Doing it for 2 years today

This morning two years ago was the first day of the new Jan. That morning I laced-up my brand new Nike+ shoes with Nike+ sensor, put on the shiny new iPod Nano and went out for first run. Well now looking back at it it may not have been exactly running, but hey I was moving and doing positive steps. My motivation was to improve my fitness and lose the extra weight that I carried back then (well over 20 kilos to be exact). I was dead after 1.5 miles, but I was happy that I'm doing something to get back into shape. Day later I was back on the road and running another 1.6 miles and I have been doing this since then. Few months later I ran my first 5k - you can see the time on the right side of this page. Then I ran another 5k and my weight loss motivation got a friend - I wanted to get leaner and faster.

Fast forward to January 2007 when I started to feel little bored with just running. I started to think about adding another sport. At the same time I came across book from Joe Friel, read it in two days and was ready to make the plunge to triathlons. I knew I'll stick with it so I went full bore - tri-bike, treadmill (to make the training easier during the winter time and when I can not leave the house), and bunch of other stuff that one needs to get into triathlon. Luckily I already have pool in the backyard otherwise I do not think my wife would be too pleased if I had someone build one for us and justify it with tri-training :-).

And since then I do this swim, bike, run thing and love it. I would not necessarily say that I'm very good at it, but I'm definitely getting better and moving up in the score lists in the races. I got lucky last year when I finished 2nd in my AG in local Half Iron race and two weeks later took 3rd in local sprint race. This year I was 49th in Black Bear sprint (9th in AG) and last weekend 22nd in Anthracite Oly (6th in AG). Definitely an improvement, but here are still few things I need to work on to get better - can you say swimming and running... One thing surprises me though - I never knew I would do so good in biking part of the races. I guess the bike riding as a kid shows in my race results - as kids we usually took bikes to the lake and it was a good 45 minutes bike ride away. On the way to the lake we were descending a steep hill and that is probably helping me with my bike handling skills - I literally have no fear on descends (case in point - in the Anthracite Tri the first steep downhill ended in sharp turn - I still did over 49 mph (80km/h) on the downhill with no fear and made the turn nearly taking the cop that was at the intersection). I also do fairly well on the climbs - I guess it must be related to the rides home from the lake - we needed to climb back up the steep long hill after being pretty tired from all the swimming and running around the lake. Now only if my swimming and running were as good. I guess I still have a lot of laps and miles to do to improve on those two fronts...