12-28

Good Morning. Well as family members have come and gone I have managed to get in a few more pretty good workouts. It gets a little hard to maintain a training schedule when the rest of the family is still in holiday festive or chill mode. A run around my favorite place in Las Cruces (A Mountain), a bike workout with lots of one legged and speed intervals, and a treadmill run with 4 x 1 mile repeats have me feeling pretty good about the start of this season. My family didn't seem to mind that I was a little late to gatherings or I was on my spinning bike during the annual viewing of various Christmas themed movies and cartoons or even when we took the kids to the park and I seized the opportunity to run in the dry riverbed. Thanks!! When it came time to family stuff we did have a fire in the pit out back, made smores with the kids, put lights up outside, and took the kids on a couple pretty cool hikes. All in all it has been a great break so far and I think all the family members left pretty happy. My little brother Steven gets here today and I told him to bring his mountain bike so that should be fun. Can't wait!!

Now on swimming when I was growing up. Socorro didn't have a swim team or a swim program when I was growing up, but there was always a place to swim:) A few places we used to swim were: the mighty Rio Grande (at a few different locations), the local water tank (which we only did twice because it was way too dark), the tech pool after hours (by sneaking in through the ventilation system which kept the air inside the bubble during the winter fresh), the water hazards on the NM Tech Golf Course (gathering golf balls to sell later, and future training for Milkman...YUCK) and lastly in the stock tank my dad put in the back yard. It seemed like no matter what we did it was always competitive when it came to swimming. Swimming circles in the water tank until the big bubbles in the center came, swimming against the current for as long as possible in the river (Mexican endless pool), gathering the most and best golf balls, and of course holding your breathe the longest were a few of the contests I can remember.

Triathlons would surely have gotten boring for me if I would have just stuck to the usual swim, bike, and run everyday. Growing up in Socorro could have been boring for most, but for my friends and I, it was a blast. We would add elements of creativity to just about every activity we did. For example, when we were playing golf we would invent our own holes and par for them. We would go from 3 tee box to 7 green etc. We were like the commercial for BASF, we didn't have access to all the things a lot of other kids did, but we made the activities we did that much better. I honestly believe it has been this ability to make things fun and break up the monotony which has enabled the competitive fires to burn inside me for so many years. In the next few posts I will let you in on some of the seemingly crazy training I have invented or BASFed over the years. Hope everyone had an awesome Christmas!!