gotta love subies!

this past sunday was finally the day of my first triathlon. after months, weeks, days, and hours of anticipation the time had finally come to do something that i never thought i would be able to do. i have never been a very athletic person and the thought of me swimming, biking, and running all the same day is something i would have laughed at years ago. now i do love cycling and i have been an avid cyclist for the past 5 years now but running and swimming are a different story. well i got talked into signing up for a triathlon by my co-worker ray and in january i signed up for my first triathlon. the date was set for june 27th. 

thankfully i had a cycling base so i was planning to use that section to at least try to make up some time of my slow swim and run times. i started training and jumped into the pool. the first attempt was terrible to say the least...i couldn't even swim 50 meters without being totally gassed. i couldn't even run a couple miles without feeling like crap. fast forward to may, i was still slow in the swim and run but i could now swim and run the race distances of 300 meters and 3 miles. i was pumped coming into june, i had been training alot with my buddy jared and we had been doing awesome brick training sessions and swim sessions. then in the first week of june, my training high quickly came crashing down. i woke up at 3 am and my ankle was on fire! it felt like someone had bashed my left ankle with a flaming sledge hammer.  this had happened to me before and had gone through physical therapy on this ankle before from a previous mountain biking injury. a few days later i could hardly walk and couldn't even sleep from the pain. i was more than angry, feeling like i had just trained 5 months for nothing because i wasn't gonna be able to race. i went to my doctor and he told me that i have gout and gives me some meds and tells me to lay off it and stay away from meats. great... i have gout and can barely walk 3 weeks before my first tri. i couldn't train anymore and felt like i had lost all the progress i made and began to become more and more frustrated because a week before the tri i was still having trouble walking on it.

i was thinking about not even trying to race but then i thought to myself, how disappointed i would be if i didn't even attempt it. so i made a deal with myself that i would do the tri and if at any point my gouty ankle got too bad i would call it quits then and get a DNF..which is better than a DNS (did not show) in my book.

a couple days before the race my ankle felt alot better but still nowhere near 100%. i had to be up pretty early so i tried to sleep pretty early saturday night....that didn't happen. i had so much stuff running through my head...not having been able to do anything for 3 weeks ....will i be able to run...what if i can't finish... all those thoughts were running through my head that night. i finally went to sleep and my alarm went off what felt like 5 minutes later. 

i get up and get everything together and bike to the race site which was luckily only a couple miles from my house. got my transition area setup and waited. found ray and jared..talked to them for bit. jumped in the pool and swam 100 meter warm up and felt pretty good afterwards so that helped calm the nerves. i was seeded pretty low and there were hundreds of people ahead of before it was my turn to swim. i waited and watched jared, holly, and ray go off on the swim and then it was finally here. i was off on the swim, all the nerves went away thankfully. the swim was like swimming in washing machine of people. surprisingly i had to pass about 4 or 5 people which shocked the hell out of me because iam a super slow swimmer.  out the pool and on the bike where i was most comfortable...that was over quick...next was the run. which i had been dreading because of my gouty ankle. off the bike onto the run ...man my legs felt like jello. about 1.5 miles in to run my ankle started bothering me and i had to stop and walk to give it rest but there was no way i wasn't finishing this thing strong. i ended up walking till about the 2.5 mark and than ran the last half mile to the finish. seeing my family and friends cheering me on through the finish line felt awesome!

i crossed the finish line and it was done. i knew it wasn't going to be as fast as i had planned cause i had to walk a mile of the run but i didn't quit and i still finished under my goal time. my final time was 1 hour 17 min.  i know i can cut that down by at least 12 minutes when my ankle gets better and i can actually run the whole thing. it was a great experience and iam hooked! i have already signed up for 2 more tri's this year and i hope my ankle get better better before those. 

so just remember to train hard and don't give up on whatever goals you have!

a photo of my girlfriend testing her blood sugar. she has been a type I diabetic since the age of 11.

info: sb24@ 1/16 through mini soft box from above.

well its been almost a month since i have taken a daily photo. i know its pretty bad considering i told myself i would keep this photo a day thing going but ive just been super busy with work and training...i know it shouldn't be an excuse. so iam going to try my best to keep up with it.

anyways, since the world cup is coming soon i figured i might as well do a football (soccer) themed photo. while i was taking this photo, it really made me want to watch green street hooligans. in fact iam popping it in the dvd player as i type this.

photo info: sb26@ 1/2 through shoot through umbrella camera left. white card on right.

about a year ago when a new shipley's location opened up on dulles ave. right down the street from soliz, me and couple friends started talking about having a gluten fest of eating soliz and shipleys one after another. then a light bulb went off and we thought: "what if we had both......at the same time!". so we came up with the"double trouble" (this was way before the double down came out).  what is the double trouble? 

take one soliz #15 (the darlene) breakfast taco:

+

hot fresh shipley's glaze donuts:

now resize the donut hole:

now repeat for two more donuts (or as many as you like) and then take the darlene and slide it through the donuts. it should look like this:

now behold and enjoy the monster that is the double trouble:

over the weekend i participated in the warrior dash in dallas, tx.  it's a 3.51 mile foot race with 14 obstacles scattered along the way. some of the obstacles included cargo net climbs, wading through waist deep mud pits, jumping over some fire and finally ending with a soldier crawl through a mud pit under some barbed wire. needless to say it was tons of fun. 

the only thing that had me a bit uneasy was the super sketchy rut ridden ground the course was set on. i have a crappy left ankle and i was super paranoid that i was going to roll it. there was also another section that was suppose to be "waist" deep water, but it ended up being about 6 feet deep and i ended up just doing the breast stroke through it, which was actually kinda fun. 

check out the rest of the photos in here or click the event link up top. they still have a couple more events going on in different regions, so check out there website to see if one is in your area. i am definitely going to do it again next year. thanks to jared for racing with me and  jackie, jackie, and erin for coming to cheer us on. 

it was a great weekend of mud, sweat, and victory!

ever wonder what your happens to motor oil when you put in your car. well check out this super cool behind the scenes look on a shell motor oil commercial in which they completely recreated a nissan 370z out of plastic and glass so that you can the oil running through the motor. pretty cool stuff, and if you notice they are using a dslr to film. this seems to be coming more common with commercial work these days. 

so i finally got around to uploading all the photos from the Lone Star April Fools Race back from earlier in the month. Been kinda busy lazy for the past couple of weeks. anyways check out the rest of photos here or you can click the events page link up top.

so this has quite possible got to be the most ridiculous thing to come to american fast food in a while. courtesy of KFC they have graced us with the double down!

iam wondering what the thought process was of the marketing people that came up with this one. " i got it.....instead of bread, we'll use two pieces of fried chicken! we can't loose!" no wonder theres so many people using those electric wheel chairs in the grocery store because they "can't" walk cause there "handicapped" with obesity.

please note i did not eat this monstrosity . i even offered it to my brother to eat, who normally eats everything and even he refused to eat this thing.