OktoberFast Wrap Up

I realized last night (as I was destroying a plate of Tandoori chicken, ironically) that October is going to be a very light training month. I have to Taper for the OC Tri which is the 10th, then I promised my body and my wife to go light on the training this month to rest and finish a living room remodel. So my goal is to be at or below the weight I am on race day despite the decreased training load.

The above is the comment I left on September 30th in response to Big Clyde's post about the OktoberFast challenge.  Basically, my month was supposed to go down like this:

• Taper for the OC Olympic Triathlon
• Finish remodeling the living room
• Maintain (or lose) weight in light of a decreased training load.

How did the month end up?  Here it is in review:

The Taper - I ended up doing OK with my taper - twice (well, maybe one and a half times).  Regular readers will recall that I was all ready to go for the OC Tri, but managed to put the wrong cleats on my cycling shoes.  I didn't discover this little folly until about 40 minutes before the race start, so I had to drop out after the swim.  Obviously I was pissed, so the second I got home I searched for another race and found the Big Rock Olympic Triathlon the following weekend.  Though the second time around wasn't a full taper, I definitely took it easier than normal.  In hindsight, I think everything worked out for the best - I ended up doing OK at Big Rock.

The Remodel - Yeah....this one's not done.  I've been working on it, but I'm not finished.  I used to love doing this stuff, I'm not sure what happened.  I still have to install some light fixtures, paint and seal the floors.  This WILL be done by Thanksgiving; mid December at the latest.

The Weight - My weight is down by a pound or so, but it wasn't that much of a "challenge" due to the fact that my training volume didn't decrease too much.

Here is my training volume for the month:

Bike:	20h 16m 24s  - 362.79 Mi
Run:	11h 42m 55s  - 86.93 Mi
Swim:	9h 12m 08s  - 15880 Yd
Strength:	40m

It's a little over 41 hours.  My run volume is slightly up from September, but the bike is down by about 90 miles.  The decrease in the bike is mostly due to 2 or 3 days of crappy weather we had.  I'm not sure if this is a bad thing, but I really couldn't be bothered to ride in the rain pretending I'm racing in one of the Spring Classics.  Also it's nice to see I made it to the gym - once.

The cherry on the proverbial sundae was winning my age group at the Huntington Beach Distance Derby.  This certainly wasn't in my plan.  In fact I wasn't even registered for this race on September 30th.  But it was nice to win a piece of hardware for the first time. 

So it seems that though nothing really went as planned, I had a pretty good month.  Well, except for the living room.  I'm catching some heat for that and I probably deserve it.

Anyway, a big thank you is in order to Clyde for masterminding the challenge.  I also look forward to reading about how everyone else did with their challenges.