow off your roof and preventing ice dams for all you Southern folks wondering what I'm talking about.....). I didn't even take it out of the box and it hardly snowed for the next 5 or 6 years.

You can all thank me later. I knew you'd appreciate it!

Todays Update (SSDD)

Today I was off for the rest of my "weekend" after working and extra shift and a half Saturday night. I slept in, then got on the spinner to watch a movie for 2 hours. The flick was "A Love Song for Bobby Long" with John travolta and Scarlett Johanssen - not a bad film and definitely not the sappy love story I was thinking I was going to watch. When it came in the mail, Mike tossed it at me and said "It says love song in the title, I don't want to watch it." :-)

Other random bits:
- Today I watched a truly inspirational bit of video, an excerpt from Oprah. It was a lecture given by a man named Randy Pausch, a university professor with terminal pancreatic cancer. He delivered a speech to his class that was his "If you were going to die tomorrow, what would your last lecture be" lecture. He reprised it for the Oprah show, and it was incredibly inspirational. You can see it yourself here. Do it - it will change the way you look at life.

- Team EvoTri is taking nominations for the group of regular traithletes that do great things for thier community. These folks will get a year of sponsorship and coaching as recognition for the great things they do every day. One of the top 10 applicants is someone I know. Michelle Alswager is someone I went to high school with. She was a lot of fun way back in the day. These days she is a major fundraiser for JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) in Middleton, a cuase near and dear to her as her son Jesse is a diabetic. last year we took part in the first annual Rock N Roll Rookie Run 10K in Middleton which she organized. It was one of the most fun events I've done ever. Oh yeah- she's an Ironman too, doing it again this year I think at Wisconsin. Submit your vote for her to receive sponsorship this year by emailing vote@evotri.com with "Michelle Alswager" in the title of the email. Good luck Michelle!

I Tell Myself the Burn is a Good Thing

I won't hold y'all in suspense - I did not blow off my weekly long run for the first time since Christmas. Mike and I did 2 hours of running at YMCA indoor track at 15 laps per mile. My footpod read 8.6 miles, but it felt like 86, so we called it at 2 hours. We got to see 4 PeeWee basketball games from the track in addition to listening to lots of tunes on the ipod.

I have been using the footpod I ordered for my Forerunner. It has 3 places to attach it to your shoe and up until this point, I only had it fastened at 2 points which i thought was fine and made it easier to switch between shoes. I have been feeling pretty fast lately, but after Mondays run it was giving me 9:30 pace miles and I knew I was not going that fast. So I made a few adjustments, attached the pod with zip ties nice and snug, and Voila! I am once again back to 12 something miles. Bummer. had I left well enough alone it probably would have told me I ripped out 9 minute miles and covered many more miles that I did on that Saturday run.

Today my body is punishing me for blowing off 8 long runs. My quads are killing me. It of course did not help that I had to cover yet another NOC shift (it really blows to be the boss lady these days) last night so my post-run recovery nurtition was off and I have had only a little bit of sleep so the muscles have not had much of a chance to recover properly. And they are letting me know it. All. Day. Long.

Repeat after me: Pain is weakness leaving the body.

Yeah, I'm not sure I buy it either, but whatever gets you through the day.