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.