Time flies...

I can't believe how fast time is flying by! It's almost the end of January and I feel like the year just began. This blogging thing is funny because I know a few people read here so if I'm absent for a while I feel like I need to apologize and say that I've been away and I've been busy...on the other hand I think "well, who really cares?" I hate to keep doing breakdowns of what I'm up to but it always seems like the easiest thing to do in order to give a little picture of what my life is at the moment.

THE POOL: I promised myself I'd be going twice a week and twice a week it is! I don't always do a lot while I'm actually in the pool, but I have the excuse that I'm working on my "technique". (Ha!). Anyway, it's doing wonders for my back so I am very happy about that. Also I have a training secret: I have a "monday" partner (Tiziana) and a "thursday" partner (Linda). It is set in stone that we meet at the pool so I have no way to back out, someone is counting on me being there. I do this also for my Sunday workouts (biking or running). It's always a good idea to have training partners that keep you on your toes.

MY TRAINING: The running is going good. Not great but good. I did my first key race of the season last sunday, a 12 km near my house. I completed it. Enough said. The swimming is going good. Not great but good. The bike is non existent and I have to change that really really fast. I went out for a 30km spin yesterday but I really should be on the bike twice a week at this point. I now declare that I will get on the bike twice a week. For all of those keeping tally that's two swims, two bikes and three runs per week. Go!

MY BUSINESS: I've doubled my clients in the last two months so I am really busy with that. Next week I have two women's running clinics that start off in an area near Treviso. I've very excited about it since this is a new area for me, meaning I've never done clinics in this area. If you want to read about my clinics in english you can go here. I just feel SO optimistic this year, I can't wait for each day to start...

MY RHYTHMS:...and in my can't wait for the day to start mood I've taken to getting up at 4.30 a.m. - It sounds freaky, but I love it. First of all I love having some time to myself in the morning. Olly is a big girl now and stays up late so I almost always have someone around. I love my alone time, need my alone time. I get up, meditate for a few minutes, make a cup of tea, then I start the day writing. The time actually flies by since I have to get the kids up at 6.30. I bring them to school then get back home at around 9.00 where I can either continue working or go train guiltlessly since I've already put in a few hours of work. The most difficult part of the day is going to bed early. It pretty much means no television but I'm okay with that. This morning Piero got up with me and then we had breakfast and some time together just talking before he took off for Rome where he will be until Friday. Anyway, if ten years ago someone had said that I'd be up at 4.30 a.m. to work I would have laughed in their face. Look at me now!

NYCM, here we come!

I was contacted a few months ago by a guy that had participated in my "My First Marathon". He wanted me to create a similar running program for his clients that would start running from scratch and work towards completing the New York City Marathon. We had our first meeting on Saturday. The spirit of the group was fantastic! Lots of fun people, very positive attitudes. To start out we filmed them running and then over the weekend wrote out individual video analysis for each runner. We showed them a few of the exercises that they'd find on their training plans in the first month also. Last night I finished writing out all the training plans and then I'll be calling each one next week to see how they're adapting to their schedules. The word must have gotten around at what a fun time we had saturday because three more people called yesterday to join the group. I guess I'll be going to New York in november! I love an excuse to travel, especially to the States.

In the "my kid's a freak" topic, Evan is learning to spell. Now, he knows all the letters in the alphabet so the other day we got take out pizza and on the box PIZZA was written across the top. Ev said "look Ma! P-I-Z-Z-A". I told him it spelled pizza. He got it. He's now memorized how to spell his Evan, pizza, casa, mamma, papa, and Scarabeo (don't ask...). Piero has fun saying a word he knows and telling him it's spelled sbzraq. Evan will correct you and give the right spelling. Very very cute...

Scattered thoughts for the week

This is Evan making his "sad" face, though you can see his eyes still smile. After two week away from nursery school it's been really hard to get him to go back in the morning. He puts on a little crying scene and pronounces in english "I want to stay home with yoooooouuuuuu..." If he says it in english you know he's trying to tug on those heart strings.
I haven't had time to write a proper entry so he's what's been going on this week:

- I've made good on my promise to go swimming twice a week. I almost didn't make it...The week started on monday the first and by thursday evening I still hadn't gone. On Friday I said to myself that I didn't have to do a long and strenuous workout, I just had to GET IN THE DANG POOL! So that's what I did. I ended up with only 1000 metres but half of it was balancing drills that takes a lot of time up. (That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it). Saturday I went again with Linda and all was good with 1600mts. This week I already went on monday and I have a planned workout tomorrow, so now it's a habit. Right?

- Watching all the weight loss blogs after the new year. I will scream the next time I see another person confuse "lose" and "loose". It drives me crazy!

- Sunday Linda and I did a really fun workout: 30' + 10 x (1' slow/30" fast) + 3 x 1km @ 160 bpm. Again, fun, but I have a lot of work cut out for me before I can run the Roma Ostia Half Marathon.

- Evan is seeing letters everywhere: license plates, road signs, packages. His new "game" is to open up a Word page and ask me to spell words to him while he finds the letters. I found a great site for tracing paper, to teach him to write his name. At the moment he can type it, but not write it. Computerized kid...

- I've been concentrating on how I chew my food. Don't laugh, I'm not being a freak. I love to cook and I do cook our meals at both lunch and dinner. So I'll spend like an hour preparing dinner, set the table and have everybody sit down. Ten minutes later the whole affair is over. Piero swallows his meal whole and he can really shovel it in. I have to slow Evan down all the time and have caught him taking on the same habits. Olly is better but she eats a quarter of what everybody else does so the time thing evens out. I'm somewhere between everybody but it is something I thought I ought to pay attention to. Here's what I've learned: 1- a ten minute meal now takes forty minutes. Twice this week I've ended up eating by myself since everybody else still finishes in ten minutes. 2) I'm more satisfied at the end of the meal, feeling fuller 3) Fruit and vegetables really DO contain a lot of water. If you chew long enough you end up with just a little pulp. 4) Foods that require essentially no chewing: couscous, ground beef, carrot cake. Who would've known?

An opportunity for gratitude

Yesterday Olly and I got in the car to bring her to the train station. She was going to Milan to spend the night at her father's, but unofficially she was going to spend the day with her new beau. I knew this because her father works until about 7.00 p.m. and she was itching to leave by 10.00 a.m. so it wasn't hard to put 2 + 2 together. Plus, she was willing to travel by train. Until today we've had a decade full of her father and I meeting half way between Milan and Modena any time she wanted to see him. On my part that's 120 round trip kilometres plus the time getting it all together, probably about two hours total if there is no traffic. The train? A seven minute car ride to the train station, a one hour twenty minute train ride for her.

We get in the car, I turn the key and it makes this "mpehra..." sound, and then nothing. I knew what it was right away. The battery was dead. Olivia panicked. "Oh no!! I'm going to miss the train!". She had tears in her eyes. I'm more practical (comes with age) so I just told her that there was nothing we could do in that moment about the car but we could see when the next train was. We looked at the schedule and saw that we had an hour and a half to get it together. She suggested a cab, I suggested one bike, four legs. I won. I had about ten errands to do that morning and I needed to be mobile after I dropped her off at the train station. Plus, it's only a three kilometre trek from our house, so off we went.

After I put her on the train I had to deal with the car. Piero is away for a week so no male to take care of the mechanical stuff for me. Now, I don't know anything about cars. I can pump my own gas, but that is truly the extent of my mechanical knowledge. There is a car mechanic just three hundred metres from our house but he is a THIEF! He totally overcharges on anything he does plus he surcharges any parts. Yes, he would walk over to my house and tow the car off and fix it, but he'd be charging me a ton of money for the whole thing. I knew that it'd take him about ten minutes to change that battery and he'd charge me $200.00 for the operation. I don't know where it came from but my first thought was "can't I do this myself?" Now where did I ever come up with that idea?

My across the court mechanical type neighbor Andrea confirmed to me that it was a simple operation. He threw in "if you have trouble just call me". It was comforting to know that I had a backup. I asked him where I could buy a new battery and he told me that just behind the bowling alley not more than three minutes from our house was a battery store. It was like a dream. I mean, I've lived in this neighborhood for eight years and not more than three hundred metres away is this huge store where he sells nothing but batteries of every type.

The first thing I had to do was get the old battery out and remember the sequence with which I took it apart. This actually wasn't too difficult. The hardest part was getting the bolts to turn because they'd been in place forever. I also have to admit that I Googled "how-to-change-a-car-battery" and viewed a few sites that confirmed how simple it was. The only thing that I messed up was taking off the negative before the positive (or the other way around), but I'm still alive to testify that it wasn't a problem. Andrea also popped outside in the crucial moment when I couldn't get this thingy with the spark plugs that was screwed on top of the battery off because the bolt wouldn't budge. After a mere fifteen minutes I had my old battery out. Now how to transport it to the shop and trade it for the new one...the baby jogger! I got a few stares from people seeing me pushing the battery in a stroller, but I'm not that self concious so I didn't care. The salesman looked at my battery and asked if I wanted the same type or a new "no maintenance" one. I went with latter because I found out that in all these years I was supposed to check the water levels every year. Who knew? Equipped with my new "no maintenance" battery I wouldn't have to ever worry about that again. (I'm laughing on that last sentence...I've never worried about it in the first place 'cause I didn't even KNOW about it...sigh...)

With my new battery back in the baby jogger, I headed back home. In front of the open hood I did have a moment of hesitation. "Maybe I should just wait for Andrea...". "No, you do it." That was still me talking..."Just give it a try." Getting the new battery in was ten times easier than taking it out. Then, like a true mechanic, with the hood still up I went and tested the engine. Unlike any other mechanic, I gave out a little squeal when it turned over in an instant. I CHANGED A CAR BATTERY ALL BY MYSELF!

I have a lot to be grateful for in this experience. Don't laugh, it's my brand spankin' new 2007 point of view:

- I am grateful that I will be able to cut out a lot of driving by sending Olly on the train. Now we know that she can travel with no problem. It's ecologically more sound and will save both parties time and money.

- I am grateful that my mechanic has overcharged me all of these years because I would have never been inspired to change the car battery myself if he hadn't.

- I want to thank my old battery for nine years of service even if I never once checked its' water levels (though I'm sure that someone did at some point).

- I am grateful for the whole experience because it has opened up a whole world of mechanical possibilities to me: my bike, the house, my bike, my car, my bike. (I need to work on my bike but have always taken it to a bike mechanic. Hey, I can change a car battery, can't I change some bikey thingy?)

Day one...actually Day two...of 2007

I was going to post yesterday, being it the first day of the year and all, but I got too busy doing nothing. When you have the entire day to screw around with, it is really easy to watch the hours fly by. There are a few things I did get done though:

- I tried to solve the JBMommy problem with my fonts and learned all about CSS style sheets! I thought I could go into the html and just change the font colour from dark grey to black or the font size, but I couldn't find them. This led me to actually looking at what the heck CSS was and why I should learn more about it. Anyway, the CSS sheet is on an external site which I can't get to so we'll all just have to live with these fonts until I can change my site over...which is going to take a long time because the Beta version of Blogger doesn't accept a lot of the old stuff and you pretty much have to use their templates. For me to do a new site is really fun and exciting (really!) but it's a long learning process for me (read: I'm really slow in understanding new concepts...) and I don't have a lot of time to waste right now. We'll get there soon though!

- I sorted out the socks. I took all the stray socks from the laundry basket + all the stray socks from three socks drawers + all the socks from the stray sock drawer. I made one huge three foot pile and started to pair them up. I came up with 146 pairs of socks and only 15 stray socks left over. This took me an hour and a half to do. The fifteen stray socks left have one week to find their partners or else they outta here!

- I did part two of the "Get Your Geek On" Triathlon. I was supposed to do the run afterwards but it was cold out and rather grey and sort of depressing. I decided to skip it and do the five km timed run today...later...

31-12-06

I had a wonderful Christmas. I can't pinpoint any one thing that happened or tell you about any fantastics gifts that I received. I just was really happy all the time. First we had a Christmas at home in Modena because Olly was going to be in Viareggio with her father's side of the family. This is the first time we've ever done this and I will be doing it in the following years. We've always either been at Piero's family's house or Olly away. This year I told P that I absolutely wanted our family to have a Christmas first. We all loved it.

The next day P and Evan and I drove the 800 kms down to Puglia. It took us a record thirteen hours to get there. There was so much traffic and accidents it was ridiculous. We had prepared well though so we listened to lots of Christmas music and then a reading of the "Jungle Book" on CD for Evan. Actually we listened to it five times in a row...Evan napped for about four hours midway through the trip. He was so good I couldn't believe it. He never complained or cryed or anything! Just went with the flow with us.

In Puglia we have a second house but we convinced Evan to sleep over at Grandma's house , which gave us the opportunity to do a lot of unmuffled, unscheduled, spontaneous love making.

That in itself was a Christmas celebration!

The 26th is still a holiday over in Italy. Piero asked me what I wanted to do and I said I really wanted to go to the beach, have a coffee and watch the sunset. We brought a really good friend with us and set out towards the shore. About two miles from the beach we stopped to look at a property that's up for sale. We know that we don't want to stay in Modena forever and will be looking to move someplace else in about five years, but we haven't decided where yet. One thing we agree on is that it has to be near a beach. The property we look at was ridiculously expensive and way out of our budget, but it was nice to see and I loved the view from that side windows:

Part of my being happy was in not having anything "to do". Since I am self employed I could work like 24 hours a day. Somehow I never feel like I deserve time off, but I do. That is something that is going to change in 2007: more specific time off where I turn the computer off and just spend time doing nothing with my family. Or something with my family. Or just going to the beach to watch the sunset.

2006 was a good year. It was emotionally difficult but I solved a lot of problems that I'd had for years. No, nothing that I want to expose to the internet world, but problems that I had been pushing back, hoping they would go away on their own. When it was quite obvious they wouldn't, I am proud to say I dove straight into dealing with them. I feel like this year was a transition time, gearing up for what is to come. I feel extremely positive. I am so content it makes me break into a spontaneous smile just writing this sentence. 2007 is going to be a fantastic year. I can feel it.

Gotta go gotta go gotta go....

I had a FANTASTIC Christmas...I just haven't had the time to post anything...but I will soon...I'm trying to set up the new site and in doing so came across this FANTASTIC tool.
It's called the Color Palette Generator. Very Cool. All you do is upload a photo and it then spits out a color palette that matches your photo. Try it!

OMG

If you knew me well you'd know that I am a rather unpolitical person. I still vote (by mail), but I don't get into debating anything or keep up on how many seats the democrats or republicans have in congress. But I was appalled this morning when I read this article. It makes me totally sick. The world is so screwed up sometimes...

R.I.P.

Yesterday I was able to talk Olivia into watching Evan for an hour while I went running. Actually, money talks...she accepted when she realized that I was paying her. "Watching" is also a big word since when I got home I found him in front of the television looking at cartoons and her reading a book in her room...anyway, I was able to run for an hour and ten minutes which was great. I went on a route near my house called "Tre Olmi" (three elms, still gotta search for where those trees are). It's a popular route for both runners and cyclists because there is not a lot of traffic and it's a perfect four km rectangle. Since Baldini lives five miles from here and runs all of his quality workouts on this road, they measured it with one of those accuracy wheels. Anyway, halfway through the workout, on the side of the road I found this wheel. So funny, could just imagine the scene...it says: "Veteran of successes from all around the world, during a training in balance devastatingly fell to the ground - causing general hilarity among all - His friends "will remember it!"

Worry Not!

I wrote the Candia organization and asked them to send me the bike route altitudes. Though I still have to train for the race, if I don't day-dream I should be okay. It's flat as a pancake and actually sort of unchallenging. I'm going to have to also be patient with all the drafting that I'll be seeing. Maybe I'll make a "No Draft" sign to sew on the back of my bike outfit!

I went out for 50 minutes of pain free run today. My left leg is no longer bothering me. There is a strange pain when I breath on the left side of my chest, but anything different from what I'm used to is welcome. I went to the exercise class yesterday where the instructor had us do a ton of situps. I have no ab muscles and the minute I do one teeny weeny sit up I start to cramp. I'm so pathetic...My glutes are getting stronger though, I just have to do some more work in the tummy area.

Bye!

Winter Wakeup

The organization for the Candia (Long?) Triathlon came out with the rules and regulations. They're giving a four and a half hour cutoff for the combo on the swim (3km) and bike (80km). This basically means that I have to haul a** on the bike if I want to make the cutoff time. Good thing I have another five months to train for it! It's a good goal, I just need to sit down and map out how I'm going to go about doing this. I am inspired by the time rather than discouraged. This is good :-)

Festa della Madonna

Here in Italy today is a national holiday, the Immaculate Conception or Festa della Madonna. Banks and schools are closed, but there is mad holiday shopping going on. It's also my Dad's 75th birthday (Happy Birthday Dad!). Yesterday I went to an Arts and Crafts Christmas fair near my house. I did a lot of looking, skipped all the dolls and Christmas balls and then ended up at just one booth that had a ton of rubber stamps. I got two sets of letters, five colours of ink and this angel hole puncher. This could turn into a very expensive hobby. When I got home and showed them to the kids they went CRAZY over the letters. Evan was spelling his name quite well E-V-A-N until mid afternoon when he decided he really liked "S" and "M" too. So now he insists that his name is spelled E-S-A-M. I tried argueing with him about if for about five minutes and then gave up. Esam, pronounced Evan.

On the athletic side of my life I went swimming yesterday and repeated the 10 x 100mt workout I had done two months ago. I've gone from 2'10" to 1'55"/1'59" - yay me! And that's only on swimming once a week. Just think what I could do if I actually started, I don't know, training? I'll get there!

Wrap me up in a red bow!

I received an email from one of the guys that I had trained for the Venicemarathon this year. I met him at the expo before the race with his wife and little girl. They were so nice, I really enjoyed talking to them and hearing the non running wife's tales about following her husbands training. He had a really good race for his first marathon too - 3h31'.
So today he wrote me to let me know that for Christmas his wife had given him six months of training with me. I am someone's Christmas present. That thought makes me smile :-)

A REAL bike workout

Outdoor bike workout

Outside temperature: 7 c° (44 f)
Total distance: 38km (23 m)
Clothing worn: two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, balaclava, skull cap, two long sleeve N1ke tees, winter cycle pants, winter cycle jacket.
Number of other cyclists seen: 12
Food consumed: 1 litre water, half a powerbar, one really delicious and piping hot cappuccino at the turnaround.
Money paid to babysitter: 18,00 euro (23 usd)

Piero is in Rome again and Evan is still sick. I had to get out of the house or I was going to go crazy. It's cold outside but no ice on the road so I thought I'd go for a spin on the bike. It was great! I don't know if I can keep it up (totally depends on the road conditions) but I'd love to be able to go out biking at least once a week. The other two workouts during the week could be done on the trainer, but I'd go nuts if I had to do it all winter long. I have to get those thingys that cover your shoes and I'll be set. Actually, if the roads did get too cold I could use the mountain bike since it has those big fat tires. Anyway, good workout :-)

Swim workout...sort of...

This morning I was able to find time to go swimming with Linda. I LOVE swimming with her since it seems to make the whole workout pass by faster...which it doesn't because we yack, yack, yack so much that we spend half the time chatting, which doubles the time in the pool. Sometimes we actually only start swimming again because we get cold talking while not moving...Oh, we're good on the run though!
I'm going to start using some workouts from this site. The workout timings are generated from parameters that you put in. I had already put in my times for 10 x 100mts but nothing else so I decided to time myself for the 3 x 500mts. They came out 11'49" - 11'42" - 11'44" which was actually not terrible for me. I thought I'd do worse. I was swimming slow and without much purpose so I feel pretty confident that I can improve once I have a little more swim direction.

Olivia and I went grocery shopping after school today. It was nice to go around with her and look at all the Christmas stuff they were putting out. She was sure to point out to me all things that I could buy her for Christmas. So many choices, so little money...but I will buy her one nice thing. She really deserves it :-)

The "How to make POLENTA" entry

A few weeks ago I switched from counting points on Weight Watchers to their Core Program. I don't know if it will work (still too early to say), but I have to say that I love it. They give you a list of foods that you can eat until you are satisfied (big key here) plus an extra 35 points during the week to play with. This works well for my triathlon and marathon training since a) I no longer feel like I'm starving myself to lose a few pounds b) the foods on the list is what I normally eat anyway.

So one of the foods on the WW Core list that you may eat when you want is...Polenta! I go on theWW boards every a few times a week and was sad to see that many of my fellow Americans have no idea what polenta is or (gasp) buy it ready made at the supermarket. So, I'm going tshow you how easy and inexpensive it is to make.

The first thing you want to do is go and buy a box or bag of polenta. It usually comes in 16 or 32 oz. When you open the box up you'll see that it is actually ground corn. It will be roughly ground up, not fine like flour. Don't be surprised to see little brown specks in it, especially if you buy an organic type. Please don't buy the "instant" kind. It's not the same. Sort of the same difference in buying instant oatmeal or steel cut oats.

Take a big pot, like a soup pot, and fill it with two litres (or 1 and 3/4 quarts) of luke warm water.

Add one tablespoon of rock salt.

Measure out 500 grams (or 1 lbs, 1 oz.) of dry polenta and slowly drizzle it into the WARM water while stirring. You want to then turn your stove on and cook it (moderate heat) while stirring it with a wood spoon at least every minute. In this first photo it's really watery and milky looking...

...this is five minutes later and it's already starting to firm up...

Geez...I'm such a bad photographer! Anyway, this is about fifteen minutes into cooking and you can see that it's getting clumpy. At this point you can put the flame (or electric coil?) on low and go back and stir it every few minutes so that it doesn't burn, but it still needs to cook another ten or fifteen minutes. You will know when it is done because when you stir, the polenta comes off and away from the bottom or sides of the pot. From start to finish this should be about 30 minutes. Now that it's cooked you want to take the whole pot of it...

...and spread it out on a clean table. You can just use a wood spoon to spread it out, it should be about an inch and a half high. In some rustic restaurants in the northern Italy they'll put the polenta directly on your table and have you eat off of it. At home you can either take a serving right there while it's hot, put it in a bowl and put your favorite topping on it OR you can wait until its cool and firm and...

...Grill it. I don't use any oil when I grill pieces of polenta but sometimes I'll put on a little olive oil once they're done. You can top them with - pieces of melted cheese - tomato sauce - vegetable sauces - cut up pieces and put them in salads.

If you have any leftover (or you want to cook it up to use for grilling later) just slice it into big chunks, put into plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge. It'll keep for up to a week, but I've never actually had it last that long since we eat it up pretty fast! Buon Appetito!!

Ugh. It's Monday.

BOTH kids are now sick and I may go crazy doing ten loads of wash a day (one for every time one of them unloads the nothing they have in their stomach...). The only good news to this is that Piero and I seem immune to whatever strain of virus this is so we can give our full attention to the children.

I went and had an MRI on my back this afternoon. After seeing the x-rays I don't think that they'll find anything different here but it was already ordered and it only cost me twenty-five dollars so I had it done. I'll have the results ready on Thursday. It wasn't painful doing the actual process. It was just this big machine taking pictures, but I had to lie on my back in the same position without moving for forty minutes. My back hurt like crazy and then my left leg (the one that hurts more) fell asleep. It'll be cool to have the pictures though, certainly worth all the pain!

I was able to get a quick run in (see sidebar) which will save me from going house crazy...

Poll

I went to Firenze yesterday on occasion of the Firenze Marathon. I didn't actually stay and watch the race, I just went to the expo cause I can get every business contact that I have under one roof and take care of business meetings in one big swoop. I do love Firenze, I spent a good twelve years of my life there...loads of fun, loads of boyfriends, my entire twenties and the first part of my thirties. I still have a lot of friends there so it's always nice to catch up with people. I don't regret moving away because the traffic there is hideous. I mean the whole town is pretty flat, you'd think that there'd be more bicycles use. I know I always used one, even if I lived on the hill above the Ponte Vecchio. Anyway, I had my second encounter with a live Tri Drs member! Lee Crumbaugh! We met for coffee, talked away an hour and then went to the expo together. I saw that he didn't have as good a race as he had hoped for :-( - Oh well.

Evan was with me and on the way home he threw up in the car in the first ten minutes of a ninety minute drive. I had a change of clothes so I did that on the side of the road and then had to have him ride with me up front since the back was no longer usable. We got home and then he started going to the bathroom. Continuously. Today he's heaved about twelve times, can't even keep water down. He seems okay now, he ate a banana few hours ago and that seems to be sticking. He'll be home this next week though so I've already lined up a babysitter for a few exercise sessions.

So, let's get to the title of this entry! I started "five in five" as a guerilla blog, to be put up and then taken down as soon as I got to my original goal. But then I kept blogging and this blog turned into something other than my losing five kgs (which I have to RE-do btw...). So. Poll.

a) Do I keep the Five in Five title and just keep blogging (thus keeping also all the archives)
b) Do I change it to a brand new blog with a more appropriate title (already chosen!) but losing those archives?

On one hand I love new changes, on the other I hate cutting with the past.
Cast your vote please!

Turnaround

So I woke up this morning and the sky was turquiose blue. Hey! Did I make that happen? It's amazing what a change of attitude can do. I brought Olly to school and then brought Evan to school and then rushed off to go get my new Ipod! Last April my best buddy, triathlon pal IronMauro presented me with an Ipod as a gift! I was moved to tears as it was totally unexpected and overgenerous. Now I know I'm a freak (because my daughter tells me this once a day) but I never use my ipod for music. I use it for listening to podcasts and audio books. I can clean the whole house effortlessly listening to a talk show, or go running with Zen and the Art of Triathlon. By the way, with so many triathlon podcasts out there, I had to sort through a lot of them before I settled on this one. My dad was a radio broadcaster (aka as a d.j.!), plus he taught voice for broadcasters for over forty years so whenever someone is "on the air" saying "hmmm, uhhhh, mmmmm, so, so, mmmm...) I just cringe. Brett (zen etc) did that at the begining but he seems to have gotten better at it and eliminated a lot of dead air time.

So the thing I love about this moment of my triathlon training is the dreaming. While I still sit here with ten extra pounds bolting me to the ground and I haven't even really taken a spin on the bike outside in like a month...I dream of myself going really fast and feeling really light and having a great time! Dream on...

Like yesterday, I couldn't find a photo that pertained to this post so I put up Evan's ten month old feet! Piero had to do a presentation for N1ke when they came out with the Free shoe so I told him that the best example of a human using their feet is in babies before their first birthday. They use them like they're hands. I call(ed) him "my little monkey". So cute!

Snap-Out-Of-It!

I gotta snap out of it...gotta gotta gotta... snap-out-of-it! Winter is here and it's grey outside. So grey that I have to have the lights on in the house in the morning because it's too dark to see. So grey that I wish I had one of those light lamps to make me peppy again instead of depressed. So grey that all I want to do is bake cookies for the kids instead of going out to run or bike or swim or exercise BUT if I keep this up for one more minute I will turn into a cow. A depressed cow. The only thing to do is to have a plan, so now I present to you the Five in Five "first half of 2007 race calendar"!! I knew you'd be just as excited as I am.



- "Madonnina 12,2 km" - January 14 - This is our neighborhood race which usually hosts about 1500 runners. I'd consider this a "C" race for me but a good indication whether I'm heading in a good direction. Last year I completed it in 1h06'30".

- "San Gemingano" - January 31 - SG is the patron saint of Modena and this is a classic road race of 13,7 km. It's a holiday for the city so it's held at 3.00pm in the afternoon and they close most of the streets off for it. There are usually about 2500 runners, even the President of Italy runs it every year. Last year I didn't run it 'cause I was sick (or that's what it says on the running diary), so I'm looking forward to running this year.

- "Roma-Ostia Half Marathon" - February 25 - Definately an "A" race. This is the largest half marathon in Italy with 8000 runners. I ran it last year in 1h59'15". The girl in the photos on this entry is Piero's athlete R0salba C0nsole. She came in second. I always feel bad that Piero has to wait around an hour for his wife to finish, but that's life. (btw, the pics are of her in San Moritz doing exercises). I have decided that I won't be running any marathons in 2007 unless I can get down to like a 1h51'00" on the half. A lot of cosmic stars would have to line up for that to happen...but you never know. I love half marathons, so that is a plus.

- April - Still undecided. I'm sure I'll be doing a medio fondo bike race (around 100km) and/or another half marathon but I won't be able to plan until the beginning of the year when work plans take shape.

- "Candia Long Distance Triathlon" - May 13 - This year the organization is conforming to ITU standards and changing their formula to 3000mt/80km/20km which in reality is just doubling the Olympic race length. I like this since it's just a change in the swim from what I did in Mergozzo this last summer. I sort of choked at looking at the swim, but the truth is that a) if I actually do some training, I'm a good swimmer. I was just looking at some old race times...36 minutes for 2000mt in 2001! I-need-to-train. b) It gets me close to that Ironman standard length so that if I do attempt the Ironman in the future (2008?) 3,800mt won't be so intimidating.

My Calendar plan has to stop here and then be revised for the summer since we never know how our work schedules are for the summer. I already feel less depressed (plus I just looked out the window and it's stopped raining and I see a patch of blue sky!!!)