Done. Finished. Complete. And only 363 days to go until the next one.

[Skinny]

While I had originally planned on doing the silver challenge, which I thought would be challenging enough for me, someone on here (Beverly, I'm looking at you...) pointed out that it was my 30th birthday, on the 30th of the month, and that should be worthy of the Gold challenge. Never being one to turn down a challenge, I figured I would go for it, with the possibility of changing to the Silver if things weren't going right.

I started out with the swim at about 11:45 am. My wife came to the pool with me to count lengths, and take some pictures. She wrote out a scorecard: 25 m pool X 3 miles (4500 m) = 180. The lifeguards, who have watched me train, and I think noticed that my longest training swim was well under 2000 m, thought I was crazy, and had no problem pointing this out to me. Having never swam that distance, I had no idea how to pace myself, or how to fuel for that distance. However, 3:59 later, I was finished. Three mile swim complete.

I went home, showered to relax my shoulders a bit, dealt with some stomach "issues", and then napped for a few hours.

When I woke up, my stomach was still not feeling quite like I wanted it to, and it had started to rain and the wind was picking up. I decided to do my ride on the trainer. After tinkering for about half an hour trying to move my speed sensor from my front wheel to the back, I did my ride. According to Google, 30 miles converts to 48.28 km (bike computer set to metric). The ride took 1:45, including dealing with some equipment issues (my headphones quit working), changing movies, almost running over my wifes cat (more detail in a later blog).

I then rested another hour or so, before heading out to run at 11:15 pm. I went to the track, as my previous long run being only 6 miles, I wanted a nice cushioned surface to save my knees. Listening to my Ipod (birthday present from my wife) helped kill the boredom of running 40 laps around, and around, and around, but the music soon became secondary to the various thoughts that started running through my head as I got to the six km point, and approached "the wall". From km 6 to 8, it started to rain a little harder, and the wind picked up more and more. At the 8 km (halfway) point, I went to sit in my truck and rest for a bit. I thought about quitting for the night, and finishing later. However, I knew that if I quit at that point, I would be too sore for the next couple days to keep running, so I had to finish. I got back on the track and kept going.

After that break, I fired off 5 quick laps, feeling great. Then the run turned into a jog. Then the jog into a walk. I tried to jog again, but my legs felt like rubber. I was afraid I was about to trip over my own feet. With 14 laps to go, my wife took her break from work to come see how I was doing. After a short break visiting with her, I started back out again, but two laps later, I had to get her to drive me home for a "personal emergency". I REALLY need to work on my feuling issues. Once that was taken care of, I headed back to the track, again managed to run two laps, then, with 10 to go (2.5 miles), the legs died. Completely. I could only run about 10 steps at a time, and then had to walk about for a few laps until the feeling came back. This continued, to the point that I didn't know if I would even be able to finish it walking. I thought about trying to learn to walk on my hands. Then I remembered that I had swam 3 miles earlier in the day, and my shoulders were pretty numb too. I stuck it out, and walked. And at 2:15 am, I finished. And when I was done, I went and got the greasiest chicken and fries I could find.

Over the next couple of days, I will try to get on here and blog some more about each individual event, and what all I learned through this challenge.