October and November
In October we had our 4th kid, she's a doll.
I trained exclusively for a 10k. Pfew, I don't know how runners do it! It seemed like my muscles never stopped hurting. In the end I missed the race, and I have to admit, it was a relief, running is hard people! Now don't get me wrong, it's not like I have tons of experience trying to train for running races. But I did have a plan, based on some reading, and good golly, it was tough.
December & January
All family all the time. It's actually a little surprising to me how much more work a fourth kid seems to add. The old three sort of feed off each other, and can generate a cyclone of energy. Sometimes that energy can be running around like hyper cats, laughing and whooping and having a ton of fun. Other times the energy is more like a swirling vortex of crying and breakdowns. It's great though, all the kids are growing up and being individuals.
February - May
I started up regular workouts again. We had the coldest winter I've ever had the privilege of being a part of, and so every single workout was inside. Also during this time I participated in a wellness challenge at work.
The Wellness Challenge
So someone at work put together a set of teams (on a volunteer basis) to compete in both a weight loss challenge as well as a total number of minutes challenge. So, let's be clear hear, I'm 6'2 and over the winter had "ballooned" up to 187 pounds - so I wasn't really going to contribute much to weight loss effort, but I thought I'd be competitive in the minutes category.
The first week rolled by, and people came out of the gate charing, 10+ hours by several people. Not me, I figured, well I have some staying power, I should be able to maintain my effort level, not everyone will.
A few more weeks roll by, I'm not in the top 10. But some people are starting to fade, though much to my surprise, the people at the top are starting to surge, sometimes toping 15 hours a week.
In the end, after 12 weeks. The winner had racked up an amazing 14,000 minutes of workout time, that's more than 1,000 a week, or almost 17 hours per week. That's some serious commitment, I mean he said he was mainly just walking, but I don't care, that's some serious will power. Second place had 11,000 and I ended up in 5th with 6,000.
I came away with two major thoughts. First, I was shocked at the effort people were putting in, people at work are always talking to me about how much I run or bike or whatever, but in reality many of them are putting in the same or more time. Second, the contest really pushed people. There's a guy I run with sometimes at work, and he just tacked on 90 minutes of walking every night to his normal workout routine in the beginning just to get into the top 2, he ended up getting sick and falling way behind. The guy who won, went from roughly 5 hours a week to (in some weeks) 30 hours, he said "it's not like your body can't handle it, pro athletes do it" (they don't have other full time jobs though.)
It was eye opening, and humbling.
June
It's finally warm out, most days. Very recently I've been having a pretty good series of workouts. The other day Strava told me I set a new 15k PR, and I did a running workout where I was able to put together two sets of sub 8-minute miles together. I didn't run that fast at all last year. Swimming workouts are going off fantastic, I'm swimming with Genesis again, and again it's great. And after a year of not biking with the group I put on some big-boy undies and went out with them. That's been good too. It's a little surprising how shy I am though about being in the mix. I can still clearly recall the accident.
Part of me is really itching to race to see where I'm at, other parts of me have different plans.
In Conclusion
I leave you with this. For my birthday my wife had gotten me a GoPro, which eventually we deemed to be defective and returned, but it did capture this. I present my two oldest
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