CAP10K and more
I've been busy training for Challenge Roth in July and hit a bit of a wall posting here to LJ. I wrote a post back in late December called "Living like it's 1972" and meant to clean it up and post as public, but then my Dad died, and since he was part of the point of the post it didn't seem appropriate; then I lost interest in posting all my collective thoughts, links, etc. to facebook and decided to start another blog instead of dealing with my "block" over here. So, if you are interested, it's http://markcathcart.com I'm mostly going to contionue to post my triathlon and training stuff here, although wordpress can impressively import your whole livejournal preserving tags, post dates and even protecting private LJ entries.
I'm coming off my hardest block of training since probably 2002, prior to the ITU Worlds in Cancun. I'm training often twice a day, I have a personal coach and my objectives are to get a qualifying time for GB Team at the ITU World Long Course Championships either 2012, or 2013, and go under 12:30 for Ironman distance at Roth, which would be a 60-minute plus PR. Really I'd like to go sub-12, but at least at this point, I can't see how to do that.
In the short-term this Sunday I'm doing the Statesman Capital of Texas 10k, CAP10K. I PR'd at this last year, and I'm going to race it this year with the same objective, although I've not tapered for the race, have a bike session today and a long bike tomorrow as well. We'll see. The good news is I have a new, improved, pair of "Shoes that Fly" from the Wongstar, who has long since stopped being @wongstar here on lj. We'll see how they fly.
After CAP10K, my next race will be the Republic of Texas Triathlon, half-ironman distance, down at Corpus Christie. Thats where I'm going to have a go at getting a qualifying time, which effectively means sub 5:45, or more likely sub 5:30 for the half, which will be a PR by some 30-mins for me. I have a difficult history with half distance races, where I've had more failure than success, reading back through entries here has most of the details.
Before that I'll be heading down to Galveston for the Lonestar 70.3. I hadn't planned to go and won't be racing, but I have Ronnie Schildknecht staying with me and all the "big guns", including Lance Armstrong will be lining up at the start, so I'm going down to take some pictures, ride the bike course and have fun.