Buckle down for Boston

The holiday time I had with my family flew by this past week. My gift and blessing I have is my children. I enjoy watching them grow and become who they are day by day. I am declaring the "people of the year" award goes to my children. For my oldest son serving in the Navy for his hard work and service. My other son serving as a Marine who recently came home from Iraq completing his third tour. For my daughter who graduated this December with a Masters in Physical Therapy (at the age of 22). And finally for my youngest son who I am glad to see enjoy life as an 8 year old kid should.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas time with your family and friends. We sure did.



My official 16 week Boston marathon training schedule begins today. Today's workout was a 2 mile easy jog followed with 3 X 1 mile fast runs with only 1 minute rest between each mile. I finished with a 1 mile easy jog. Each mile was run in 5:56 per mile pace.

Welcome Home!

My son arrived safely home today after serving his third tour in Iraq. We love you and are glad to have you home.

Lego Room

For the past two 2 weeks we have been preparing, demolishing, and installing walls in one of the kids bedrooms. We decided to make an official "Lego room" for the kids which we hope would restrict the thousands and thousands of Lego pieces that have been strewn over the house to one room.

This wall has got to go.













Ok, lets knock it out.

It was a mess to get the wall out!


We made a hole in the closet wall too.







Framing it in.


Insulating the new walls.


Dry walling.



The closet has a dresser in the wall.


The bed and shelf are in the wall.


And we did it!





We were able to gain an additional 40 square feet of floor space by knocking out the walls and placing some furniture in the knock outs. All so the kids can have a lego room.

Interlude

I love this game. I'm always looking for someone who is up for the challenge.

I have been doing some home remodeling and will post my results this weekend with some pictures.

Not much of a gadget guy.

I have no cell phone, palm pilot, ipod, or whatever electronic gizmo out there, but yet I work as a computer network administrator. It's not that I fear the use of those things, but the cost of any of them does not justify the need.

What I do have is a polar s120 heart rate monitor watch of which I only use the time and distance and mile splits for my runs. I think I only used the heart rate monitor a couple times just to see how much my heart beats while I run a 6 or 7 minute mile pace.

For my bike I have a cheap computer that only displays time, speed, and distance and that's all I needed or wanted. Until recently, I came to realize all my workouts on the bike trainer where I use DVD's and online workouts, all indicate a cadence to train at. I decided to buy a Cateye Astrale 8 for 30 bucks so that I can train using cadence to monitor my performance and progress. I think it'll be worth the 30 bucks. If anything it'll make my workouts more honest.

Today's workout from fasttendem.com had most of the spinning at 100 RPM and let me tell you if anyone can keep up with that pace has to be a tour de France champion. I think I kept most of the RPM's around 80, which was hard enough, and boy did I sweat. The numbers I gathered from today's bike workout were as follows: Max Speed = 25.7 MPH, Av Speed = 18.0 MPH, Trip Distance = 18 miles, and Elapsed Time = 1 hour. I wish the computer would have some cadence results. Maybe the higher priced ones have it but for now I'm happy with what I have. And hey, I like all the new fancy numbers that are displayed on my new bike computer.