Thank yous, sleep and endurance rides

Well my friends, I am happy to announce today that I completed my very first 50 mile ride. Many thanks to my friend Dave who has been doing my endurance rides with me. Without him I would probably be lost out there somewhere, right now. Still. My sense of direction is impressively lacking, as my friends and family can all attest to. Anyway, this time I did the first hour of my ride by myself, and then met up with Dave for the last two hours. I felt pretty good the whole ride, pushed it on some hills and finished feeling very accomplished. Yay!!

My training has been going really well this week, although I have been very tired a lot recently. Sometimes I am pretty groggy for my morning workouts, which can mean I sort of swim in a fog for the first half of my pool time. I've been trying to get myself to bed earlier and get more sleep (as well as feed the beast enough to stave off the grungry, as discussed in my earlier post), but it can be very hard with the rest of life getting in the way.

Another interesting turn of events is that I seem to have counted the weeks incorrectly in my training calendar. I don't know if I repeated a week somehow or what, but yesterday when I tried to sort it out, it had my race landing one week later than it actually is. SO I've had to rearrange things, and the long and the short of it is that I am skipping what would be a recovery week and moving on with the next build week instead. I know this isn't the best thing to do, but I didn't really have many other options. There are only 2 more build weeks left, and then I begin my half and full taper, so I think that it will all work out OK. Just gotta be diligent with the stretching, the ice and the sleep.

So with that I am going to bed. One more thank you to send out tonight though: Thank you to my wife Erin. Yesterday was our 1st Anniversary. She is an essential part of me being able to follow this dream and without her, I would be lost literally and figuratively :)

I am sure there will be many more thank yous to come, however. This race is not far away and it's a big deal for me. I have gotten a lot of support from my friends and family, so I'll be thanking them all shortly. :D Thank you in advance for putting up with me until then!!