Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This past week has been a great workout week. While the base pool has been closed this whole week and until the new year we have made up by doing a lot of biking and running. Once the pool opens up next week we'll get back to swimming and try to make up for some lost time. The trainers we set up downstairs in our basement have really paid off. Now with the weather constantly cold, snowy, or icy outside it's been great to get on the bike inside and keep up our bike fitness. We've been watching a lot of movies or Seinfeld while biking for up to two hours. Our bums are finally getting a little more accustomed to sitting on the bike seat for over an hour...slowly but surely we'll get more and more comfortable with it so that the 6 hour Ironman bike portion won't be nearly as painful.
We've also been doing a lot of running outside. We usually run near our house and back behind where there's a few farms and there's not as much traffic. It's really been beautiful running, cold and icy though but great scenery with all the snow. Most of the runs we run together, Craig will sometimes run ahead a bit and then come back for me (I'm a bit slower but this way we can still run together for the most part). We'll try and get a few pictures outside next time we run, we hope everyone had a great Christmas and you have a wonderful New Years.

Merry Christmas (from Alaska and Spokane)

Merry Christmas! We started out this past week in Alaska, it was freezing cold! We were supposed to be up there for just over two weeks; however, we ended up back here in Spokane after spending only three days in Alaska and now we're on alert to go back at anytime. Alaska was so cold, luckily the gym on base was open 24 hours a day (with the exception of an cold weather day one evening when it dropped to -40 degrees....as if the -38 the day prior wasn't cold enough!).
We had a great start while we were there on our training, we had just gotten to working out twice a day and were really feeling great. The pool on base at Eielson was awesome, they had speakers underwater so we could listen to music the whole time we were swimming, it definitely made the hour of swim go by much faster! We thought over the next two weeks there we'd definitely get some great Ironman training in....then we came back to Spokane. We're continuing to work out here, on our indoor trainers and we're getting ready to head in to the gym on base in just a few minutes.
We've added a few pictures of us working out while we were in Alaska, we were doing a lot of core strength workouts (doing push ups, sit ups, and jump roping)...so there's a few pictures of that along with this blog. We're not sure if we're going to be going back to Alaska or not so for now we're just going to continue to ride our bikes and swim on base when we can until we get some more news from our squadron. We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and we'll update more when we either go to Alaska or next week after another week of Ironman training.

Winter Wonderland

This past week has been pretty exciting. Craig turned 27, Happy Birthday! We also have been getting a lot of snow, we even went skiing yesterday up to "49 Degrees North." We had a great time, it's definitely been awhile though since we've been skiing, our legs were pretty tired after having biked during the week then hitting the slopes for a day.
Overall the training has been going alright. We've been spending a lot of time on the indoor trainers which has been fun, watching lots of Christmas movies, hahaha! Work and everything else has made it difficult to keep on track, as always, so we've mostly just been trying to get whatever workout we can in our free time. This next week will hopefully be a little better for us and give us a chance to get back on schedule. We did go running outside today, drove down to Riverside State Park (just a few minutes from our house) and ran together on the trails out there. We had a great time, it was gorgeous with all the snow, it looked like a scene from a postcard! It was difficult at times though running on the snow covered roads/trails...it's tough to get any sort of traction so we will probably try and buy some YakTrax sometime this week to help out with the winter runs.
Happy Holidays!

More fun, less training in Jamaica

We just got back from Jamaica on Monday night and it sure was a great time! We spent most of the time scuba diving twice a day, even three times one day. Craig got his open water certification and after that it was non stop diving. We were able to go golfing twice also, what a great time!

Overall the vacation was a well deserved relaxing break, we certainly weren't looking forward to coming back to the cold and to work but it's nice being home. We kept ourselves busy with all the diving and activities they had at the Sandals resort and therefore didn't get a great deal of training done. We did do a bit of swimming, as you can see in the pictures. There was an area just in front of the hotel on the water that was sectioned off to make it a nice area for people to swim without any large waves. So, a couple of times while we were there we did about 30 minutes of lap swimming. It was actually much more interesting than swimming in the pool, you could see stuff on the bottom compared to seeing the same lane in the pool.

Now that we're back home we have gotten into training again. We've been spending a lot of time biking, getting used to that again. We'll write another update in about a week of probably our first week of real training in quite some time.

Family, Turkey, and Jamaica

Once again our training week was not fully completed. We had a few obstacles, Catherine's family came out to visit spur of the moment. We were able to get a few workouts in but most of the time we spent visiting with the family and enjoying the time we had together. Once the family left we picked up our training where we left off. The few days that we stayed on schedule certainly tired us out...we slept for a good 10 hours after our workout days completely exhausted from the training but it was good to get back on schedule.

We had another set back...Thanksgiving!! Lots and lots of food was eaten and a lack of training! We did manage to get a run and bike in on Thanksgiving day. We went to Manito Park for the annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot. It was freezing cold outside, only 19 degrees outside when we were running, Craig really wanted to be back in Santa Barbara in the warm weather instead of in this arctic climate! It was a great run though, lots and lots of people, at least 500.

We also were able to get a little bit of biking in. As you can see in the pictures we set up our new indoor trainers. We have one unfinished room in the basement and decided that'd be the perfect spot to do our biking, it's nice and cool down there and no worries of messing up the carpet or anything else. After setting up the trainers (thank you Craig!) we brought our TV, VCR, and DVD player downstairs from our bedroom and set up a little movie area so we can watch movies while we're doing our long training rides. It really worked out great, we tested it out for about a half hour before we had to leave for Thanksgiving dinner. I think it's going to make the time go by nicely while biking indoor for the winter months!

We're going to finish our movie while biking today and then it's off to Jamaica! We'll be going to Sandals Grande Ocho Rios for a little over a week. We plan to do a lot of golfing, scuba diving, and of course Ironman Training so once we get back we'll update on how the trip and training went!

Tough Week

Sorry it's been awhile since we've updated...we're going to try and update weekly (every Sunday or Monday) to let everyone know how our training is going. We had a bit of a setback this past week. I started to get sick then Craig and for a few days we had to cut back on the training and try to get better so we ended up having a pretty rough week. We're finally starting to feel better so we should get back on schedule soon, we're going to start slow though since we have been taking a few days off.
Our first week of training (before the cold) was pretty tough. We spent A LOT of time in the pool and on the bike, we've been taking some time off from running, slowly getting back into it, since we just finished the marathon and wanted to make sure we gave our legs a rest from the impact of running but we should start back up soon with some longer runs. The swimming has been very tiring, we went to a masters swim class on base that they offer twice a week in the evening and we were able to get quite a few techniques and it was good to swim with other people (there's even another triathlon couple--they're very good though, hahaha!).
Not a whole lot to write about this time but we'll update more after this week once we get back into our training plan. Thanks for everyone who wrote a comment, we enjoy hearing from everyone!

The Beginning of our Training

So we finally made the commitment to race in the Ironman Coeur d'Alene June 22, 2008. Although our weekend began with a lot of laziness and relaxing we are motivated and ready to begin our training. We haven't decided on an exact training plan yet but we will start training tomorrow now that we've had a week off since the Marine Corps Marathon.

Today Craig and I went out to Fitness Fanatics and bought all the equipment for the Ironman, what an expensive day! Since the weather is getting cold quickly, winter is coming, we decided to buy indoor bike trainers for both of us so that we can do a lot of training indoors as opposed to the nasty weather outside. We each tried on triathlon wetsuits , what a workout that was to try and pull those suits on and off! We're pretty happy with the suits we got, I think they're going to be great...especially in the cold Coeur d'Alene water in June! Also, as a little treat...Craig got an early birthday present for me, new triathlon bike shoes and pedals that are so much lighter and better than the old "mountain bike" like shoes/pedals I had before.

We plan on keeping everyone updated on our training and how we're doing throughout the next thirty weeks leading up to the race...we hope you enjoy!