Journal of Pier Luck

It's not been almost 4 months since I have written, so I'm not keeping up too well. Just an update: finished the Breast Cancer Marathon in 4:37 (way over my goal, but it was an extremely HOT day and I had a bunch of minor problems, but Dustin and I had a lot of fun and it was for a great cause). We also finished the St. Louis Half Marathon with our group of 18 others, Team Will Power! It was so awesome and we are so proud of everyone, especially our parents for completing the event with smiles on their faces! It was fun to cross the finish line with them this time! Dustin just graduated from JU and got commissioned last weekend, so that's a BIG deal and I am so very proud of him. So are the 22 people who came into town to help him celebrate. We had a great weekend, so thanks to everyone for all your support! Now, attention shifts to a very important part of my life, Team in Training again. This time, I am coaching the triathlon group and preparing them for the Nations...

It's been over 3 months since I have written in this, but it's about time I start again. We are now training for 26.2 with Donna on February 17th. This will hopefully be my last marathon if I can run it in under 4 hours! Then, on April 6th, we are doing the St. Louis Half Marathon with a bunch of friends and family, including our Moms and my Dad, so we are extremely excited about them doing it and they are taking the training pretty seriously. April 27th is St. Anthony's Triathlon which is a .9 mile swim, 25 mile bike and 6.2 mile run, so we are also training for that one. We are currently doing a challenge with our Hammerhead Triathlon Club called the Brickfest. You have to pick seven consecutive days to do 7 bricks (meaning doing two disciplines, either swimming, biking, or running) at least 30 minutes each. I am on Day 6 and Dustin is on Day 5. We have until the end of February to complete it, but we want to get it "out of the way" before our heavy mara...

It's almost been a month since we completed the Ironman, and sorry to say that I haven't kept this updated. We were getting back in the swing of things. We met with our Team in Training group the Wednesday after and shared our medals and pictures with them. We had a "Return to Lazy Football Sundays" party the Sunday afterward which was a lot of fun. We kind of had an "open house" from 1 PM when the games started until 11 PM when the games ended. I had barely had a drink of alcohol since the last weekend in July, and decided I needed to catch up in one day I guess. It was pretty cool though, because people dropped by all day and night to tell us congrats and hear our stories. Many of them wanted to toast with a glass of wine, so I couldn't turn them down, could I? It was a fun evening! The day before that was a 5 mile beach run that we were talked into doing. I envisioned it as being a nice little jog on the beach with Dustin and about 2000 other...

UPDATED ENTRY with Angie, Dustin, and Kendra's renditions (in that order) of Ironman Wisconsin. We did it! ANGIE'S RENDITION We have been going non stop since we got back from Wisconsin and I know a lot of you are awaiting to hear how the weekend went, so here goes. If you only want to know about the actual race, go down to RACE REPORT below. However, the recipe for the most positive, fun, energetic Ironman includes the days before also! We left Jacksonville on Thursday around 5 PM and flew to Minneapolis. Dustin slept on the plane ride (he had an awful week of having to get up at 5 everyday for the Navy), and I wrote out in my journal what my perfect race day would be like. It just so happens that Dustin's brother, Travis, and his family live in Minneapolis so he made a trip over to the airport with Dustin's Mom and sister and her three kids to visit with us during our layover. They were already holding huge, bright green signs for us in the airport, so we knew we were...

We are officially an IronCouple! It was an unbelievably perfect day and I promise I will elaborate more when we get home. We will be moving slowly in the airport today for sure, but I think we have a good excuse! Thank you to so many people who supported us in Wisconsin and across the miles! We love you!

It is Ironman eve and everything is going great! We are sitting here in our hotel room of Fairfield Inn and they have wireless internet in the rooms so I'm typing on my laptop. Dustin's shaving, Dave is drinking a beer, Jeff and Jen are being assigned duties, Paula, Kendra's sister is getting last minute tips for cheering from Kendra. Now Jeff, Jen, and Dave's pizza just got here. Kendra, Dustin and I already ate our microwaved pasta about 6 PM, while we hung out by the indoor pool with some of the kids from our group. By group, I mean the best freakin cheer squad ever!!!! We had our lunch at Panera bread earlier at 12 and met up with most of Dustin's family and my parents old friends' Greg and Mary who they hadn't seen in 10 years and their daughter, Nikki who lives here in Madison who we grew up together! She is going to be a part of our cheering squad tomorrow along with Bill, Gwen, Jeff, Dave, Jen, Walt, Judy, Becky, Ken, Don, Carolyn, Shelley, Braxton, ...

We are here in Madison getting ready to get some breakfast on Saturday morning. It's been awesome weather so far and Ironman Village is really cool. We are registered and we are turning our transition bags in today. My parents are here already and then all of Dustin's family will get here today for lunch. We are planning on trying to stay off of our feet today as much as possible. Everything is going well; we're feeling relatively relaxed and ready to go. We went to the Pasta Party last night hosted by Ford and Mike Reilly was the announcer. We had some good pasta and got pumped up. Then the race directors got up and scared the living **** out of us about making the bike cut off and people having wrecks and all that crap. We have had such unbelievable support throughout this whole process, but we've been getting so many emails recently, like about 50 that we don't have time to respond to every one, but we want to. We want to say thank you for thinking of us...

Vacation? What defines a vacation? I had a meeting this morning at work and I told them I was going on "vacation" and they asked how a triathlon could be considered that? Well, I don't have to work for 6 days straight and I am flying on a plane somewhere to see friends and family, and hope to have an awesome time, so I think it's a vacation! with a little working out thrown in the middle! We are getting ready to head out to the airport now. We don't get into Milwaukee until after 11 PM, so that sucks. Using "the secret" from the movie, I am visualizing that both legs of our flight will go smoothly and our luggage will arrive quickly and we will still get to bed at a reasonable time. I am really trying to stay positive in every single thing that I say or do. I thought I was a positive person before, but try it, it really is hard to do! But, we are getting positive things in return. I will elaborate more on that later after the race! I keep sayi...

I haven't been writing too much in this because there isn't too much to write about. I've pretty much been taking it easy since the car accident. My neck was still pretty sore until a couple days ago. We did volunteer at the HOT triathlon and it went well; it felt good to do a little something, but my feet were definitely hurting by the end of the two days. My neck was still stiff and felt very weak at about my C7-T2 area of my spine. On Tuesday, we swam for about 30 minutes in our pool and my neck was still stiff. I got a back massage from Monica at Massage Envy on Wednesday night and that helped loosen me up a bit. Thursday was my first real workout and we did Bob's double spin class for 2 hours 20 minutes. Then, Friday morning, we rode 40 miles at the beach (how did we get our bikes there, you ask? Amber and Stuart let us borrow their four runner and we put our bike rack and bikes on it-they let us borrow it the day before to get our bikes tuned up too-thanks gu...

Let me take you back a few days to when I only had one issue-my feet! That was Wednesday, when we met Roberta, Caulie, and Lisa at the beach and ran 3 miles and then did an ocean swim. My feet felt pretty good while running, but hurt while walking on the beach. We did better in our wetsuits this time because we pulled them up further, so it restricted our shoulders less, so that was good. We practiced swimming over and hitting and kicking each other in the water like it will be for the Ironman start. Then, we went to Carraba's with the group and had some good food and good conversation. Then Thursday rolled around and I had a good day at work, came home and got a few things done, then Dustin and I got in my Nissan Murano and left for the Yates YMCA on Riverside for spin and swim class. Dustin was making a left hand turn on a solid green light. One lane of oncoming traffic was backed up so the guy stopped and waved us on, but there was another car in the far lane coming oppos...

Ok, well now it's 21 days left. I'm making it a habit of writing in this once a week and then I forget all we did during the week. Sorry about that. Allow me to be a little negative for a minute and then I'll try to finish with positivity. All of you know I'm not a very negative person usually.............but.................. I have plantar fascitis for sure! The bottoms of both of my feet are killing me! There are plenty of people who suffer from this, but in all my marathons and other shorter tri's, I've never had any problems, so why now, why when there are only 21 days left until the race of a lifetime, does it have to show up now?????? It hurts like hell and it started after our 18 mile run (not during it) and has gotten worse each day. I haven't really run on it because I was scared to, but yesterday after our 90 mile bike, we ran 5 miles. It hurt pretty bad for the first 2 miles and got better. This morning, Dustin and I ran with Joy (who is doing he...

We did 100 mile ride today in the hills of Clermont. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life! It was close to 100 degrees, very little shade, no wind and a bunch of freakin hills! There is so much I can say about this ride, and during it, I have all these thoughts of what I'm going to write in my blog. I'm thankful that I have this blog because it actually makes me think more when I am out there training. Of course, some of those thoughts escape me by the time I get to the computer though. Some of what I remember is as follows: It was hot. It was humid. Dustin was there. There were a lot of other bikers out there. We ran into 2 fellow Hammerhead Tri Club members, Teresa and Minya. We found a bike path and explored. It was hot there too. There was some shade. We were around a lot of pretty lakes. There were a lot of hills. I had a 70 mile bonk, but recovered about mile 75. My heart rate strap wasn't reading my heart rate. I was breathing very h...

Well, another productive day! We started running this morning at 6:30 AM from our house. Our intention was to run at least 16 miles. Dave came over to test Dustin's mountain bike out for his first tri next weekend. He was nice enough to take a backpack with him full of water, gatorade, gu, endurolytes, and bodyglide (all of which we used). We wanted to do a long run today after doing a long workout yesterday, because we have heard it is similar to how your legs will feel during the Ironman. I don't know that it was that bad, but they were definitely fatiqued and sore and got more fatigued and more sore as the miles went on. We went up Girvin to Wonderwood to the bridge hills to practice for the Wisconsin hills. We ended up doing 18 miles and didn't feel too bad at all! It was hot and very humid. We were pretty much soaked from 10 minutes into it all the way until we were done 3 hours later. Dave on the bike as our "personal servant" worked out pretty well...

Wednesday night, we went to another Hammerhead Triathlon meeting and learned some more stuff about running and mingled with fellow triathletes. It's great to be around people who are so supportive of what you are doing. We didn't have time to fit in a workout that night, so we decided to double up on Thursday. Thursday, after work, we headed to the Yates YMCA for two straight spin classes for 2.5 hours and then went running over the bridges (hills in Jacksonville) downtown with our new friend, Martin. We kept a really good pace for the bridges (8:15 pace) for almost 5 miles. It was drizzling a bit, which actually really felt good. Our legs were pretty dead afterwards, but we felt good for working out for over 3 hours on a weeknight. We didn't get to eat dinner that night until after 10:30, but we fixed a great salmon and rice meal that was worth the wait! Friday, as usual, was our day off, so after work, we picked up our boat with Dustin's new wakeboard tower on i...

We are back from Wisconsin and I have some catching up to do on this blog. However, I'm not going to go back and tell you everything. I will tell you that we feel a lot more ready for the Ironman now after our extended weekend trip. Besides getting to play in the very fun golf tournament that Jeff and Kendra throw with all of their friends, we got in some good training. We got there on Thursday afternoon and our bikes had been shipped already. We got right to putting them together in case we had problems. All was going well at first (until I got frustrated that I'm just not meant to be a mechanic). So, basically Dustin did everything while I cleaned the bikes! Jen, Kendra, Jeff, Dustin and I ate a good spaghetti dinner and Jeff and his neighbor tried to diagnose my bike. After no success trying to figure out the gears, we decided to head to the bike shop. Problem was they closed at 8, not 9 and didn't open until 10 the next morning. So, we hung our heads as we entered at 7:...

It's been way too long since I have written in this, but we have been so busy! All I have time to update on is the fact that Maw Maw went to the doctor today to find out the results of her scan and the tumors are all gone! She is cancer free, so that is exciting news. I can't believe it; I can't believe how effective the chemo was, despite the fact it didn't bother her 80 year old body too much. She does only weigh 96 pounds and her hair is thin, but she never got really sick from it or anything. They did find a different little nodule in her lung that they will be trying to biopsy if they can, so I will keep you updated on that. I just can't believe how much the research has helped treat people like Maw Maw effectively. In our fundraising, we always run across people who are skeptical and say that research isn't doing any good. Well, now I will really have a strong comeback story to tell them about Maw Maw. We just had Dustin's surpise party this we...

Happy Independence Day! We woke up today at 6 AM and ran 15 miles on Girvin and the hills of Wonderwood Expressway bridges. We had to get in the car and go put out 3 bottles of gatorade and water and some gus before hand, so we didn't get started until about 7:30 from our house. We both took Gus before hand also. It kind of sounds cocky, but I'll say it anyway, running 15 miles was not even hard today! That's pretty awesome! I told Dustin at the beginning when he started talking about time goals, that we needed to try to keep our heart rates under 150 and just have a nice steady run where we feel like we could go much further at the end. That's exactly what we did. With stops included, we ran it in 2:27 (9:48 pace), which is a lot slower than we are used to. But guess what? We aren't going to be sprinting the Ironman, ya know!??? It sprinkled on us in the beginning and then poured down rain with about 2 miles left. It was kind of refreshing at first, but...

Last Thursday, we went to spin class and then I went to swim class while Dustin was doing his research job. Christine wasn't there, so I just did my own thing for an hour in the pool and I really did some sprints and pushed myself really hard. I swam a 50 in 45 seconds, so that's a lot better than I used to be (over a minute when I would try hard). Not that I really need to work on sprints, since we'll be swimming 2.4 miles for the race! Friday, we were off and went to the Team in Training Pasta Party at Anheiser Busch Brewery which was really cool. All of our teammates, including those from Gainesville and Tallahassee were there and we met them, enjoyed some pasta and got inspired by a speaker who was in remission from Hodgkin's Lymphoma. We were ready to do the sprint and see many of our teammates who had never done a triathlon before, and some who had never swam in the ocean before! On Saturday, we got to the race site about 6:15 AM for the 7:30 race. We were wearing...

Well, that bike ride in Clermont was the hardest thing I've ever done. It was actually harder than the half ironman, partially because of the heat. We didn't get started until after 9 AM and it was already hot. It got up to 96 degrees and there were NO clouds in the sky and no shade! We ended up doing 67 miles on and around a 12 mile hilly loop. We did the infamous "Sugarloaf" hill twice, which was the hardest, but also many other significant hills in between. We were going 4 mph on the way up and 42 mph on the way down the big hill. We were low on energy after 40 miles, but still managed to do 27 more, so that's pretty darn good and I am proud of us! Towards the end, after going up and down so many hills, we decided we needed to finish on some flats, but what is funny is that we couldn't find any! We drove all this way to find hills and then we couldn't find any flats! It was a bit ironic. Dustin apparently still hasn't figured out his nutri...

Once again, life has caught up with me and the blog has gotten the back burner. First of all, my grandma is done with all her chemo and now she has to wait over a month for another scan to see if the tumors are gone, so it’s just a waiting game now. She is in good spirits and she did VERY well with chemo, especially for being 80 years old. I am proud of her, and I know that sounds weird coming from a grandaughter to a grandmother, but I am proud of her strength and positive attitude and I could only hope that I would have the same if I ever was diagnosed of cancer. You know that is one of the most widely feared things in the US—getting cancer. So, we haven’t been doing our training calendar 100%. As I said before, life intervened and we had other things to do with the business and with fundraising. We got our Medicare number finally after 216 days of waiting, so now we will actually be able to bill for our services that we have rendered since October. We were also "spring cleaning...