Monroe YMCA allstars

When you first make the decision to do an IronMan.  One of the first things you will realize soon thereafter, is that you need help!  Not just mental help for wanting to do an IronMan, but also help with training, equipment, scheduling, nutrition, and where to go when it's raining (other than straight to your bike).  So for me, I knew I needed a gym membership, and I knew I needed a place with a pool, and those things led me to the YMCA.  On top of that, I had the best idea ever!  I would do the IronMan and the YMCA would give me a free membership, in return they would write or publish a story about me and that would drum up new members for them!  Now, just let me say, this really is a terrific idea, and there are a few places around Rochester who are leveraging this exact scenario in order to get the word out about their business.  However, the YMCA turned out to be a little larger of a vision than just another gym in the area.

One of the first things you have the option to do when you head to your local Y is fill out a financial aid form. So not even 5 minutes after you walk in the door, they have already separated themselves from other gyms.  How is this possible?  Well, simple, they Y is not just a gym.

The Y was founded over 160 years ago, and is in-fact, a not-for-profit organization which aims to build a stronger community.  It has three major objectives or visions: Youth Development, Health Living, and Social Responsibility.  Now stop right there and let that sink in for a sec...  Exactly how many organizations have you heard of in the last ten years who has as part of their mission statement, teaching people Social Responsibility??  Tell me, do you think our country could do with a little more social responsibility?  I thought so.  Whether your talking about how to manage your finances to become debt free and financially independent, to responsible families and children AND adults, this is a great idea!  Not to mention youth development, which is a phenomenal undertaking in-and-of itself.  Let's face it, there are lots of kids out there who are lacking the influence of responsible adults in their lives to help them become responsible adults!  High-Five Y!  What about healthy living?  Well what about it!  They Y has more fitness programs and establishments than any other gym in Rochester!  From the various YMCA locations to the camps scattered all over the area (north point is one of my favorites, nice little splash park!) they do a far better job of helping people live healthy than most gyms who claim to do the same thing.  I mean seriously, they Y is here to give everyone an opportunity to learn, grow and win.  Every single day, they are working side-by-side with people in our community to make sure that everyone, regardless of age, income, background, etc, has access to the Y programs that make people healthy, confident and plugged into each other!

I don't care if your talking about joining, volunteering, or donating to the Y, at this place your support has a super meaningful and lasting impact right in your own backyard.  Their missions is to achieve lasting personal and social change brought about by working together!  This is a mission I didn't know very much about before I joined and am glad I found out about it.

From the moment I walked in to meet with the YMCA Rochester's major super-stars at the Monroe YMCA, I knew I had stumbled into something bigger.  I am lucky to have met and get to work with Vanessa and Melinda from the Y.  Donna, my swim coach, Vanessa my running coach and second biggest supporter (second to my amazing wife), and Melinda the kayak queen: I have encountered nothing but blessings from their business and community support.  These guys really are a shining example of what the YMCA stands for and how awesome people can help you achieve great things.  I have literally everything I need to complete my training for the IronMan without looking any farther.  They have the equipment, the knowledge, and the connections to make you successful in whatever your fitness goals are.  And fitness is just the beginning of the vision!

If your not already a member, there's your first great idea!  Go join the Y and start getting into amazing super-good shape.  While your at it, you can volunteer or donate to a fantastic cause that will only help our future be more awesome!  Here are some links to help you get started.

Use this link to donate to the Y, make sure you click the Monroe Branch because they are the ones helping me out with all the ironman stuff, and because they are awesome!

http://rochesterymca.org/donate

http://rochesterymca.org/locations

http://www.facebook.com/YMCARochester

Aqua-biking??

OK, time to break the mold a little, maybe a lot.  Today I would like to take a moment and HIGHLY recommend riding your bike in the heaviest most turbulent rainstorm you can get your weatherman to promise.  Seriously!  Will this help you get ready for a bike race?  Perhaps, marginally.  Is this part of a recommended training plan I found somewhere, nope.  Does the rain help do some magic breathing technique or something?  Not in the slightest.  So why do it?  Because it is incredible fun!!  I stumbled over this fact completely by accident yesterday.

It was a normal Sunday mostly.  Hot and humid.  My training program called for a 3 hour bike and a 30min run.  Which is fairly normal for a weekend workout at this point.  Although, 3 hours is still a long haul make no mistake!  So around 1pm I strapped on the old kickers, jumped on my trusty metallic steed, and kicked it into medium gear.  17+ mph all the way baby!  This is my target speed for the bike because it get's me off the bike with a little under 8 hours to run the marathon.  Anyway, I head off without checking the weather of course, since I am far too impulsive to do anything that looks too much like planning!  So anybody who is in the greater Rochester area knows, that about 2:15 on Sunday, we had a thunderstorm that broke wind speed and rainfall records!  Now any normal person would have called for a ride to be sure, I even found a little spot, homeless style, under an overpass that was fairly dry.  However, by that point I was already completely soaked anyway, and more importantly, I am not normal.

Photo from under bridge.  The blurry is from the insane wind.  The little spout of water
at the top of the pic is the drainage from the roadway above.

I keep riding, heading down the Erie canal bike path at breakneck speeds, with the wind at my back, having literally a blast!  The water under the tires got as much as 6 inches deep in some spots where the rain had fully overflowed the easements and was coursing over the top of the path, branches were falling, little fruit like things falling from trees, what looked like mini crab apples, hit me once or twice!  I had to keep dodging bits of debris that were covering the path, it was amazingly great fun.  At the height of the storm with the wind behind me, I looked down at my speed while riding up a small hill and saw the number 28mph.  The wind really does affect your speed haha.

Ahhhh ADVENTURE!!!  Like food for your soul!  I turned the bike around and started riding back, facing the wind now, and ofcours had a hard time riding over 10mph, and even then the rain felt like little icy needles.  Which is fine, because at this point I am so high on endorphin's and adrenaline nothing could have bummed me out!  Thunder and lightning are normal to my ears, but about half way back on the return trip I heard a different kind of crash, familiar to my ears from back on the farm.  And about 50 yards up the trail, POW tree.

Tree.  Yes.  Dumbfounded for nearly a minute when I saw this fall, all I could think of was the word ... Tree

After thanking God for this awesome ride, and the fact that I am not dead, or pinned under a tree, or any other thing involving the tree.  I take a picture to remember the size of the blunt objects nature uses, and kept riding.  The rest of the ride was rather uneventful, except for the face plant I did in the pavement.  I seem to remember some lesson or something about bike tires not working very well in the mud, no matter.  It's my first wipe out ever, so I feel pretty lucky.  After my short but memorable make out session with the ground, it's back on the bike and heading home.



After all this, I really did have a unbelievable blast riding in the rain.  My workout went by in a flash, I worked harder than usual and barely noticed.  The ride will be a great story for ages to come and a happy memory for ages more.  I only wish I had some chums to share the madness with!  A few select people come to mind almost instantly, and if your one of them, you know who you are and your a stud!

Seriously though, you want some good medicine?  You want to feel great and love life again?  Go have an adventure, go ride in the rain, go hike somewhere you've never been before and spend the night out there.  Go do something totally out of the ordinary and lean on God to pull you through.  Then call me and tell me the story because I LOVE stories like that!  You better believe this will be fresh in my mind and one of the stories I tell while icing my entire body at the finish line in Cozumel!

Don't hate the hardships in life, love them while you overcome them.  Your going to be telling stories about them for ages, you might as well enjoy them while they last.

Wait, how many??

I think it's time to geek out a little bit.  Let's run some numbers just to see exactly what it takes to burn a pound of fat.  What does it actually take to do an IronMan in calories?  Is this really something that anybody can do??  Oh I think it is and I will prove it to you with a short simple calculation:

Let's take some random person and say they are about average, roughly 18% body fat and is 180 lbs.  We are going to look at what it takes to do an IronMan from this starting point.  We can look at others later, I'll even show you the calculations and how I did them so you can do them yourself!

First, let's take a look at what it takes to do an IronMan:

Let's begin with the Swim (2.4 miles):
If you take the full 2 hours 20 minutes to complete the swim, and you breaststroke the entire thing, then you're buring about 817 calories / hour.  Total of 1,879 calories for the full swim.  In and of itself, that's a major workout!  Seriously!  That's a ton of calories!!  That's as many as I ate in a whole day before I started training!  WOW!

Now the bike (112 miles):
Say you are good on a bike and can average 16-17mph for the whole 112 mile ride.  This is pretty quick, but you'll be glad you trained up to this speed when you get to the run portion of the event and the pressure is off because you have plenty of time to run the marathon.  Riding at this clip burns about 1,000 calories per hour.  It's a good clip on a bike no doubt about it.  And to go 112 miles it will take you around 7 hours.  So if we multiply it out, that's going to be 7,000 calories.  It took me about a week to fully let that number sink in.  How is there even that much energy in my body!?  are you kidding?  that's like 3-4 DAY'S worth of food!  All burned up in just 7 hours?  You gotta be kidding me.  But, believe it or not, this is not as insane a number as you might first believe.  I will show you, keep reading.

The Marathon (26.2 miles):
Now, at this point, if you've followed the times, we've got 8 hours left to finish the marathon, so we need to average 3.3 miles per hour, or a consistent 18 minute mile pace.  This is totally doable as most humans WALK at 2.5 to 3 mph, so you really only need to jog about half of it, and walk the rest.  So let's say you walk some but run most and average a 12 min / mile pace (5 mph over the course of the run).  Then a marathon would take you a little over 5 hours.  So you would burn about another 3,500 calories.

I know, there are A LOT of numbers.  If your curious, the sources for the calculations are included at the bottom for you number types.  If you add it up, this means that an average IronMan will burn about 12,379 calories!  And that, my friends, is insane.  that is about a WEEK's worth of food.  Certainly not possible to eat that many calories during the event!  How can this even be done?  Well let me show you one more calculation before this very number heavy article is done.

Again, let's take a 180 lb 18% body fat individual, about average.  This means that this person is carrying around on them, 32.4lbs of fat.  This sounds like a lot but it's all spread out over your body.  Actually 18% is not high, it's very healthy.  As a general rule of thumb, your body get's nine calories per gram of fat burned, and there are 453.5 grams in a pound.  Therefore, there are 4,081.5 calories in a pound of fat, wow!  Now, if you have 32.4 lbs of fat reserves in your body, that means you have 132,240.6 calories just waiting until they are needed, waiting to be fired off.  Holy lots-of-calories batman!  this means that if you could run on only fat, no carbohydrates or protein, then you would use less than 9% of your body's fat-energy reserves to do an entire IronMan.  And this doesn't even count any muscle tissue, or protein, or carbohydrate's in your system, or glucose, or glycogen in your blood!!!  You are literally buzzing with energy each and every day!  You are seriously a huge source of energy just waiting to be unleashed!!!  the trick is convincing our silly heads that we really are, and that means you stop listening to all the "I am tired", "I have no energy", "I can't do this", "It's to hard", blah blah blah and start listening to the truth!

TRUTH:
You are an incredible, rock-solid, unstoppable machine; built for one purpose: to be a magnificent reflection of PURE AWESOMENESS!!!!!  Let's go do it!




Nice calorie calculator:
http://www.healthdiscovery.net/links/calculators/calorie_calculator.htm

Useful look up table:
http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist3.htm