Recapping July

After 3 months of incremental weight increases, I lost 5.4 lbs in July. This gets me back to where I was around a week into the month of March earlier this year weight-wise (and down 3.4 lbs for the year). It's good to see that 2.5 months of slow gain can be undone by a good month, just like I've seen the opposite where 3 months of weight loss is undone by one month of gain. In the end, this is still a long process where the important thing is to stay on-track in the long term and not worry about the short term.

This month of training proved to be a long one. I ended up logging in 2431 training minutes for the month easily my highest training time since I started running again back in late 2006. I ran 65.3 miles during the month for my second highest run mileage of the year (and above average for me). The 225.2 miles on the bike and 12.7 miles of swimming each represent a personal monthly high for me as well. In addition these represent an amount of training that I likely would not have pushed myself to attempt without the advice of coaching--at least not at this point in my training schedule. While there are too many variables to guarantee that I will beat my previous best in my coming Olympic and Half Ironman distance races, I am certainly going to be entering them much better prepared than I was for them last year.

With the Longhorn 70.3 and IM Texas on my longer horizon as my main events, and shorter "training" races such as the Bridgeland Sprint Tri (8/8) and The Austin Triathlon (Olympic Distance 9/6) along the way, I have been writing posts about some of my specific training experiences to record my training process for later review, and any constructive criticism anybody out there might have to offer to me. One thing is certain at this point, my training volumes will have to increase when I kick into IM Texas specific training late this year/early next year.