First Bike Ride

Today was my first workout/ride on my bike trainer.  I was surprised by how my legs felt after I got off the bike, they were a little wobbly.  My thought as I was walking up the stairs, "I'm looking forward to my first brick workout".

Here is what my setup currently looks like:

I decided to stick with my current Mountain Bike, a 2005 Gary Fisher Tassajara. I was originally looking for an aero bike but after talking it over with my wife and reading Your First Triathlon by Joe Friel, I decided to stick with my Gary Fisher.  It doesn't help that my wife and I are big Dave Ramsey fans so logic and my budget prevailed. 

In case you are new to all of this like me, the red tire on the back is a Zaffiro Pro Home Trainer tire. It turns out that the friction caused by your bike tire rubbing against the trainer can shred it (your tire) so whether you are using a road, mountain or other type of bike you should get a trainer tire.

I'll seriously look at an aero bike once I'm finished my first Triathlon.  Here are some of the bikes I've been looking at: Cervelo S2, Felt AR5, FUJI SST, Kestrel Talon Road, Trek Madone 5.1, and Specialized Tarmac Comp Rival.

Where to start?

Yesterday (Christmas 2010) I was commenting on Facebook about a new bike trainer my wife had given me for Christmas when I realized that I would like more than 140/240 characters to talk about my new passion, running and training for a Triathlon.  So here it is, my space to talk about my training for a Triathlon and along the way getting ready for a Half Marathon and perhaps a full Marathon before the end of 2011.

Back in the summer of 2010 my wife came across something called Couch to 5 km or C25K for short (I originally thought it was an training plan to help you run 25km).  In August of 2010 we picked up the C25K app for our iPods and iPhone and decided to give it a go. The first run was 30 minutes which included a 5 minute warm up walk followed by 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking. It finished off with a 5 minute walk, so there was only 9 minutes of running in total.  It killed me, needless to say we stuck with it and every Sunday was a new challenge in the 9 week program.  For the first four weeks every Sunday was a killer, by about 5 PM I was ready to go to sleep.  By the fifth week we weren't as tired and by the end of the nine weeks I was able to run at least 30 minutes without stopping.  Soon I was running 5 km every time I went out.

Sometime near the end of October we decided to start training for a half marathon.  Shortly after that my wife signed up for the Disneyworld Princess Half Marathon.  We started to follow the Jeff Galloway method for our half training.

So where does the Triathlon training fit in all of this? I has always wanted to participate in a Triathlon, so here goes. With the addition of a bike trainer I'm 2/3 of the way there. I'll be picking up a membership to my local community center in the next couple of weeks and then I can start my swim training.