I’ve been away for a while now and I think it’s time to start the blog back up. There is a lot going on and I want to catch everyone up but first I really want to thank all of the people that have been stopping by the site while I was taking a break. Since I stopped updating every Monday there has still been a steady stream of people going through the archives and reading random posts. No one post has seen more traffic than others so it looks like you guys have just been catching up. I can’t thank you enough for that. You guys have been checking in since the last post went live all the way back in late May. That’s amazing and I can’t thank you enough. That was a huge part of what has inspired me to get back to work writing each week. If you guys are still into reading what I have to write, I need to get back to work!

A lot has been going on in my life since May. There have been some pretty substantial changes and a couple of challenges. First, I landed a new job. I went back to work for one of my former employers as a manager of a facility. I knew it would be a challenge, and it has been a large one. It has caused a fair amount of rearranging to my schedule and the first few months have been a struggle to adjust to the increased travel and professional responsibility. It is a great opportunity and I am so grateful for the chance but it has cut down on my free time. Where I used to be able to do most of my housework during the weeknights and save the weekends for family time and writing; now I am trying to cram everything into the weekends. Sometimes that works and other times it doesn’t. For a month or two it didn’t work at all. For a while something had to give and I chose to put away my blog and keep time with my wife and son as my focus. Today I finally have some time to sit and write as I do laundry for the week. Multitasking at its finest!

I also managed to injure myself. My foot was bothering me at the Five Boro Tour, but I chose to ignore it hoping the pain would go away. Sometimes you just have pain or soreness and it fades. This time it didn’t. I probably should have taken care of the issue before the Tour seeing as it affected how I rode and caused me to be in pain walking around Manhattan, but I was still hopeful that it would fade. Once I wasn’t able to job or ride I decided to do something about it. I don’t want to go into any real detail, but in late May I went in to have a minor procedure on my big toe. It didn’t fix the issue. I lived with it thinking I would heal, but ended up going back in late June when I was barely able to walk. Thankfully the second time solved the issue and I was feeling much better. This caused me to stop training for a while and get a little depressed about losing all of the ground I gained over the last year. My weight went way up and my cardio training was almost completely lost. It was hard to think about writing a positive blog when I was no longer feeling very positive at all.

Fortunately I have some great support in my family and my training partner. My wife and son supported me when I wasn’t able to walk all that well and took care of my after my procedure. They also helped me laugh a lot when I was struggling to get my shoe on to go to work or when I was falling asleep on the couch. Both asked my when I was going to start training again and what my comeback event would be. Angie, my training and racing partner was also a huge help in getting me motivated to get back to work. She was always encouraging me to get back to the gym and get the next event scheduled. She knew that once I committed I wouldn’t have a choice. We signed up for a couple of obstacle races and 5Ks and then did the insane, we committed to a Spartan Race. The story of the race is for another update, but I am proud to say that I was a finisher of the 2014 Connecticut Spartan Sprint. It wasn’t pretty, I was barely healed and way out of shape, but I finished.

After the Spartan Race I started to feel better. It was then that I realized I was also feeling the effects of mild depression. It is something that I have struggled with from time to time and with the injury and losing so much ground on my fitness goals it had started to creep back into my life. The depression was there, and it was causing me to avoid writing because I didn’t have anything positive to write about. I might have been working, but I was also far away from where I was. I won’t say that finishing the Spartan Race cured that or solved everything, but once you accomplish something so large and seemingly impossible, other challenges appear slightly different. I watched people quit. People who hit their personal limit and just rolled over and stopped their race. People who were injured and had to quit. I managed to finish. Angie and I worked as a team, both with the physical obstacles and the mental challenge, always pushing each other to keep going. I think about than now when I get to the gym to train or when I run a race. Nothing is as hard as that day was, and I finished. Nothing hurts that badly, and I finished. This too, whatever it is, can be overcome.

So I got back to work and now I am moving back towards my goals. Some I have met. I can now run for 40 minutes straight on the treadmill and complete a virtual 5K without stopping to walk. I ran a 5K in Manchester and finished in a time of 40 minutes 20 seconds, shattering my personal record of 45 minutes. Positive results that motivated me to get back to writing the blog, something that I had let sit for far too long. I started this blog because I wanted to be a writer, and I think I accomplished that goal before I took a break, but a writer writes, so here I am. I don’t know the direction the blog will take from this point. I would like to get back to weekly updates, but I don’t know if I will be focusing on riding anymore. You may have noticed that this story has a distinct lack of two wheel fitness in it. I have been struggling to find the time and the motivation to ride. I have changed from the fat guy that rides to the fat guy that runs obstacle courses. I am okay with that for right now. I am sure that I will ride again, but for now I am happy to run. So the blog will be active again, as well as the Facebook site, but I am not sure what we will focus on, but that will be part of the fun. This is still, and will always be a positive site that will celebrate all of our victories. Let go out and have some fun.