2014 Goal: Read 24 Books

I’m on track.*

In January I completed ‘The Millionaire Next Door’ and am half way through both “Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring” and “David and Goliath”.

*The asterisk is because of a decision I made that audiobooks count. It wasn’t my original intent to listen to books, I wanted to read them. As I started I realized how much time I would be spending training for my Ironman, 1-5 hours a day, so I invested in a waterproof mp3 player and got some audiobooks so I could leverage that time.

I’m going to try to consume less than 50% of my books as audiobooks and I’m going to try to limit it to the non-fictions. I feel like I am able to learn from a non-fiction even when listening to it while I’m not able to slow down and imagine the world of a fiction quite as much.

2014 Theme: Bear the Burdens of Others

My updates will be short of this theme. I don’t really feel like it is appropriate to share much here – where I do have the chance to bear burdens for others, sharing will often sacrifice privacy and confidentiality.

What I will say is that I’ve found a great organization to partner with and am excited for the work they’re doing in San Francisco.

2014 Challenge: Complete an Ironman

This is one of 14 updates about my 2014 challenge to complete an Ironman – you can see a list of the others here.

I’m training again and it feels good, though a bit more difficult than I remember it.

The last time I was seriously training I was 21. Its been a long 6 years and I’ve sustained a few injuries that  have never fully recovered. Stiff knees, weak ankles and a rotator cuff issue. Training for this race is going to involve a lot more careful planning than I remember and a good deal of listening to my body.

I started off the month training for two challenge’s: 2013’s, which I had extended my deadline for, and 2014’s. Now that I have completed my 2013 challenge I can focus 100% on this year’s Ironman.

I’m using runkeeper to track my training. The chart above shows my running activity. What it doesn’t show, except for the one pink bar, is my surfing activity. Most days I don’t attribute a distance to surfing, but I did on January 25th because I could actually map the mile paddle out to Mavericks.

In January I completed 20 activities in the 31 days. I missed about a week at the end of the month due to a cold I was fighting off. Then coming back from that week I re-sprained my ankle playing snow football. (I got the touchdown though)

I’ll be in the pool for a bit (the green bar) and ordered a new bike that should be coming soon. Those two should hold me over until I can run again.

Finally, I decided on and signed up for the race I’m going to run: Ironman Lake Tahoe. I picked it because it is the closest to me NOT because of the 7K feet of elevation I’ll be climbing on the 112 mile bike course. Nonetheless, Tahoe is a special place that I’ve enjoyed visiting many times over the past few years, so I’m looking forward to racing there.