MMMM Granola

Granola is probably one of my favorite foods (other than peanut butter...btw, what is your favorite peanut butter?). I have been trying to make my own on and off for a few months. Some batches come out good, some....edible, but not something you'd crave. My favorite store bought is Nature's Path Organic Pumpkin Flax Granola. It is just so good. So, I'm trying to duplicate it, but not having the luck yet. If I get something that is good, I'll be sure to post the recipe.

Along with trying to make granola, Jaime and I are starting a garden. I think we are going to have lots and lots of home grown organic produce this summer. We just have to get the plants to survive the transplant. We've got lots of beans, peas, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, cucumbers, and onions in planters, and quite a few of them have already started coming up really well. Our peas are about 3 inches tall already! Now we just have to get them in the ground!

So, along those lines, things have been pretty busy. We are really close to closing on a house! Hopefully we'll be there by the 23rd. Needless to say, in all of our spare time we have been packing stuff up. I kind of like it because it means we can also throw stuff out or give it to goodwill, so it works like a good spring cleaning too.

Last week was back to hard training after a good recovery week. I had a really solid week last week and the weather cooperated nicely. In all, I put in about 14 hours total, split into 3 hours swimming, 3 hours running, 1.5 hours strength, and 6.5 hours biking, which translates into 8400 yards swimming, 107 miles biking (Close to 6000 feet of climbing included) and 22 miles of running.

This week is almost finished with just a strength training session tomorrow, followed by a 3 hour bike/4 mile run brick session. The idea was to get the brick in today as 1.5 hours on the mtn. bike, and 4 miles trail running, since that would more closely simulate Xterra racing, but the weather turned pretty foul at the end of the mtn bike. Normally I would have still done the run, but it was 50 and raining, which sounds like a recipe for a head/chest cold, so I scratched the run after. Live to train another day.

More packing, and a bigger week coming up next week. I'll post details about what that week looks like soon. If you are looking for a little extra motivation to work out/train, check out www.plus3network.com. When you sign up you choose a sponsor/charitable cause combination, and as you log your workouts, the sponsor will donate money to the charity. Win/win situation if you ask me. It is really fun to log all of your activities for a week and look at how much money you raised for your cause, just by working out and spending a few minutes entering the data.

NS

Big Training Week, a visit from friends

In my last post I talked about how I had just finished up my first week of base 2 training. Since then I've had two more weeks of increasing volume with last week being the biggest week I've done since probably mid-summer last year. The totals from last week were 3.5 hours of swimming for 10,200 yards, 8 hours of biking for 136miles, and 3.25 hours of running for 24 miles, plus 2 strength training sessions. All in all around 17 hours of training.

I was pretty spent by the end both physically and mentally. 5 and a half hours of the biking was inside on the trainer, which is just no fun. It is useful though because the quality tends to be high; no stoplights, no downhills, etc. Luckily Sunday's long ride brick was outside, or honestly, I probably would have skipped it. To add to the mental exhaustion, we have been searching for a house to buy. So, there was quite a bit of shuffling workouts around to make everything happen for that.

We had some good friends in town last week as well. We spent a night up in Dillon with a bunch of friends, so that was a nice relaxing time to get away from things for a night.