COVID-19

At the beginning of March I finally finished up my November, 2019 RVA Marathon race report and was looking forward to ramping up my race season.  Everyone knows what happened then. A global pandemic was spreading fast across the globe and in order to mitigate the spread of disease, countries around the world instituted new social distancing and stay-at-home orders. The upshot of these new rules meant all the races I was planning on doing were canceled. 

One by one, events were canceled and athletes around the world voiced their varied opinions about how the race directors were successfully or unsuccessfully handling this monkey wrench. As someone who has been a race director for a small 5K, I could feel the organizers pain and understand where they were coming from. We were all just going to have to suck it up and be thankful that we were not in a worse situation. For instance, dead or worse, gravely ill. 

Personally, I got over it pretty quickly. I use races as a fun motivator and as a test of my fitness. I like to finish as high as I can in my age group so I am competitive but I do not stress about it too much. I am in this for the long haul. Racing helps me stay fit but overall health is my goal. If I have to modify how I get there due to circumstances beyond my control, I am intrinsically motivated enough to keep moving. 

Here is the list of events that I was planning to do. 

Date	Race	Location
Saturday, April 4th	Smithfield Sprint Triathlon	Smithfield VA
Saturday, May 9th	Kinetic Half Triathlon	Lake Anna, VA
Sunday, May 10th	Kinetic Sprint Triathlon	Lake Anna, VA
Saturday, May 16th	IM 70.3 VA Blue Ridge Training Camp  not a race	Roanoke VA
Sunday, June 7th	IM 70.3 VA Blue Ridge Triathlon	Roanoke, VA
Sunday, June 28th	Rev3 Williamsburg Olympic Triathlon	Williamsburg, VA

After resigning myself to the fact that I would not be racing, I started to alter my training schedule a little bit. Ever since the November, 2019 RVA Marathon, I had decided that I wanted to focus more energy on strength training and core work. In fact, I had started going to Pilates and Barre classes before the Ys and gyms all closed. As it turns out, all of these things could be done remotely with online classes. I dove in and started doing more pilates, more yoga, and some online barre classes. I also started my own regimen of weight lifting, push ups, pull-ups, and core work. I continued to run and bike but my volume went down a bit. As I get older, this kind of exercise is even more important so my pivot to more of these kinds of workouts was something I have wanted to do for a while. 

As I mentioned, I did not stop running and biking. In fact, in addition to adding more core and strength training, I joined the Ironman Virtual Club and started doing the Ironman Virtual Race Series. So far there have been 5 events and I have completed them all. Below you can see the events the events that I completed starting in early April. 

As you can see, I have been doing plenty of biking and running. This coming weekend is Ironman Virtual Race #6 and I am signed up for that one as well. The running and biking in addition to all the other exercises has kept me fit through this crisis. Plus I am eating way less and drinking a great deal more water than I used to. Together all of these things have led me to lose 5-6 pounds. That is less weight to carry out there on the run course. Also my fat percentage has dropped about 1 to 1.5 percent as measured by my scale. So I am getting stronger and staying fit. I really can't complain too much about anything since my health is good an I am continuing to work full time from home as my job in IT allows me to do everything remotely. In fact, I really don't ever need to go back into the office. I am sure I will have to one day. But until then I am enjoying the extra sleep and my new routine. I get stir crazy sometimes but writing and doing other creative things helps. I have some projects other than exercising to work on including converting an old laptop to a Linux webserver to host my John Rosen website and some other things. 

Thanks for reading. Stay safe. Stay home.