On Sunday night I woke up at 1:45am and never went back to sleep.  I HATE nights like that.  I could not turn off my brain.  AND I was hungry.  So, I got up, ate and tried to read something to let my mind rest, but no luck.  So after 3 hours of laying there, I got up and went to the pool.  What else would I do?  I surely wasn’t sleeping.  And, my favorite thing to do at 5am is swim….so..swim, I did!

Most of the things I have on my mind are trivial – nothing important but when you are laying there – wide awake in the middle of the night – everything seems important and magnified.  Part of it is the house stuff….this market is SO crappy right now, it is a tad stressful.  But, that is not that big of a deal.  Then, I was worried about my kids’ teeth that are hurting them and I need to get them into the Ortho stat….and then getting my work done so we can take off to Tucson on Thursday for a long weekend…We lost our basketball game on Saturday (Graham’s team) and I hate losing – even though these kids played their guts out…I still come home and try to figure out HOW to win next time.  And, what am I going to race this year?  Big, small? Local?….  And, more and more of things like that – see ALL stupid and not important…but funny how they feel at 2am!

One of the things I was thinking about in the middle of the night was expectations.  I think my expectations of myself are high.  Sometimes, I wonder if they are WAY too high.  And, I do think that my expectations of some of my friends are high.  Sometimes I find myself disappointed with some of my friends – whether they are my childhood friends, triathlon friends, neighbors….or my athletes I work with.  I think it is not good.

But, what I struggle with is do I lower my expectations for myself and others?  You know they always say, “If lower your expectations and they will only rise to that level of expectations….”  I do think that as we get older and busier, I think most people cannot do it all and do it all well.  We all try so hard, but at the end of the day we can only really meet our own expectations for ourselves – NOT other people’s expectations.  Of course, in the Triathlon world, we have to have expectations of our athletes and of our coaches and our support system.  And, I do not find myself trying to live up to anyone else’s expectations (except my Mother’s and my own)…but, I find myself having HIGH expectations of people I interact with frequently and I find myself getting disappointed by some of these people – but because my expectations are probably too high.

Clearly, I need to re-group and fix that because no one is really thinking about this but me – so I need to manage my own expectations of myself, my family and my work….and learn not to be so hard on myself and the people that mean the most to me!    I still have not answered that question after tossing and turning all night!  And, now I am off to bed…hopefully I will just dream about rainbows and fairies and nothing else!

I have been a moving and a shaking recently.  After the holidays, we quickly come upon my birthday, which thankfully is not a big deal anymore!  After 40, you stop counting and I cannot top 2011 nor do I need or want to – so my birthday was a normal work day/coaching basketball at night with Graham kind of day – which was super.  We did get out for dinner at my favorite restaurant this weekend and that was nice.   (I am just glad my sister turns 40 this year so I can start to harass her now).

What is more exciting is that the twins turn 10 this week.  TEN!  I cannot believe it.  I remember hearing (when my kids were 2, 3 and 4 years old) some of my friend’s kids turning 10 and I thought that was SO OLD.  It kind of is…but they are still great at this age.  They are still young enough to want to be with us and old enough to be pretty self-sufficient.  I actually really like this 4^th grade year.  This weekend I even was asked about the birds and bees and once I got to the part where the egg is released by the woman, their eyes glassed over and they were on the floor in laughing in disgust.  GREAT….Jerome said “this is going so well.”  Jerome threatened to show the twins what my LOVELY neighbors bought me for my birthday (not PG)…NOW that would have been a fun conversation!

I am also back to training. I guess I was after the holidays – but I was pissing around a little bit more than I should have been.  This year I am racing more locally and am not doing any IM.  I may do a couple of ½ IMs, but I have not decided with ones yet.  I am trying desperately to get back into swim shape.   I expect my running to be pathetic now (healing up my Achilles)…..but my swimming is worse than I want it to be.  Sound familiar?  Lol.  After my time off, I had to swim solo for a bit to get some fitness back…and just recently I went back to Masters – as of last Wednesday.  They are 90 minute practices and I absolutely have to swim hard for most of it.  And, on Wednesday I even moved down a lane as not to slow down my normal lanemates…but this morning (Sunday) I was back in my normal lane.  Endurance-wise there are no issues, but damn if I can barely flip and do stroke with them.  But, what can I expect?  I do LITTLE to no stroke work all year and then I expect to swim with these swimmers come January?  While they are doing swim meets and I am coming out of my off weeks.  We have a meet coming up in 3 weeks and – for the first time in many years – It is going to literally kill me to swim what I typically swim.  Oh well…who cares..it will come back and I don’t need to be super fast in the winter – of course – but when I choose to swim with swimmers on a competitive team, THIS is their season!

I will say I am consistent once I get back into the pool and this week I swam 4x/week and 4500+ each time, so it will just be a matter of time now.

And, we have some exciting news!  I said that quote to my neighbors this week and when do you get to the point when people do NOT think you are pregnant.  ?!!!  Gosh.  Ha.  NO!    The exciting news is that we bought a lot and closed on it in December.  We will eventually be building our dream home on this lot and selling our beloved 1880s house.  It was a VERY hard decision for me…(not for Jerome) because I LOVE our neighborhood and have raised the kids with all their friends and traditions in this neighborhood.   But, with the twins turning 10 and in 1 more year off to middle school, it was go time.  They are still young enough to make good friends and not feel the impact of being uprooted.  AND ironically, this lot is only 5 miles or so from our current house and the kids will go to the SAME middle school as all their friends – their High School will be different though.    And, no we did not consider buying a house or lot in Tucson.  Family before SUN at this point.

So, that is the main reason why I did not take the Hawaii slot at IM Arizona…remember I said we had some big plans going on in 2012 that were not triathlon related?  Well, this was it…but because this market SUCKS so bad, we never thought the deal was done until the ink dried on the closing papers!!   And, I just wanted to negotiate the heck out of the deal until we got everything we wanted…including them “mowing” the yard in the snow to make it perfect.

We are not going to build this huge house – neither of us want anything obnoxious – we want to be w/ the kids and/or on our bikes!  But, I want simple things like:  a proper bathroom upstairs…..a closet in my bedroom, storage….and simple things that a house built in 1880 does not have.  It will be hard and sad to leave this neighborhood – my neighbors are the best – but it is the right thing and time for us to do this move.  AND I am so excited to start designing our house.   We have spent our free time interviewing builders, real estate agents, architects and more!  We have hired the builder (general contractor) so now it is rolling!  And, we have to sell our current home before we can build the new one….So this is a long process…but one we are so excited about.

Jerome is fixing Graham’s room and re-painting it – so we are starting the house improvement projects to sell this house.

On Friday night we went to dinner for my birthday and then to Barnes & Noble to look through all the magazines at what we want and our wish list.  It is a fun chapter in our lives.  We will be building a Craftsman style home.  If anyone has any tips – I will take them!

2012 is going to be a great year in many regards!

Hello!  Well, this is why I have not been blogging for a bit…besides the holidays and being sick for those couple of weeks – and then with January 1st, it is BUSY BUSY….we were working on the new website in the interim!  So, I am happy that after 11 years, I have a proper website and a RSS feed for my blog and all that other good stuff.

Thanks to John and Jerome who worked hard on the website.  Technically, it is not something I wanted to do – and John (bless his heart) could NOT get over all the pink.  I realize it is PINK, but that is me….good, bad or indifferent…so that is what it is!

A quick update:

We had a great Christmas and New Years….low key, but all family, which is always nice.  And, I just went away this weekend for my annual trip to one of my friend’s lake houses up in Wisconsin…6 of us, all who have been friends since we were 9.  So, 31 years….yep….and it is always a great time. I think it is the only time I am ever up past 12am both nights!  Just eating, talking, drinking and just girl time.  I cherish this time with these girls and realize how lucky we are all.  Amazing.

Funny though, I had Graham’s first basketball game this weekend too – and there was no way I was going to miss that – so I drove back and forth on Saturday AM to do the basketball game.  So worth it – even though my girlfriends thought I was nuts (but understood).  We have 13 kids between the 6 of us.

Coaching Graham's Bball game!

And, I am back to light training.  I took most of December off.  Some of it by choice and some not by choice (too sick).  My body was ready for some deep rest.  I took off 6 full weeks of running.  I had to heal up this achilles.  It is not 100%, but the achilles is a challenging injury – SLOW to heal…but after 6 weeks off, I called my PT friend, Lindsay and said, “Is this enough proper time off?”  Just tell me now – not in June…and Lindsay said, “YOU are good…let’s start running.”  So, 20 minutes one day….day off, 20 min the next day type of thing.   It is all good.

I got back into Masters and got my ass handed to me … not in that kind of FAST FAST shape…and I had to stop swimming with them to rest.  The team is actually swimming at a meet today – I wish I could be there but since I have not slept all weekend, that would not be a good choice.  This week I head back to Masters, thankfully.  Time to get rolling.

And, the bike – WE have had such a mild winter so far, we have no snow on the ground (THANK YOU) so I have been able to get on my Cross bike here a bit because we have had temps in the upper 30s and 40s.  Amazing days!!  (loving it).

Anyway, I hope you all had a great holiday and excited about all the good things ahead in 2012!  Happy New Year!!