Hello World! We still exist! It's been a while since I last posted ... basically missed the entire summer of activities, but fear not, things have been quite busy! To quickly recap the last 5 months since our trip to Scotland for the Edinburgh half marathon and Cheese Rolling event --

  • Boilermaker 15k - Ellie and I set a 15k PR at our favorite race in Utica, New York. We ran this year in 1:36:25 at a pace of 10:13 per mile. We were SUPER excited by this finish time and for the first time ever at this race, I felt good enough afterward to have a Utica Club. This was a sizable improvement from previous years where I blacked out from heat exhaustion, and had a case of runner's stomach in the final two miles (2019 race we did in 1:52:29)... so that's a wild improvement!
  • A 5K race in Belmont, MA to celebrate Alice's very first 5k race ever! She absolutely crushed it and was such a good sport the entire time -- especially when we forced her to keep running past the Pizza place where she assured us several times that they had both pizza and a bathroom.
  • Several long bike rides with Ellie around all of Grand Island as well as up to Niagara Falls and back. This was a great way to spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons for some long quality time together.
  • Triathlon Training - Sadly this year I didn't make it on the start line for any Triathlons. We were scheduled to race up in Maine on the weekend of my cousins wedding but due to some untimely cases of covid in the training group we decided to call it. This turned out for the best because we had an even more awesome time at the wedding without having completely destroyed ourselves that morning.
  • Swim training at the Aquatic Center has started! In my first ever effort to get better at swimming, I am now in a weekly swim group on Friday mornings at 6:30 am... lol... I've already seen a huge difference in my technique and I'm excited to see what the next 4 weeks will do.

My goal for the last couple months of the year is to really build up a solid base platform of fitness and focus on my nutrition and flexibility (shoulders and ankles especially). I've started to really analyze my data over the past few years and will do a post about the main reason I haven't seen a ton of progress in sustained fitness, but more on that later!

One last note -- I know the server has been less than stable and some images and links might not work. I'm working through some of the problems but my time is sadly very limited so for at least the next 6 to 8 months while I wrap up the ole phd bare with me on that

Cheers!