I come from the land of the ice and snow (and rain... and mugginess)

Foreboding?

More winter.

Sigh.

Actually, Sunday I ran in shorts and a tank top as it was almost 60° in good old East TN. Of course Monday morning it was 32° and raining... so yeah. If only the weather would make up it's dumb mind I'd be able to adjust and 'dig in" instead of waking up to a guessing game every morning. Like last week for example, when I look outside the house and am greeted by this...

Soo...my road is out there :)

And of course being the super prepared fellow that I am, I then had to traverse the tundra to get THE LAST EGGS EVER at the grocery store (which was out of banana's... so unlucky for me)

Driving in the snow in TN... you'd think it was serious business by the fact
that it took me an hour to travel a mile in the bumper to bumper traffic.

Of course every time the weather does a 180 like that it really makes getting in a solid training session tough. I try to mitigate the damage by having my rollers and treadmill in the house ready to go... but you really can't do any "fast" running on a sears home treadmill (a $10 one at that) and I can only take so much time (usually an hour) on the rollers before I start losing focus... and of course swimming is unfortunately out since a 30 minute commute in the above is not on my list of things to do.

Swimming has actually been going well overall however. I've been fine tuning my stroke and despite having a little bit more back/shoulder soreness (a good kind) the times are going down. I'm still not in the 1:15/100 range on my longer sets, but I'm hopeful once I start adding more volume back in.

As for the Zipp, It's finally fully together again (although it's dirty and in need of some final tuning on the cockpit positioning.) so next week I should have some good before // after pictures. There was a minor snag in the rear brake installation... mainly... it's a giant pain in the butt. It's not the Omega's fault (although some of the things that make installing it easy on most bikes make it a real pain on the 2001.) but I'm not sure how you get this thing even remotely well setup without a friend to help you out. Also, unfortunately I will also have to live with the fact that the pads are "toed" just a slight bit too much and no amount of adjustment was able to get them flush. I could have shaved part of the pads, but I'm not terribly worried about it... The thing actually stops now, which is a huge upgrade from the original Zipp brake.

Hey the bike actually stops! Hurray!

Of course as soon as one thing is near completion, another thing comes up. Last night in our spin class I managed to do something to my bottom bracket (all those watts I am pumping out I guess...hahaha) so now the Cannondale has to have some repair work done. Hopefully some re-greasing will be the fix, but I won't know until I get it apart. Sigh. It's always something.

Besides that, my Corvette is sitting in a couple of pieces as well, waiting on a new intake, air box and headers... The intake and air box shouldn't be much of a project, but I may end up letting someone with a bit more experience do the headers ;) I won't bore you all with my car nerdiness though.

Anyways, a little under two months until the Knoxville 1/2 marathon, where I'll get a good idea of where my run fitness is compared to last year. That's goal #1. Considering I've had a couple of good 140-160mi months and no injuries (fingers crossed) I'm hoping this will be a really good year for my run...but we'll see.

As always, thanks for reading. I know I'm a jumbled mess of thoughts, so I appreciate you taking the time to sort through it for any nuggets of insight I might have.

-Christopher Morelock