40 days and 40 nights

So, I didn't announce this "double" challenge this past Sunday/Monday but I have already started several challenges. I am not eating sweets right now. I haven't had any since Saturday, so that is 6 full days as of midnight tonight. Even when Panera gave me a free cookie today for messing up my order, I decided to just bring it home for the roomies. The term sweets includes all of the following: cookies, candy, ice cream, chocolate, and anything else that may be a dessert. I plan on doing this until August 1st which will be the day after the 40th day. So technically, the challenge started on Monday, June 22nd. And I have Nationals on the 22nd of August so I'll keep some restrictions on my sweet intake until after Nationals. Casey and I had also discussed making a challenge of some sort related to "eating out" to help encourage us to cook more. I'll still eat at lunch type places such as Subway, Firehouse, Panera, and Chipotle, but we would be cutting out the dinner type places such as Cheddar's, Olive Garden, Pazzo's, etc. This may be challenging, but that's the fun part, right? And of course I would have to throw in the exclusion of when I'm traveling to race. It might be kind of hard to cook in a hotel. More details to follow July 1.

The second challenge is to run 40 times in 40 days. This may be a stretch, but I need to improve my running, so this is a little extra motivation to get me out the door. I have already skipped a day of running, but it's nothing a little 2-a-day can't fix. Any run over 3 miles counts as a run. That is about the only rule that I'm making for this challenge. And if I do a two-a-day then there has to be at least 1 hour between runs.

Training has been going great this week. I got to try out my new road bike thanks to Mercury. Mercury is a new bike company that offers some really nice bikes for a great price. I'm riding the Apollo road frame and the Trident tri bike frame. They both are amazing and I can't wait to race them. Check them out at: www.mercurybikes.com. I've been swimming a lot this week, and I feel pretty good in the water. I swam with the UK team this morning, and have been in the water with the Wildcat Aquatics team a few other times this week. On Wednesday, I did my first track workout in a while and it really hurt, ha. I'm not used to doing fast stuff, but I better get some turnover in my legs before some the the big races I have coming up over the next 2 months.

Now I'm looking forward to the big tv schedule for the weekend with the big Hy-Vee ITU race tomorrow, the Team Champs Tri on Sunday, and the US National track meet going on all weekend. The men's 10k last night was a pretty fun race to watch. You can find it at www.flotrack.org. And the men's 5k should be pretty exciting tonight. I haven't watched the women's 10k yet, but it looked exciting just by looking at the results (or at least the last few laps).

Tony