My main “project” has been my personal health. On March 15th I restarted running after an abbreviated return to running in the fall of 2009 when I re-injured my Achilles (after partially tearing it in the spring of 2009) I ran in the mornings with the track team and added an additional run at night. In June I added biking to work. Followed by running at night. In July I started doing fun runs, and in August Duathlons. I also coach CC at St. Marcus and at HOPE High School to Mid-October. I bike about 120-140 miles a week. I run about 35 miles a week. I have a schedule of fun runs including two half marathons coming up for the winter. When I finally have to put the bike away for winter, I will keep running but will spend more time in the weight room. I have realized now that all the fat is gone that I actually have no upper body muscle. A big throw back to high school days for sure.
All this athletic training has taken up some time to be sure. However, the results have been dramatic. I have lost 66 pounds as of today. I am 4 pounds from my goal of getting to 170. I hope to have this goal accomplished by November 1st. I have changed my diet too to eliminate excessive fat and sugar. Nothing crazy, most of my diet is to avoid the obvious bad stuff and keep the portions in a reasonable amount. These results have been good too in that my cholesterol has dropped from 232 down to 178. My blood pressure is 109/66. My heart rate is 49. My BMI is 24 is in the middle of normal weight.
So now that the weight and health goals are close to where I want them, I have been focusing on the competition of running and the Duathlons (running and biking). I have been improving and placing in the top 10 percent of the races I’ve been in. My best official 5K time is 18:54 where I finished 26th out of 350, although I got 17:53 at the 3 mile mark of the Briggs and Al’s run last week. My best Duathlon has been 1:24:45 where I finished 37th out of 791 but I finished 9th overall last weekend at the Pewaukee Duathlon with a time of 1:10:44 on a smaller bike distance. My goals for next summer are to achieve under 30 minutes for 5 miles. 4:45 for one mile. And 1:17 for a 2/20/2 Duathlon.
The most recent family events have just been Zach being home for two weeks on leave after he completed a 1 month long exercise out at sea. It was a nice visit. He got his RX7 running again after being stored in the garage for two years. We got the turbo in the Volvo fixed from my epic vacation in June. My car had been sitting in the garage unused as I am on my bike for everything. That was a fun repair to do. He finally was able to do the engagement pictures with Chrissy. We also tested a restaurant for the rehearsal dinner. Although Chrissy is dealing with the brunt of the wedding planning, it is definitely a fun thing going on in our lives. I find it fun of course as my role is limited.
Kt is working full-time as a preK4 assistant teacher at a daycare center in Muskego. She works with Chrissy actually. It is a challenging job and Kt spends a lot of evenings napping to recover. She will be attending classes in the Spring semester as well working on early childhood education. Kt and her friend Bonnie are working on a plan to get an apartment together and live some adventures. Right now they are saving money and maybe by summer they will be able to execute their plan.
Ike has been taking to his virtual online high school. He has all A’s and a B right now. That’s a big deal!! He is also on pace and taking responsibility for his assignments. He has said he sort of misses having the social parts of school readily available to him like passing times, lunch, goofing off in study hall, etc.. However he says the education part of it is far better. He is filling in social time by visiting his various friends from various schools and packing it in on the weekends. He also likes being able to do school at night, weekends, stay up late sometimes, wake up at 9:00am or whenever basically. He can run and get a snack whenever he likes or even sit in a “lecture” in his underwear while chewing gum if he so chooses. Ike said the best part has been that he has the time he needs to complete all his assignments. Often his problems in the past were not a product of understanding but more a result of time limits. So far this has been a good thing. It does strip out a lot of the “nonsense” of school and focuses just on the education. There is no dealing with dress codes, tardies, unexcused absences, scheduling, computer labs, cell phone use, teacher access (in virtual school they are available 9 hours a day…and even longer by multiple methods such as email, text, or chat), etc. Even if he is “talking” in an online lecture through chat or voice when he is not supposed to…the teacher can simply disable him and voila …classroom is controlled. In General this choice seems to be working out very well.
So that will have to do for an update for now. Perhaps by Christmas I’ll have another one.
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