Life Update

As promised, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything on here.  Since it’s been so long, I’ll give you two options for this update. A short one and a long one (or you can always take option three and just hit the ‘back’ button on your browser).

Short:
-The kids arrived mid-August (13 yr old daughter, 10 yr old son)
-My triathlon in August was canceled due to storms
-I’ve basically been doing jack sh*t for physical activity

Long:
Life has obviously been a lot different with the kids in the house.  (Quick recap – my wife and I adopted a sibling group from the foster system).  They moved in around the middle of August, just enough time for us to try to get settled into a routine before school started.  Since this blog is public, I’m extremely limited with what I can say and I can’t post any photos showing their faces.  That’ll change in about six months when the adoption is finalized.  In the interim, we’re tied to the foster care rules.  However, I can say that things have gone really well.  It’s been an adjustment for all of us, but I feel like we’re all getting used to the new normal.  Our house is not without teenage girl drama, and our son wants to do little more than play Minecraft all day, and I’m exhausted beyond belief right now.  But it’s good.  Very good.

My triathlon was scheduled for about four days after the kids arrived.  I was surprised that they wanted to get up at 7a on a Sunday morning to come watch me race, but they both did.  The race had an indoor pool swim, and after  sitting in the bleachers at the pool for 3 hours, they called off the race due to thunderstorms.  To say that the race organization was a cluster f*ck would be an understatement.  Even when it became obvious (to those of us who looked at the radar on our phones) that the race wasn’t going to happen, they wouldn’t let racers leave the building and pack up their bikes and leave.  Why?  Because no one was there to make sure that the right person took the right bike out of transition.  Take that one to the logical conclusion, and you’ll note that they didn’t have anyone watching over the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear in transition.  It was just sitting in a parking lot in the middle of a city, unattended.

I’m not signed up for any other races right now.  My physical activity level has basically gone down the toilet.  Part of it is due to life logistics now, and I’m still working on trying to find a routine that works for me.  Probably the larger reason for my inactivity, though, is that I’ve been dealing with depression for quite some time.  I started on meds before the kids came, but I realistically should have gotten on them MONTHS before that.  The downhill started around the time of my DNF at Rocky Raccoon, and it just kept getting worse.  It’s only been recently that I’ve realized how much that race hurt my psyche.  (That DNF didn’t cause my depression, it was just the first in a line of life events, and I had not been taking care of myself to stave off the depression).

I really want to get back into better shape.  I remember a time when I could walk out the door and crank out a 20 mile run at a sub-8 minute pace with no advance prep.  I would just get up, decide I wanted to run 20, and go make it happen.  Now, I’d be very hard pressed to crank out 10 at that pace.  A lot of days my four mile lunch runs are slower than that.  It’s an odd dichotomy in that I really want to get out more, but I also have almost no motivation to do so.  I’ve been thinking of joining up with a local tri group, because I think I really need some sort of accountability (right now I have zero).  Not sure when I’ll actually make that happen.  Maybe I just need to sign up for a race of some sort to give myself some motivation.  I’d still like to try for a sub-3 marathon at some point, but there’s no way that’s happening anytime soon with the shape I’m in.

Maybe I should train for a 5k at that pace first – that’s probably a better starting point.