Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Home: Family "Transition" area


Happy almost 4th of July!! This is our flag in front of our house...our house which has been relegated to a "transition area"

Day four of no power. Or water.

We are among the 10,000 households in the county still without and now "they" (Appalachian Power) are saying it could be Friday before we are back up. I have yet to see an Ap Co truck anywhere and am still driving over fallen lines in the street.

Fortunately, the main parts of town (and our pool) have power and water now. So, other than the fact that the kids and I are not currently living at our house (only the hubs; I think it's a "guy" thing), life is fairly normal. This is a community that knows how to come together and support one another in challenging times.

I've made my peace by thinking of the house as our "transition" area. The bike comes in, the guitar goes out. The mail comes in, the karate uniform goes out. We don't stay there long. It's our storage unit. With a guard dog and cats! We have moved in with Oma. Thank you Oma!

Training is providing much needed structure and focus. Today I had a brick ride-run and a swim on the schedule and knocked them all out in a row first thing. It was nearly two hours of quality workouts. Coach Jim is turning the screws so I had to step up and dig a bit deeper than usual on the bike and swim. I was happy to oblige :-)

After the morning's workouts, I was thinking about writing a blog post called "You CAN get faster after 40". Then I came home to find that Joanna Zeiger who blogs at Fast at Forty had written a post called "Age related declines in performance". LOL! It's a good read, and my favorite part is the quote about fitness being like a ladder and how even though we lose the top-most rungs as we age, most of us are still far below the top of our own ladder and have plenty of room to improve! I say, even if VO2 Max is in decline, we can still get smarter, tougher, and more tactical.

Another good read today was Tony Gentilcore's Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss post. The classic line from that one? "You can't out train a poor diet."

I will conclude by saying thanks/sorry to whoever has unwittingly let me hop on their WiFi connection here from Oma's.....desperate times call for desperate measures.