Preseason 2018 - Getting a late start

It's been a year so far - Not speaking of the calendar year, but of a pretty life changing 365 days.  I'm thinking about what life was on May 15th 2017, and it's a little different now to say the least.

One year ago, I had one kid. A grown child/non-baby 6 year old kid who was about to enter into the first grade.  I was training and coaching full time and able to focus only on that.  Then, on the 4th of July of last year, we welcomed our final family member Makena, into our lives.  Beth, Aiden, and I then became a family of four.  I continued racing, training, and coaching full time through my wife's maternity leave that ended in December.  During Beth's maternity leave, we also decided that our Boulder home was a bit too small and that we were going to build a new house and sell our old one.  I don't think we understood in the slightest of what we were doing and how much work it would be.

We decided to sell and build in September of last year when we wrote a check to get the process started.  Though the building was very exciting and there were lots of fun/stressful/cool decisions to be made, we also had to go through the process of getting ready to list, sell, and move out of our Boulder house.  That was a SHIT ton of work and I could not have done it without the help of my parents and my parents-in-law.

Here is how it all went down.

In the build process, we went into the initial meeting thinking that we would have until around June of this year to move in to our new build.  Nope.  We were told that they would pound out a new house for us in the span of 3 or 4 months.  This gave us a tentative window of having our place done in February. Shit.  We left the meeting that day in a panic of needing to list and sell our then current house ASAP.  I ordered a POD and started emptying/prepping the place that week.  

Against the advice of our agent, we listed our property the week of Thanksgiving at a price that was about 50k above what the house across the street sold for a few weeks earlier.  A bad time to list at a price that was way too high.  We took our chances.

I coached a swim meet the morning we put it on the market and had about six showings that day and were under contract for full price that evening.  Wow.  We got lucky.  We then had less than a month to move out.  We moved out/sold on December 15th - The day before we were leaving for Christmas break.  Perfect timing.

What made it even better was that my parents left for the winter that week and were amazing enough to "lend" us their house (my childhood home) to live in while ours was being completed.  We lived there through the end of March, then the four of us moved into the new place on March 29th.

So aside from all of those moving pieces and house things, if I back up to July of last year, I did a race that might have dug me in a hole.

After Makena was born in July, I raced Ironman Lake Placid 2.5 weeks after in late July.  It was a good race and I finished 8th pro there.  I was starting to feel the fatigue of the season though.  I made the decision to race the Boulder 70.3 two weeks after Lake Placid for fun and did fine.  I then piled on Ironman Wisconsin in September and boom.  I was toast. Bad race, but fun times.  I have no regrets of finishing or going out there, but it was too much.

I have been tired and sick since.  It's been pretty non stop with the Baby, the move, and health.  Since January, I have had two bouts of stomach flu, I'm guessing 3 - 4 colds, and a chest cold that turned into pneumonia. Then, most recently I was diagnosed with Shingles the week before Ironman Texas.  My immune system was/is non-existant, but I'm in the process of rebuilding it.  I FINALLY feel settled as of the last two weeks and I am ready to get going again.  The shingles recovery has been surprisingly good, and I feel settled for the first time in my life since July 4 of last year.

I was VERY bummed to sit out of Ironman Texas a few weeks back, but my consolation is going out to Chattanooga this week to race the 70.3 before I toe the line at Ironman Boulder.  It's a much later start than I wanted to get this season, but priorities have changed.  Being a healthy dad is number one.  I think I'm finally there.

Here are some pictures from over the winter and spring.  You can hover over the images for a description. Life has been a blur, but things have finally slowed down enough to see things in focus again.  Sort of.