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The Story of my First Ironman

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Since the last time I wrote one of these, I was prepping for 70.3 Muncie. While that race is a worthy of its own post, the race did not go as well as I had hoped (despite my second fastest bike split ever w/ a drafting penalty) and left me hungry for more. The best part of that race was getting to race with Taylor Ellis and Greg Grosicki (aka GG). After that race, I decided to sign up for my first full distance Ironman in Cambridge, Maryland. This is the story of my first Ironman. (Full Disclosure: this is a LONG post, so for the real meat and potatoes of this post, skip ahead to the third paragraph of the Ironman Maryland section. It's so long and took me so long, I might not graduate on time anymore...) Always fun to race with your best friends ❤️ The Build Up: A little help from my friends  After Muncie, I took about a week of low key training that included a trip to Chicago to celebrate Taylor's birthday and a trip to Wisconsin for a wedding. After returning home, I
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How is it July Already?

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It is crazy how quickly time goes by. Since the last time I posted, I've raced twice, attended a training camp, attended two conferences, and published two journal papers to say the least. With my next 70.3 a little less than a week away, I thought I would post a quick update on training, racing and life. I have distinct section for Oceanside 70.3, Quassy Olympic, and Muncie 70.3 prep. Oceanside 70.3 Race Report Heading into Oceanside I felt pretty good. It's an early season race and I had put in a pretty good base over the winter. My goal had been to "do more, by doing less," aka more time going EASY, but also more time going HARD. I definitely felt like I had done a pretty good job doing this on the bike, but running not as much. Regardless, I was excited because this was my first time racing as a member of Team Wattie Ink ! I arrived in LA Wednesday evening before the race and headed down to Oceanside on Thursday where I was staying with new teammates. I spent T
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Do More by Doing Less

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Finding the balance between doing too much and too little can be tough and I am definitely one of those people who pushes the boundaries of doing too much. This is applicable in the context of training and life in general. Now this is technically a "New Years" post, so I'll explore this topic both reflecting on 2017 and goal setting for 2018, but mostly 2018. A quick look back at 2017 and the whirlwind that it was... I have always played around with the limit of what I can take on, teetering on the edge of having absolutely no free time and going insane. I have a tendency to get bored with the same old routine and then try to take on new things so I continue feeling challenged. This YouTube video pretty much sums up what I am talking about by Casey Neistat (click here ). 2017 was no different and there were times where I teetered a little too far into the domain of taking on too much and too little. I spent some time trying to get rid of part of my personality, but I
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Something Old, Something New. Something Borrowed, Something Blue

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The idea of writing a blog and publishing race reports is not new. Endurance athletes have done it for as long as I can remember. At first, I didn’t read them mostly because I told myself I didn’t have the time, but this season I have started to read some of the posts my training buddies made and I have grown to enjoy and appreciate blogging. While I usually hear a lot of what is written in person, it is often not until the blog is written that these things are said outloud. Writing a race report, whether or not it be in blog form, gives athletes a chance to reflect and write about everything and anything that happened during a race. By having a long record of these reports, athletes can start to see trends in things that did and did not work while. This is especially important in endurance racing where we don’t get many opportunities to race and try new things, especially when so many things can go wrong while exerting yourself to your max for 4+ hours. This is a fairly simple conce
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