Catching up...

I've always been pretty bad at keeping in touch with friends and family.  Last weekend I saw a few old friends that I have not kept in touch with and they both know about my races and Kona because of my blog.  That reminded me that even though I don't always have anything particular great to say I really should keep up with this blog a little better.

I'm going to attempt to make more frequent (but shorter) updates going forward....

First off, thanks to everyone that contact me about my Kona race report and experience.  I really value your advice and thoughts.

Since Kona, I took some downtime from serious training and then I once again lead a pace group at the NYC Marathon.  It's amazing how enjoyable running a marathon can be when there is no pressure, no goals and all I have to do is have fun and talk to people.  I was able to train without a plan for a few weeks and just do what I wanted when I wanted.  I even showed up to a 5k untrained and just ran for fun to see what would happen. 

I loved all of it and for a bit I even started to think about stepping back and just doing endurance sports for the enjoyment of them.  However after only a few weeks of down time, I already had the itch to get back to real training and I knew I wasn't going to be able to take it easy.

I then spend a while review all of my past training data and race reports and realized that I am great at training and not so good at racing.  Other than a few random b-races, I have yet to perform to my potential or to how I perform in training during a race.  Although I have been pretty successful over the last few years I'm now looking into a few ways I can restructure my season and training to hopefully allow myself to perform better at races.

My next few post will be a recap of the 2010 season, my goals for 2011 and hopefully by then I will have figured out my plan for next year and can share that as well.

In the meantime I am back to following the Endurance Nation Off Season Plan.  In only 5 weeks I've got my FTP back to within 2 watts of where I finished the OS last year.  My running is taking a little longer to come back but I'm continuing to make good progress.

If you didn't already see from my facebook status, I was nominated for Chicago Magazine - Athlete of the Year after being selected as athlete of the month earlier this year.  Voting is still open but I believe it closes very soon.  If you do decide to vote for me, I recommend you pick Jean Marinangeli as well.

Vote here: http://j.mp/cpUNxF