One More Week to Prep

I've been getting my house in order so to speak, getting some things in place that will hopefully improve my chances of success training for my first IM triathlon.

1) I met with my coach to talk about Ironstar, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to get feel for what went right and what went wrong. We identified an obvious weakness with my bike fitness as well some modifications I need to make to my bike ASAP.

2) My regular training periods are going to be 3 weeks with 2 up and 1 down (recovery). Knowing my start date and those periods, I scheduled every 3rd Monday with my boss as a work from home day so I can get an extra hour of sleep (as opposed to fighting traffic) and not have to put on dress shoes and go into the office. Just a little thing but I think it'll help my stress level too as I can always get more done for Memorial Hermann while I'm at home working than I do in the office with all the interruptions.

3) Then every third Tuesday, I scheduled a PTO day where I'm off work completely. I'll get to do some active recovery that day with a nice bike ride in the morning, a nap, and an easy run in the evening. This will also give me some time to catch up on some honey-do's that I may be behind on due to weekend training.

4) Every Tuesday I'm off, I scheduled an hour massage.

5) I set up a new Training Peaks account and have been playing around with it for a couple weeks now. It's really going to make planning and logging easy. I don't like the interface for nutrition. It's really not usable which is a shame.

I still need to buy some more clothes. One thing I found training for the Half is that I spent a lot of time ironing and packing and figuring out what I needed to take with me every morning. I hate it when I'm too tired at night or just home too late to lay everything out. I end up putting it off until the morning and then spend a good hour ironing and packing when I should be out the door. Then I'm late starting my workout and then late for work which adds a lot of stress trying to catch up during the day. I'm going to Penny's or somewhere this weekend to get enough slacks that I can take them to the cleaners on Friday, pick them up on Saturday and have enough clothes to set everything out on Sunday for the week and not have to worry about it each day. Getting this part of my life organized is going to be HUGE for me. Getting out the door quickly, before traffic begins to build in the mornings is going to save driving time and save stress.

What else can I do? I've got one more week to get things in order before it starts.