Week 3 finishes on Saturday with a Training Triathlon

Saturday of last week ended with a nice triathlon of training.  I swam with my usual Saturday morning master's crew at Redwood HighSchool.  NorthBay Aquatics was a rocking good time as always!  I've been back in the pool now for a couple of months and the progress is finally starting to show.  I try to swim 3 days a week with NorthBay and really have come to rely on the coaching and the planned sets for my swim workouts.  I feel it's a much more productive workout for me than trying to remember set lists on my own.  Also, when you're putting in 3000 to 4500+ yds of swimming, keeping track of laps is nearly impossible for my simple mind.  Back to my triathlon of training.  Saturdays consist of me swimming early, heading home to take the dog out and then getting on with the day.  I usually run a quick 4 or 5 miles with the dog and get in a little brick every Saturday.  I ran Lucy over to the Farmers Market at Larkspur landing, met the girls and our friends the Fitz's there and had some yummy Huevos Rancheros.  The family headed home and my ladies had a Birthday party to attend.  In the past, I would have relished the opportunity to nap, work on the yard, or just watch sports for the few hours the girls were gone but with my first IM looming in a mere 34 weeks, I felt like I needed to take advantage of the free time to train guilt free.  I headed out on the bike and did the Paradise loop and added Camino Alto at the end for another climb.  I felt pretty strong on the bike and came to the conclusion that after training for the last 6 weeks, 3 weeks of official IM training, I could most likely do an Olympic Tri and come close to my PB times of the past.  Now, these aren't too fast but still all things being relative, this gave me confidence heading into week #4.  I feel like I'm on the right path to accomplishing this daunting feat.  I also know from my marathon experience in December that I need to focus on my run and my overall strength so My goal going into Week 4 was to focus more on the run and put some solid time on my legs.  So far in 3 runs this week, I have 2.3 hrs and 15.2 miles with a brick run before swimming tomorrow and a transition run planned after my long ride on Sunday.  So I'll get 22 miles in this week and look to build on that next week.  I'm getting in the groove of getting my workouts in and spending 8 to 11 hours training a week.  I'm also making it a priority this year to continue overall strength and core training as I had a couple of injury issues that came up towards the end of last year as I abandoned my strength plan.  I do at least 2 strength workouts a week and I feel better about it helping my overall conditioning.  I'm down to 203lbs and have 7 full months of training ahead of me.  I'm pretty sure 195 is within reach and if I can get to that by race day, I'll be fine! 
AlooooooooooooooHA!