still kickin'!

thanks to all of you out there who have emailed me, IM'd with me on facebook, and left comments on my blog with wonderful healing messages. they worked! amazing what a difference a week can make. my battle scars have healed rather nicely for such a short period of time and never did hinder my training and as Tosh.0  would say, and for that we are thankful!

actually, the only thing that i was unable to do was swim and that's because i had the worst pinched nerve in my neck from the crash and it hurt to turn my head in either direction up until yesterday. funny how, five months ago, missing a week of swimming would have sent me over the edge but times have changed and i have no worries. next week is a new week.

the good news continues, i ended the week today with a total of 30 miles running, that included an 18 mile long run and cycled a total of 260 miles, that included a century this morning. not bad for being all torn up. this morning's century was one of two scheduled 40th birthday centuries. i'm absolutely giddy about turning 40 and still being able to kick ass. i am by far in the best shape of my life, period.

i still have 2.5 days left in this decade of my life called the 30's and have no plans of slowing down anytime soon. in fact, i'm just beginning to raise the bar and i can hardly wait to see what this new set of ten has in store for me. oops, sorry for going off in another direction there. back to the centuries. the other century i'm doing is called the Bok Tower Century on sunday, sept 5th. as for the picture of the bionic woman...a few of my awesome girlfriends lovingly named me "Bionica" several years ago and i just wanted to let them know that i kept thinking about that today as i was riding...i really felt bionic. what an awesome feeling!

the not so good stuff, work has been CRAZY busy (that part is good) so i've been putting in lots of long hours there which leaves me with very little time for much else. i try to catch up on my blog reading here and there, sometimes at lunch while i eat at my desk and on the trainer with my itouch. never enough time is all i have to say. upward and onward!

good luck to all of my friends who are racing this weekend, especially, Pati and Jennifer who are doing IM Louisville and Tri-guy at One Crazy Summer who is doing his first IM at Penticton.

much love and peace out!

open letter to oblivious cyclists everywhere

dear oblivious cyclists,

thanks for ruining my friday morning ride. a ride that should be safe with no cars around and just a few cyclists here and there who usually understand all of the signs posted along the way that state, bicyclists stay to your right. obviously, you don't understand this simple, yet important, rule. i hope you got a good look at the stupid owl you stopped to look at. did you ever think to get off the pavement because there may be other cyclists coming up behind you or did you think that you two were the only one's on this 7 mile loop? did you ever think to use the frickin mirrors that you have mounted on your handlebars? why do you all even have a mirror? why didn't one of you bother to look back and why did you move to the right when I was yelling at you that i was on your left? i know it was unintentional, and purely accidental but my goodness, why such stupidity? this could have been completely avoided with just some use of common sense. just being aware of your surroundings is such a basic concept, yet day in and day out, i see this happen...cyclists (usually not seasoned cyclists) making stupid decisions and causing crashes or near misses.

ladies, i hope that the next time you are out there riding, you remember me laying there on the ground trying to catch my breath. i did that for your sake because i was about to get up and beat your ass but then a calmness came over me and i thought to myself that you probably felt a lot worse than i did. please look back next time either with your mirror or just turn around and look or better yet, get off the pavement if you need to stop and look at a damn owl.

Peace out!
KC

P.S. i haven't taken a sick day at work in almost 2.5 years but thanks to you, i had to today.
**********************

well that was therapeutic! i feel so much better now. anyway, some of you asked if i ran into her and the answer is no. i completely missed her by inches. lucky her! i debated whether to post pics of my war wounds or not and decided to show my ass, what the hell! so here they are:

lovely, huh? i actually did go to work for a few hours but was a bit uncomfortable so i came home and iced a few times, fell asleep for an hour and just chilled out. still planning on riding 100 tomorrow in the hills but will make the final decision in the morning. i still need to go buy a new helmet. i just thank god that i didn't get hurt any worse, no broken bones, or head injury. everything is superficial and will heal but in the meantime it burns like a mother! i need my nurse to hurry up and get home from work.

have a great weekend everyone and a big shout out to everyone doing Timberman 70.3 this weekend, especially Mandy - Caratunk Girl bib #2597 and Jon at SwiCycloRun - Tales of an Age Group Triathlete bib #1955. Race smart and strong you two!

much love and peace out!

no more apologies...after this one

time and motivation or lack thereof is my excuse for not blogging. nothing more, nothing less. as much as i love keeping up with everyone, the last few weeks have really consumed me, mostly emotionally, but not physically, thank goodness. can't slack on the training at this stage of the game. anyway, i feel the need to apologize to all of you who read my blog and leave such encouraging comments. i thought about my blog all weekend and how much i miss updating but just haven't been able to find the motivation to sit down and write type. i wonder if this is normal? and, is my blog the only thing that i'm neglecting in my life? is this a normal part of training for 140.6 miles and does balance in life really exist when you are training for this kind of distance? is it just me? that's what i'm struggling with right now and i'm not sure what to think.

on the training front, all is good. knee pain went away as fast as it came. feeling like i dodged a bullet there. i'm getting all of my training in and feeling very strong and motivated. maybe that's where all the motivation is going and leaving nothing left for anything else. i won't bore you with all the training details but if you want to see what i've been up to just click on my buckeye training log on my sidebar. at least i keep that up to date...LOL!

i found this really good poem about going after your dreams and wanted to share it with all of you. hope it helps you get a great start to your monday!

Go After Your Dreams

You're good, but you're going to be great.

You're the best, but you're going to get better.

Sometimes the paths we take are long and hard, but remember: those are always the ones that lead to the most beautiful views.

Challenges come along inevitably: how you respond to them determines who you are - deep down inside - and everything you're going to be.

Increase the chances of reaching your goals by working at them gradually. The very best you can do is all that is asked of you.

Realize that you are capable of working miracles of your own making. Remember that opportunities have a reason for knocking on your door, and the right ones are there for the taking.

You don't always have to win, but you do need to know what it takes to be a winner.

It's up to you to find the key that unlocks the door to a more fulfilling life.

Understand that increased difficulty brings you nearer to the truth of how to survive it - and get beyond it.

Cross your bridges.

Meet your challenges.

Reach out for your dreams, and bring them closer and closer to your heart.

Get rid of the "if only's" and get on with whatever you need to do to get things right.

Go after what you want in life, with all the blessings of all the people who care about you. And find out what making your wishes come true really feels like.

~ Collin McCarty ~

much love and peace out!

i'm going off the rails on a crazy train

ozzy osborne had it right in his song, crazy train. i've been on a full speed runaway train for over a week now and it won't slow down until tuesday so i'm just hanging on by my fingernails until then. i'm a deadbeat blogger this week and i don't like it. unfortunately, my blog will always be the first thing to take a back seat to everything else...it's my red headed step child so to speak. between work, which has been busier than normal, working on a powerpoint presentation for work, training for a 140.6 mile race around the corner, and just life in general, i'm feeling slightly overwhelmed at the moment.

OUCH! had a weird little incident yesterday morning when i went out to run. i was about a minute into my run when i pulled up with some out of nowhere, totally without warning, sharp pain in my right knee cap. i tried to run thru it but it was a no go, so i limped home almost in tears. tears not from pain but just the thought of 8 months of hard work going down the drain, flashed before my very eyes and made me want to throw up. knee pain is the one thing that terrifies me. knock on wood, up until yesterday, i never have had many major injuries or issues and definitely none with my knee. not sure what that was all about. so i got home, iced it,  hopped on the bike to see how it felt and i didn't like it. it wasn't as painful as when i was walking back home but it was still there. i went to the pool as planned and swam with no pain then decided to hop on the elliptical to see how that felt and absolutely no pain there either so i did my running miles on the elliptical instead. i didn't feel it too much at work as i walked around and used the stairs so that made me feel a little better. i had planned on doing a 100 mile ride in the hills today but last night i decided that i would make a last minute decision on that in the morning. i got up this morning, hopped on the bike to "test" the knee out. i stood up, pedaled in a hard gear, sat back down, spinned at a high rpm and no pain but still decided that maybe it would be best to not overdo it and stick around home for the ride. i didn't like the thought of getting out to the hills and then having to turn around and come back home because of my knee so we ended up getting a strong 64 mile ride in around the hood. i pulled a lot, felt strong, and never felt a twinge of pain. that pain scared me a bit so i'm still a little gun shy to run. my plan for next week is to do all of my running miles on the elliptical, and swim and bike as planned. i've actually done a fair amount of training on an elliptical before, back in the day when i was training for a marathon and was having some issue with my piriformis, so i know that the ellip machine has an excellent cross-over training effect, so i'm not too worried about losing anything on the running. i think my playing it safe approach is the smart thing to do at this stage in the game.

so that is my mini update for now. i feel better now that i'm an up to date blogger and not a deadbeat. much love and peace out!

runnin' with the devil

just kidding! i wasn't running with the devil; we don't get along all that well. actually I was running with an angel...a Tri-Angel to be exact! Meet Heidi (aka: Tri-Angel), my guest running partner for my long run on friday. CLICK HERE to visit her awesome blog. she is one of the first blogs i started following when i first started mine back at the end of december. i highly recommend her blog as she is highly entertaining and does some really neat events in New Orleans where she has set up shop for a while. better yet, here are her own words from her blog profile:

Runner turned triathlete, future Doctor of Physical Therapy, and spinning instructor. Lover of snowboarding, surfing, yoga, cosmos, hot pink, and can't forget my hottie aviator and mini-wieners! Join me in my venture as I haphazardly juggle life and this crazy Ironman training. I thank God every day I am able to participate in this great sport we call triathlon!

as luck would have it for me, heidi was in town to visit her hub's family so we hatched a plan to meet up for whatever training we could coordinate. it just so happened we both needed to get our long run in for the week so that was the plan for friday morning. heidi also happens to be training for her first IM race...IM Florida on November 6th so we are about 2 weeks apart in our training, which worked out very nicely. thankfully she is a super early bird like me so there was no twisting her arm to meet me at 5:30am. my long run was 15 miles and hers was about 12.5 so i ended up doing the last couple of miles solo and that was the hardest of all the miles but i was just so tickled to have someone who could run my pace and yack the entire time with me. we never ran out of things to talk about either...blogging, blog guilt (not having enough time to blog or comment on other blogs), our part time jobs of training for a 140.6 mile race, our training philosophies, the cool bloggers we already follow and recommending blogs to each other that we should be reading. this blog world of ours is incredible...nuf said. love you all!

the coolest part about having a guest athlete with me is that i get to show them all the beauty i get to experience on a daily basis whether running or biking...not swimming because the pool is not a thing of beauty to me, only a thing of necessity. so without further ado, some pics of the last part of our run. some of these will look familiar to my elder followers when i did a picture post way back when after one of my afternoon runs.

fire road heading into the park

smooth pavement after the fire road heading to another off road trail

the water station with cold water to drench ourselves in

another beautiful fire road we ran on

beautiful pond we passed on our way to and from the park

as much as i love running alone, it is a lot of fun running with a friend or two. i will say this, good running (and cycling) friends are very hard to come by.

after we finished our hard work for the day, we came back to my crib and let the flip cam roll while we goofed off in the back patio area. here are a few more of our pics:

in other training news...had an awesome weekend of riding. 93 miles in the hills yesterday with a heat index of 109! today we did a flat 50 and i am starting to feel like i've turned a corner in my training....the only way i know how to describe it is that when the heat gets turned on high and the mileage is high, and i've been at it for hours, i still feel very strong. i know you all know what i'm talking about, right? it's just a really good feeling. you know you're doing something right.

some more fun news...i signed up to do this: Ragnar Relay. according to the website description, it is 12 runners, 2 vans, 24 hours, 200 mile(ish) relay race where you run, drive, sleep, repeat. i think it will be a perfect event following the 140.6 Great Floridian race on October 23rd. i'm very aware of the post race blues so this will be my way of heading it off before it can set in. here is a great description of the florida central ragnar relay i will be doing from November 19th thru the 20th:

This 191 mile adventure-fest will push you and 11 pals from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Starting in Clearwater and finishing in Daytona Beach this relay offers runners a unique opportunity to run across the state of Florida as it passes through the shoreline towns of Palm Harbor, Tarpon Springs, New Port Richey, and the horse country of the Ocala National Forest. The race (and your stamina) wraps up within earshot of the roaring engines of the Daytona 500 and the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

our team is sponsored by Feet First a very cool running store in Tampa and St. Pete. they have been around for over 20 years and know their stuff. so has anyone else out there done one of these ragnar relays? if so, please give me some details.

i think that's all i've got for now. congrats to Kevin at Ironman by thirty and to Matt at Staying Strong and Positive and his bride, Heather O who did their first 70.3 -Whirlpool IM 70.3 Steelhead yesterday. i know many others raced some sprint distances this weekend and i'm making my way to your blogs to catch up.

much love and PEACE OUT!