Stumblings. And ramblings.

First things first: Yes. I'm still doing the marathon. And yes. It's the one IN Dublin. In Ireland.

But yes - the past week or so has been a struggle in so many areas (recurring shoulder injury, unusual knee pain, snow/ice that just won't end, tragic news from my hometown, and I'm moving in about 2 weeks). So I've given myself permission to recover through Friday night. But come Saturday morning, vacation's over buddy.

Instead of moping and whining through my injury(s) and training hold-ups like I normally do, I opted to ask for some advice. Trust me, this is a major life-altering event.

One of these people that I've been fortunate enough to get to know is a great personal trainer/martial arts instructor. He has been (and hopefully will continue to be) nothing short of an amazing resource. He's that kind of guy that you really want to like, until you've taken about 5-10 minutes of one of his kickboxing classes. Then you are calling him every name in the book. And I spent almost all of my "formative language" years surrounded by guys so I have quite the extensive vocabulary. And then he'll just stand there laughing. And demanding more jumping jacks. And guess where I will be spending my Saturday morning?

All this aside, I have a feeling he will be a huge help in other areas of my training: helping me clarify my goals/expectations for the Tabata training I want to add in to my regular routine, getting me to consider "joint mobility" and conditioning exercises as beneficial, and sparking an idea for a new fusion/bootcamp class we (we = he, I and my yoga/pilates pal) are working on putting together. Just wished he liked to run, I'm pretty sure I'd put out better times just trying to run away from him for fear of having to do more jumping jacks afterwards.

Oh yeah, the last one is huge. I'll talk more about that later. It's super-top-secret. Well not really. Let's face it, I have a big mouth. But it's not quite ready for release yet. Yippie! I'm actually really excited over this...

Through all of this, what I'm really starting to learn is that I have this idea, it's a little fuzzy but it's there dammit, about all the pieces of my training being codependent. I just need to try all the pieces out in different ways to figure out the best fit/combination. And there's nothing more that I enjoy than figuring out the solution to a puzzle.

Especially when there's Guinness at the end. Guinness makes everything better.