My 'Off Season'

In risk of stating the obvious, um, it's NOVEMBER. Time flies when you're having fun! Though I guess it would not be an untruth to say that Oct 1 seems like absolutely forever ago. Like seriously, wasn't it like a year ago that I was packing and getting ready to go to Kona? Had to have been at least a year.

So I'm not really employing 'off-season' in a typical sense of 'off-season' the way some people interpret 'off-season'. Let's face it, since it doesn't get cold and snow here in Hawaii, we don't feel the need to hibernate like some athletes who live in normal winter climates do. We still have some races coming up in the next couple months and while I would not say I'm taking them too seriously, I do like it that they give me a bit of a sense of purpose in training... or maybe I'm just using them as an excuse to train, which is what I really like to do... and I have to say, training for the sake of training because I simply enjoy training is awesome for me. It's been such a relief to go out and just run or swim... and just run or swim and not (over)analyze how every particular workout would/could/should affect a specific race performance. And I feel the freedom to experiment with different types of training too which is rather fun. For example, Nalani and I went out running this morning and at the end as we were finishing up and feeling like we had worthless wet noodles for legs, I commented that we had done this to ourselves with a total of 7 minutes of ridiculously hard work. 7 minutes. Amazing. But cool.

Another thing I'm thinking about employing is a big swim block (Lucho gave me the thumbs up on that today which definitely means we should do it)... thinking about trying to see if we can put together an 8 day block with ~40-50K of swimming... incorporating some double days and some long swim days... now would be the time to do that and benefit from it I think, and shoot, I just think it would be a fun/cool challenge. Especially given that Nalani is game to play too. Of course she is! I think we will start that next Wednesday. Stay tuned and I'll tell you more about it as I figure it out.

So I guess you could say that while my 'off-season' isn't a traditional physical break, it is most certainly a mental break because the way I am viewing my swimming and running right now. It's just fun. Even if it's a lot. And some of it is hard. (Notice I didn't mention my bike at all... that would be because I'm not spending much time on it. That is also the reason I am actually enjoying all this rain we are getting! Running in the rain = awesome. Biking in the rain right now would make me pissy. And I am not doing anything in my 'off-season' that would make me pissy.)

And in other fun news, check this video out. I got my TRX back out (yes it hangs in my living room) and Moana is enjoying it every bit as much as me. It's like an indoor swing set that requires a strong core.