With 10 weeks to go, 10 things to ponder

1. To speed my recovery from the cold, I rode 174 miles in three days — 40 on Friday, 56 on Saturday, 78 on Sunday. The Sunday ride featured a sprightly pace, 3 hours, 45 minutes for that distance, which is around 22 mph. Would have been faster were it not for 22 miles of chip seal that felt like riding on sand.

2. Thanks to my heart rate monitor, I learned definitively that I'm not eating enough. During Sunday's ride I burned 2,500 calories, which according to the American Medical Association, is the recommended daily allowance for the average male. Granted, my demands are a bit more substantial, but it's an interesting bit of perspective.

3. Anyway, to the point. Not only am I not eating enough each day, but my refueling is inadequate. Of those 2,500 calories, I replaced 1,000 of them between nutrition during the bike (one 25-ounce bottle of Gatorade and one 25-ounce bottle of water) and breakfast when I got home (two bowls of Cheerios with 1 percent milk and sugar, a quaker chewy bar, a couple swigs of apple juice, and my multi-vitamin). That's got to change, though I am aware I don't have to replace all 2,500 calories at once. After hitting the wall late in my race last year in Phoenix, I had a feeling I wasn't doing enough nutritionally. Sunday's ride brought that point home.

4. Thanks to the ridiculously mild summer here on the high plains (five 80-degree days this year), and because I'm training for a race that has the potential for serious heat, I have to create a microclimate for myself. On 60-degree days with no wind, I'm still wearing leggings, long-sleeved jerseys and gloves, which draws some strange looks from the shorts-and-short-sleeves set with which I share the roads here. Even on runs I'm bundling up with long-sleeved shirts, though I do wear shorts as my one concession to the season.

5. On Sunday I rode to a wide spot in the road called Rock River. It has about 300 people and is located less than 300 feet lower than Laramie, per the green sign at the city limits. It's not the most cosmopolitan place in the world, being 39 miles west of Laramie and about 70 east of Rawlins. So maybe it's not a surprise that a minivan pulling up to the post office at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday was blasting "We Want Eazy" by Eazy-E. Maybe in another 15 years they'll learn Eazy died of AIDS a few years back.

6. My swimming environment changed as Half Acre Pool undergoes annual maintenance. Instead, I now get to swim in the competition pool at Corbett Hall. It's an L-shaped setup with 25 meters one way and 25 yards in the other direction. There are no seats in the pool save for bleachers at one end of the 25-meter orientation, just a classroom on the other side of a large window parallel with the 25-yard orientation. Interesting place.

7. Oh yeah, we swim on the 25-meter side, and you never realize how dialed-in your stroke is until you try to turn laps on a slightly different measurement. Last Wednesday, my first day in the water at Corbett, I missed a couple of walls and almost hit my head a few times, in two cases on the same stinking lap. Want to know how I figured out the length of the pool was different? My times were 15-20 seconds slower for a set of five 200s. I knew the pool was 25 meters in one orientation, but I wasn't sure which way it was. All it took was two of those 200s for me to figure out.

8. The pool situation gets even more interesting August 10-23, when the steam is shut off on campus, meaning both pools are closed. That will drive me to the Laramie Recreation Center, where I'll be doing my swims at 5 a.m., followed by whatever other workouts I can manage. This is the same place that shows a lap swim Saturdays from noon to 5 p.m., and the one time I went there on a Saturday, they took my $5 and then proceeded to tell me there was no lap swim because they were putting the fucking inflatable iceberg in the lap pool.

9. This morning I ran for the first time in eight days. Between shaking off sickness and my desire to go nuts with bike volume, there just wasn't a chance to run. I thought about doing a brick after each of my rides over the weekend, but once again my shitty fueling scuttled those plans. On Sunday, for example, I fueled for a 78-mile ride, not a 78-mile ride followed by a 4-mile run. I'd have bonked myself silly if I'd tried to run.

10. People think I'm nuts for waking up at 5:30 each morning to run or bike. This afternoon illustrated the reason why perfectly. It was 75 and sunny when I rode my bike to the pool at around 5 p.m. An hour later, it was 62 with 30 mph winds, blue skies, sun, rain and thunder. The weather's too dicey in the afternoons for me to do anything outside, and while I love training, I'd rather not die while doing it.