Moving on.. Embracing Change

A couple of months ago, we made the decision to make a big change in our lives. Heck... Can't be all about triathlons, but it might actually apply. Life is a lot like a triathlon after all. So what is that change? Well... We decided to move half way across the country to the East Coast. It is a big change for us, but we don't only see it as a big change but also a big opportunity. For Res it's a huge professional opportunity and for Puli it is an opportunity for change. While he won't be changing jobs, it is still an opportunity.

So,  why change and why embrace it? We had decided a few months ago, back when we did our ChallengeAC race, that we wanted to head back closer to family. Res is a Jerz girl and you know what they say... Can take the girl out of Jerz, but can't take the Jerz out of the girl, so there you have it. Just kidding, her family is still all there so it just makes sense to get back closer to them after almost 13 years of being away from them. So last year the search started, and while we were looking at a more long term plan of abut 3-5 years, we saw an opportunity for her job that we couldn't let go just like that and she got selected for it. We got the news the day before Ironman Arizona so you can imagine the mixed emotions racing and just in general.

We gathered our thoughts back in late November and started planning the move. In a 2 month period, looked at the house market to sell our house, sold our house in TX, planned a house hunting trip, found a dream home in 3 days, started the declutter process of a typical move and here we are 2 weeks before the big day and it seems like we got everything we need. Only if our closing date in NY works out can we call it a perfect move. Other than that it has been extremely smooth and with a few interesting stories along the way.

 Our realtor is our good friend and teammate and she helped us through the process in Texas. We knew the market in Texas was hot but with the holidays right around the corner we didn't have too much hope so we had to put the home as early as possible to give as much cushion on our schedule for it to sell. Only 7 days after it went live we had 2 offers. What is interesting is that one of the offers was a young couple with a little boy that happened to be both triathletes and runners. After learning that, and reading their story because of course, the offer came accompanied with their story (just like a blog entry) we decided to go with them, they felt like they were the perfect fit for our home.

We went off to NY that same week we sold our home and we started looking, maybe 100 houses later (which seemed like 1000) and 3 days of full search mode, we found our dream home, of course it being the first one we had seen the entire weekend. Funny thing is that we looked at the homes to make sure we liked them but for us a few things were important, any running trails nearby, are there any bike routes around, and is there a bike shop nearby. Well... This one has all of the above and on top of that it is only 15 min from the train station for Puli to catch the train into Manhattan. For Res, it is the same drive she does right now so no change on that end.

When things are meant to be... All will fall into place. Who would've thought that 6 months after spending 2 weeks on vacation and racing, would we make these huge decisions in our lives. Which brings us to how we have embraced our change. For us a big drive was to be close to family, but at the same time looking out for opportunities to grow and see what else was out there. We feel like if you get too comfortable in a place it is like progress doesn't happen.  We were comfortable where we were, love our home, have our Tri family from our team, and have a life in Texas which we are really thankful for. Texas provided us that opportunity 8 years ago when we moved from Florida.

So while we will miss Texas, our friends and Tri family, we know our racing will allow us to see them often and we will be able to share with them our new experiences. We will definitely have to get used to seasons... Snow.. More snow.. And some more snow... We are looking forward to it. If change is not important, then why change at all. Change is supposed to be exciting and we are excited for it. We have our east coast racing plan in place and we are really looking forward to exploring the area.  Being close to NYC will be pretty awesome too... And for Puli a dream come true to work in Manhattan.   He is a true city boy.

We will try to document our move...either with pics or little posts here and there on either one of our blogs, but definitely stay tuned!

Until next time... east coast here we come!!!

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.