Six month reflection

Six months ago, on January 29th I posted the following to my MySpace blog:

I'm gonna do a triathlon. I mean it. I'm doing it and you can't stop me, k. For real this is gonna be rad.

About seven years ago I rode my bike through Alaska (Fairbanks to Anchorage). I thought, "Wow, I'm a bad ass!" And maybe I was for a brief period. And then I put my bike away and really didn't do much with it for the next few years.I almost sold it this past fall, but when no one showed up to buy my bike I decided to keep it.

I've been talking about (or at least thinking about) doing a triathlon for a few years. I used to have these pipe dream goals of doing my first Tri by 25 and my first marathon by 30. The problem is, I couldn't run more than a coupe hundreed feet without stopping and wanting to vomit.

I've been doing some running of late. Thanks to my sister-in-law's wedding, I started running last November. By early December I ran my first 3mile loop without stopping, and I haven't done that since. However, I've grown very fond of running internvals (like run three minutes, walk two minutes, lather and repeat). This weekend I ran another three mile no-stop thing, and I won't say it was easy, but it was pretty fun.

I had all these great vissions of me crossing the finishline at the next Ironman to cheering friends and family, I'm crying and colapse in exhaustion after it all. Now, I'll probably never do the Ironman, and I'm fine with that. But this June I will finish in the Danskin Women's Triathlon. It's a half mile swim, 12 mile bike and 3 mile run. Anyone want to train with me?

So I did it. This June I completed the Danskin and finished in the respectable middle third of the pack. I might be a year late on my first goal (first tri by 26, not 25) but I have plenty of time to reach my other goal (marathon by 30). My goals now are:
1. Complete two more sprint distance tris this summer.
2. Over the fall and winter work to increase my distances to international lengths (1mile swim, 25 mile bike, 6 mile run).
3. Run in the Capitol 10K in March.
4. Next summer complete the Danskin in under 2 hours
5. Do 2 sprint distance races and 1 Olympic/international distance race.

All seem pretty reasonable, I think.