I just registered for the Chattanooga Half Marathon. This should be great training for the Knoxville Marathon. The kicker of course, I'm doing it Dean Karnazes style and running to the half-marathon. Hey, anybody can do a half marathon!

On a separate note, I think I have inspired a couple of friends to start biking to work, so I'm pumped about that.

What a JERK! Only a triathlete living in Hawaii would actually have the guts to post about overtraining. Please note the sarcasm (hence insane jealousy).

http://crashfistfight.blogspot.com/2007/02/overtraining.html

WOW...How time flies... Normally I'm always ahead of any schedule and then last night I look up on Hal Higdon's web-site that I need to run10 miles (that sucks) then take a day off and run a 10-15 miler on Friday and then a 20 miler on Sunday. Ok, that really sucks! But it's exciting. Finding 20 miles to run in Chattanooga is a lot like finding the right tool in Home Depot, you know it's there but it sure takes a long time to do it!


I'm currently too lazy to update the links on the left so here are my plans for 2007 as of now:

Chattanooga Half Marathon
Knoxville Marathon
3 State, 3 Mountain Century
Chattanooga Waterfront Triathlon (haven't registered yet)
Atomic Man Half Ironman (haven't registered yet)
NY City Marathon (name is in the lottery)

Above, is a shot of where my wife and I went mountain biking for the weekend. As you can see, Chattanooga is a great place to live. What was really neat is the 40-50 other cyclists that we saw out there. Any place where bikes out number cars, is a place where I want to be!

I ran home from work today, it is great weather in Chattanooga, as I think it was in the high 40's, which is perfect long-distance running for me. Today I realized the power of REST. I haven't ran since Friday, and I was running very fast all 10 km. Tommorrow I plan on running some serious splits, so we will see how that goes at 6 in the morning.

I have also really enjoyed cross-training over the weekend. I make it a point to either do an hour of Yoga or go biking. I think this has really helped me stay healthy for running non-stop during the work week.

Another thing I have been doing is increasing my mileage ever so slightly. Running really is more convenient than anything. One of my hobbies is to check out real estate. So I have been varying my route to add an extra hill and/or an extra mile a couple of days a week, which all ads up when you run every day.

Hopefully, the image above turned out and you can see yours truelly running into work this morning. It was really fun, running in the snow, which doesn't happen that often living in Chattanooga, TN.

An update as to shoes, it appears blogging does work, as my awesome wife bought me the Mizuno's I posted about earlier. To which, I didn't run in them this morning due to the snow.

I've been building a nice running base of around 30 miles a week. Next week, I'm going to kick it up a notch and do some speed work and more long distance routes.

My First Yoga

I wish I had more time to elaborate, but yesterday I went to my first yoga class. It was interesting to say the least. When it started out, I was a little leery, as the instructor was saying things like "let every vertebrae breath" "what do you want this yoga class to be for you" I would get in major trouble if I told you what I was thinking when she was saying this. But, in the end, I'm hooked. It felt like I ran for an hour, but better because my muscles were loose.

I can tell a big difference in running to work, while focusing on my time. I'm cautiously optimistic on my times for next year. As I stated before, I recently got a new mp3 player and will splurge on some new shoes next year. I think you are supposed to change shoes every 1,000 miles. I've had these shoes for about a year and have ran around 2,000 miles in them and my feet are feeling the pain!

I'll be running in Hawaii next week, so hopefully I'll be able to post some nice pics.

I've been on "vacation" for the past 4 days as everyone else in the United States. I put the word vacation in quotation marks due to the fact that it was spent entirely with family and required over 1,000 miles of driving - not exactly the two most relaxing endevours. Owell, in 3 days I will be in Hawaii, resting up for 2007.

This morning's run was fun, and at 39 degrees I got too hot with my sweatpants and sweatshirt.

On a separate note, my wife bought me a mp3 player with 8 gb of storage, which I am completely stoked about. My current mp3 player, sucks so bad it won't even make it through a long-run without replaying music I have already listened too.

Cheers,

Time Flies when you are having fun... Sunday night I reformated the entire blog and then I guess I forgot to save it so all is lost...thank goodness I did bookmark a lot of the information.

I have ran at least 6 miles everyday this week, and my legs are VERY SORE! Maybe I need to do something really crazy like stretch after I run.

I hope all is well, and staying reasonably healthy this holiday season!

There are about a billion bicycles in the world

There are about a billion bicycles in the world, twice as many as motorcars. Almost 400 million bicycles are in China.

Although Leonardo da Vinci drew some rough sketches of a contraption that looked like a bicycle, the Frenchman De Sivrac built the first bicycle-type vehicle in 1690. It was referred to as a hobbyhorse. However, it did not have pedals. Those were added in 1840 by a Scottish blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who is credited with inventing the real bicycle.

The bicycle as we know it today - with two wheels of the same size - looks almost exactly the same as one from 1900.

The world speed record on a bicycle is held by John Howard of the US. In 1985 he reached 245,08 km/h (154 mph), cycling in the slipstream of a specially designed car.

Air-filled tyres were used on bicycles before they were used on motorcars.

I recently had a friend who asked how he could lose 35 lbs. I (without any hesitation) told him to run a marathon. He (without hesitation) asked if there was anything else he could do since he can't run to the mailbox without being out of breath.

So I told him to quit drinking cokes. He was currently on his fifth coke (we were at dinner) and assuming there were about 150 calories in each glass and noting he had drank a couple earlier in the day, it was fairly rational to assume he had drank around 1,000 calories that day just in Coca-Cola!

I haven't heard any updates on whether he has taken the challenge, but another friend did take the challenge and lost 5 lbs the first 7 days!!!! I knew it would work but just didn't figure anybody would actually do it. Being a math geek I put some VERY interesting numbers together.

Can of Coca-Cola	140 calories
3 Cans a Day	420
420*365=	153,300
Isn't that crazy! 153,300 calories a year! 2,000 calorie a day diet
153,300/2000=	76.65
76.65/365=	21%

EVEN CRAZIER! If you stopped it would be like fasting for 76.65 days in the year or 21% of the year!!!!!

I found this neat calorie calculator for any food you can imagine

From SFBIKE.ORG

I slept in today, but ran in yesterday morning with a decent time. Hopefully, I can get in some long runs this weekend with the awesome weather we are having in Chattanooga, TN.

WOW! Last night I was pleasantly surprised by my new Runners World. It was the best Runners World I have ever read - jammed pack with training ideas and goals for 2007. I woke up this morning and not only did my 10K into work 10 minutes faster than normal - I ran an extra 2 miles I was so jazzed up!

And not that I need anything else to pump me up - I got on the Runners World web-site and I qualify for the "advanced training plan" Sounds good at least! You can find the plan here

They even had some race ideas to qualify for Boston for slow-pokes like me (e.g. an all down hill marathon in Utah).

Here are some links for anyone interested in Marathon Training!
http://www.halhigdon.com/marathon/Mar00index.htm

And to see what times you need to qualify for Boston:
http://www.bostonmarathon.org/BostonMarathon/Qualifying.asp

This week was extremely busy at work, so my apologies for not posting as much. I promise - 2007 - will be a banner year for postings, and hopefully for acomplishments as well.

I just found an awesome spreadsheet to track how many miles you bike throughout the year - you can download the spreadsheet by clicking here

Last night I scanned www.marathonguide.com and wrote down my athletic goals for the year:

1. To finish a marathon in under 4 hours
2. To finish a century

I have widdled the marathon decision down to the atlanta marathon, knoxville marathon, kentucky derby marathon, and/or the Country Music Marathon.

As for the century I'm sure I'll just do Chattanooga's three state, three mountain challenge. If anyone finds any good (e.g. free) marathon training guide's let me know!

Ok, this would be a non-even to my big internet marketing friend Chris Bradberry, but I was looking up a race I heard about in Chattanooga - Big Daddy's Bike and Run, and my blog was on th e first page of the google search! I thought it was pretty cool.

Even still, I didn't find anything about the race, even after calling a couple of cycling shops and a local gym, so leave a comment if anyone know's anything.

Cheers,

Sorry, about the time off. But it hasn't been exactly prime triathlon season and I've been giving my body a break as I transition from biking to work to running. My plan for 2007 is to do some marathons in the begining of the year then "maybe" a century and then hope into triathlons once summer is here.

Floyd Landis rolled out key elements of his defense against doping charges in an online presentation Thursday, several months before the cyclist is to present his case to an arbitration panel in hopes of keeping his Tour de France title.

Early Thursday, Landis posted a PowerPoint presentation prepared by Arnie Baker, a retired doctor and longtime coach and adviser, as well as several hundred pages of documents related to the charges on his Web site, http://www.floydlandis.com .

The presentation highlights what are said to be a number of inconsistencies in both the paperwork and the results provided by the French lab that reported elevated ratios of testosterone to epitestosterone in Landis' "A" and "B" samples, as well as the presence of synthetic testosterone.

"We have no reason to question the conclusions of the Chatenay-Malabry lab," Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said Thursday, referring to the town where the French lab is located.

The alleged inconsistencies were part of a motion that the cyclist's attorney, Howard Jacobs, submitted to a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency review board seeking to have the case dismissed. That request was denied last month.

Landis is scheduled to present his formal appeal to a panel from the American Arbitration Society in late January or early February. He also could appeal to the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Tour de France organizers already have said they no longer consider Landis the champion, elevating second-place finisher Oscar Pereiro instead. They also planned to begin proceedings to formally strip Landis' title when the appeals process is exhausted.

Landis' positive test results were reported less than a week after his triumphant July 23 ride into Paris. In the days following the report, Landis contended a number of factors could have triggered the result _ thyroid medication, cortisone injections for a damaged hip, his tendency to produce too much testosterone, even some whiskey he drank the night before his stirring win in Stage 17.

In the online presentation, Landis' experts now contend the French lab erred in its analysis, incorrectly labeled samples and ignored the World Anti-Doping Agency testing standards and chain-of-custody protocol, among numerous other mistakes.

"The whole process has been full of errors," Baker concludes at one point in the presentation.

USADA rules prohibit the agency from commenting on an active case.