Yet another week has come and gone

S - 17,200 yards
B - 204.9 miles
R - 60.5 miles

Time - 23.05 hours

Well, another week has come and gone. I've put in a very solid string of weeks over the past couple of months.  None have been "perfect," per se, but each has been about 90% perfect.  I cannot complain about ~90% perfection.

9.9 to 9.15 - 21 hours
9.16 to 9.22 - 22.83 hours
9.23 to 9.29 - 13.31 hours (Carolina Half on Sunday)
9.30 to 10.6 - 13.99 hours (recovering)
10.7 to 10.13 - 21.16 hours
10.14 to 10.20 - 23.28 hours
10.21 to 10.27 - 23.05 hours

What I'm happiest about has been the running miles over that time period.  In those 7 weeks I have run just under 350 miles.  The long run each week has been 15.3, 13.1, 8.3, 17.6, 17.7, and 20.3 most recently.  I can say, quite honestly, that I have never been running this much this "late" in the season.  I am very much looking forward to how that impacts 2014 as well as the last two races of this year.  Swimming has been mostly lackluster for quite a while now, although over the past week or two I have started to feel like a minnow in the water again.  It's a fairly subtle change, but the mental aspect is quite obvious as I go from waking up for masters but then falling back asleep to waking up for masters and walking out the door into my car.  A strong mental game is important if you want to improve at swimming, no doubt.

This past week I also got my first real new computer in quite a while, which has honestly been the most exciting thing this month.  I have been playing around with various programs a lot, trying to figure out my capabilities as a video editor and have had some...mixed...results.  I definitely enjoy creating little videos but I am not sure whether others enjoy my videos as much as I do! I suppose that's fairly standard though; imagine being Michael Bay.

Another I uploaded to ICE Racing's facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10100255534249187

And another I uploaded to Vimeo

https://vimeo.com/78159763

We were also fortunate enough to have another edition of the Tour de El Amigo, which currently stands as the most coveted race spot in all of racing.  Lance has been on a wait list for 3 years and Bradley has entered the lottery both of the past two years.  We still have yet to get an application from Froome or Cavendish but I am sure no breaths will be held.  This year the weather was gorgeous, the group was small (and ELITE, obviously), and the hormones were raging (maybe those were just mine).  My own personal day started well, had a tough middle, but came through in the end for a strong back third.  I ended up victorious in the Sprint and KOM competitions and walked away with some cold hard cash for my efforts (good thing I won as I didn't bring any cash to give to Behme, oops!).