how do you stay "ironman" during vacation?

Who knows. seriously I will be going on my first vacation in forever, and I have been struggling trying to figure out how the hell im supposed to train over vacation. but heres what i came up with.


I loaded the past couple of weeks with some more intense workout. If a morning ride was supposed to be an hour and a half, i bumped it up to 2. I stopped taking mondays off the past couple of weeks, and did an extra swim(kept the recovery aspect of the day in tact, but still got a good workout it) and i really ended up pushing myself over the weekendss. 2.5 hour runs, only rides over 50 miles, and alot of open water lake swimming.

i think the kicker here though is that i manaed to plan my vacation in a way that the first week of it involves a taper. I have a half ironman in Ohio on Aug 10th and the week leading up to the race, friday-thursday, I will be on vacation. this is the perfect oppurtunity to go light, take it easy and REALLY taper. Ill come back to chicago, do a nice solid pre race workout, then bust out a half ironman on that sunday, and fly out to leg 2 of my vacation the next day.

to most people this sounds insane. WHO PLANS VACATIONS AROUND A WORKOUT SCHEDULE. triathletes do. talk to any serious racer and i bet you they take no vacation during the months of May through Sept. Dont judge too quickly, because this means we are traveling in off peak travel times to most locations (except the bahamas) and we can pretty much wrangle a good deal and beat the crowds to boot. So all in all, i think we are on to something here.

im not really that worried about the vacation aspect, but i am a little worried aobut the bike crash i had a week ago. I ruined a front wheel, which i soon after reaplced with a Bontrager Race lite wheel ( a vaste improvment to the not-so-hot wheel that comes stock on my quintana roo kilo) but i also banged up my knee pretty bad. while it didnt really hurt all this past week, the 15 mile run killed it. Around mile 10 i got a shooting pain in my knee that pretty ,uch made mr run/walk/hobble the rest of the way back home.

i called about 6 orthopaedic offices this morning begging for an appointment and finally, one physician, showed mercy on me. I have an appointment tomorrow morning, that I hope will result in a "its fine just take it easy" which would be convenient since really, thats what i am already doing for the next two weeks. Keep your fingers crossed for me.