What a year it was... and the year it will be

Here we are a couple of days into 2015 and while we did a lot of thinking at the end of 2014 about our year, we definitely did a lot of thinking about our future.

Our year we consider it a successful year. We had our ups and downs but we were able to complete all our races. Did we meet our goals, well... maybe not quite... and I'll spare you the details on why we didn't meet those goals, the better question is what did we learn?

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” 

― Albert Einstein

When we embarked for our 2014 journey, we knew it was a tough year ahead of us. We had made the decision to do 2 full distance triathlons 4 months apart. So what did we learn by doing that? We definitely learned a lot... do we know a lot? better off... we understand a lot.
We undestand the sport a lot better now,
We understand our bodies
We understand what our coach means no more than before
We also know now... we are crazy :)

On this sport there is not enough learning, we read a lot, and there is a ton of information out there in the cyberspace, friends, teammates, coaches, books, etc. but what we do with that information and if we understand it makes a big difference in our performance.

Definitely learning to listen to our bodies was key on this process, can't emphasize enough, that while we are the typical weekend warriors:

• 8-5 jobs, 
• somewhat of a social life (very limited nowadays), 
• no athletic background

we were able to understand that we needed to gain enough endurance to do the 2 races and be able to complete them without putting our bodies through that much misery and avoid injuries in the process. We had gained a bunch during 2013 while training for Ironman Texas, and kept up training for the Dallas Marathon, but we did a lot of racing. We call it the excitement of the season and craziness. We clearly didn't want to do that this year. We didn't do short tris, did maybe 2 5k's for charity events but didn't do any thing else. We wanted to get most of our training in and not let shorter races take our focus away from them. Not that those aren't fun, we enjoy them too, but we had made that commitment and stuck with it. Our bodies thanked us and our wallets did too. 

So in summary we did:

Challenge AC Finish

Ironman Arizona Finish

That's a lot of miles and a lot of hours of sweat, blood and tears. Only had one major accident, a few blisters, lots of tears, but wouldn't change it for anything in the world. Once again we were able to do it by having each other side by side. We learned a lot how to train with each other, not that we didn't do it before, but this time we were a lot of times by ourselves on our training days since very few people from the team had the same races as we did or simply we were on different schedules. It is definitely a perk of being an #ironcouple since you are guaranteed that your lonely training days will be limited. Of course, we had those, but not by choice, mainly when one of us was traveling or something like that. For that, we felt blessed and are much stronger as a couple.... to the point that we dragged each other through both finish lines... :) That's a priceless feeling that no matter how much we complain during training, or to our coach, or to each other, no one will take that away from us. We don't compete with each other... we want to be better but we want to be better together. 

So our 2014 year came to an end, 2015 starts, it will be a year of new beginnings. You probably saw on previous blogs or our instagrams that we are moving back to the East Coast. While it is scary, it is exciting at the same time, we are excited to get closer to family and to have a change.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy

We will definitely continue to tri in our new home,  and have our 2015 season planned. We will continue training with our coach Mike and our IronTex team while exploring new training grounds. Stay tuned for updates on how we do and our findings, we can't wait to share those with you all.