Steve Miller’s Training Blog

I just downloaded an application that will allow me to manage my blog from my phone. I am not sure if this is a good or bad thing yet. We will see as time goes on. I am sitting here at my daughter’s swim practice thinking how pathetic I am that I can’t keep up with the 8 year old girls. Well enough feeling sorry for myself, practice is almost over.

I will be wearing bib number 6972 when I race in the Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon on Sunday October 18, 2009. I am both nervous and excited not knowing what to expect and knowing how much training work I have ahead of me. I just got back from an 11 day vacation where I did manage to run on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday which was what I hoped to do. I got in about 20 miles in those for runs and they were all outside. It was nice not to have to run on the treadmill. Tomorrow morning will be on the treadmill at Lifetime for about an hour.

I am going to try to keep this blog more up to date, but I think I might have said that before.

About a month ago I decided to take up running. I have been running on a treadmill and I am up to about 4 miles at a time. I am still really slow, but I am trying to build distance first before I build up speed. Last night I took my 9 year old daughter out to run with me. Since she hasn’t actually done any formal running other than the soccer I decided to see how she would do with 1 mile. We ran on local track just for consistency sake. We ran at a relatively easy pace and she managed a 9:48 mile with plenty left. We have a goal of running a 5k turkey trot on Thanksgiving morning. I think she will be ready and my real fear is going to be keeping up with her.

I was working out at the Gym today with the screen in front of me on MSNBC. The show that was on in was “Caught on Tape: The Thin Blue Line.” One of the stories they covered was a police officer who “attacked” a 14 year old male. You can see the story here. If you are expecting my slant to be the same as this news story, you had better stop reading now.

I find it absolutely offensive that the reaction to the story is that the officer was in the wrong. This was potentially a valuable lesson for the young man who unfortunately doesn’t have parents strong enough to backup the lesson. Let’s get the facts straight her. 1. Young man is participating in an illegal activity thereby instigating the contact with the police. 2. Please officer orders young man to stop illegal activity. 3. Young Man refuses to stop illegal activity. Let’s pause here for a second. If a police officer orders someone to stop an illegal activity and the person refuses, what should the officer do? At this point, the officer can no longer walk away and the interaction get physical. From what I saw, the officer showed great restraint and handled the young man very well without harming him. Once the officer gets the young man to sit down, he delivers a great lesson in respect for authority in the form of an angry lecture.

The the story gets really stupid. The monther of the boy says “I started watching the video and couldn’t continue. I flipped out,”. Unfortunately she didn’t “flip out” in embarrassment over the behavior of her son. I would have been inviting that officer over for an appreciation/apology dinner. Appreciation for the life lesson delivered to my son and my apology for my failure as a parent to instill the appropriate respect for authority for my child.

The statement on how backwards the world is on this can be found in the last line of the story. “Hundreds of WJZ viewers have e-mailed their opinions about the incident. Two-thirds feel the officer was too harsh with the boy.” It is sad that two-thirds of the people think the one who escalated the incident was wronged.

I have actually made it to work out 2 days in a row. I did an upper body workout Monday morning. This morning I did 34 minutes on the tread mill. I ran for the first 10 minutes at 6 miles per hour. It feels good to actually be working out again. Hopefully I can make a habit out of this.

This is what makes life fun, being able to ride bikes with my daughter. We did have to make sure we stopped for the ice cream truck.

0531082003a.jpgThat’s just the way we roll, originally uploaded by bubmiller.

Started the day by skipping my workout. Had planned to do an interval session on the trainer at 4:30 am. Unfortunately I stayed up until 11:30 and just couldn’t pull myself out of bed to workout. I will try and squeeze a workout in tonight.

Breakfast today was a Clif Bar. I had a leftover homemade Beef enchilada and a Zone Bar for lunch. Add a zone bar snack about 3:00 pm. Then I had to run to CVS to pick up buns for dinner and I grabbed a Hostess Frosted Honey Bun. So much for self control. The we had Turkey Sausage and French Fries.

My daughter came home from school sick and I ended up not working out at all. Grrrrr.

I finally have a goal in mind. Since I messed up and have done virtually nothing towards training and have gained about 30 pounds since July of ‘07 I need to stop. My goal now is to ride for a personal best in the 6 hours of Ithaca on July 19th. This is going to require a great deal of discipline on my part. I need to drop 30 or more pounds and get my long ride up to 6 hours in 19 weeks. Unfortunately weather is not cooperating for riding outside, so I need to get a bunch of miles in on the trainer. This means I have to get up at 4 am and ride before work. With a family, this is actually easier than riding outside because outside time takes away from family time. Tomorrow morning starts the first training session towards my new goal.

I also have to control my intake of food, not just quantity but quality. I need to take my lunch to work and avoid fast food like the plague. This is my biggest downfall. I definitely have been lacking in self control. My inspiration comes from Fatty. He finds time to ride with a much more crazy schedule than mine.

Here’s to starting over…

I have talked about starting over many times. In many ways 2008 will be a starting over year. I have managed in the last 5 months to put back on all the weight I lost 3 years ago. I suspect when I weigh in tomorrow at the gym, I will be up over 260 pounds. I have done very little in the way of exercise in the last 3 months. Well all of this has to change, and that change will start tomorrow. I have one primary goal for next year. I want to complete a 24 hour mountain bike endurance race this summer. The race I intend to enter is the 24 Hours of Hanson Hills. My understanding of the course leads to a couple of other sub goals. 1. Lose at least 40 pounds. I discovered at the hilly courses where I did the 12 hour races last summer, that it was just to difficult to push my body up hills effectively. I need to lose weight off my body to make climbing effective. 2. Training on mountain bike trails at least 2 times a week. Last summer I did not do much off road riding outside of races. This made me much more tentative and tense which equals slower. Finally 3. Improve my performance in the 3 12 hour races leading up to the 24 hour race.

Progress updates are coming tomorrow. I will try to blog about it when I can.

I have had a lot of great ideas for writing lately, but I have not actually put those thoughts on paper. I had a brilliant post about the abuse of power of 41 U. S. Senators attempting to interfere in the business of a private citizen. Unfortunately that never made it out of my head. Then I was going to write about the progress I have been making in my workouts, however, it has been over a month since I have worked out and I have put on 10 pounds. I was going to write about all the geeky things I have done on my home network, but I realize that may be a contributing factor in not working out.

I do have to write about a recent event in my life that changed my thoughts about the legal process. I sat on a jury trial last week and I have to say, it was exactly the opposite of my expectations. I was fascinated by the entire process. It was also interesting to find out what it was like to be the 1 in an 11 to 1 decision. For a while, we were at 9-3, but when the other 2 votes swung, I had to do a lot of thinking. I am still second guessing myself, but I ended up tipping over to Not Guilty on the point of the prosecutor not proving the defense wrong. The prosecutor proved all of the elements of the crime however the one point of the defense that negated the crime was not proven invalid. I was nominated Jury Foreman because I sat in Chair #1 and I have to tell you, I have never been so nervous in my life as when I read the verdict. I was quite literally shaking as I read it.

Oh well, back to the regular once again.