Coming back home from long 5 months in United States.

It always surprises me how much different are our countries. It not that easy to get use to so many people out here on streets, walking (not exercising) for them businesses, to crowd in city transport, to people with an expression of troubles on faces and, of course, to the weather: cold, damp and cloudy. I am talking about Ukraine.

 But not everything is so dark, I am happy to see my friends, who, I guess, missed me. And I am glad to meet my coach Anatoliy again. It is nice to walk along the streets and see beauty of old Lvov covered with white, fluffy snow. People aren’t smiling to everybody (if they did, they would have sore face muscles till the end of day J), but as soon as you start talking to someone you’ll see how opened and kind are Ukrainians. And I am enjoing to speak my own language. 

 But as usually I caught cold after one week spending home. It seams so hard to pass acclimatization without being sick, especially when you switch from +70 degrees F to +30 degrees. But I am not going to stay too long on one place, I am going to train in Crimea, south of Ukraine for next 2 or something months. It's not like in Florida, but still warmer than everywhere else in Ukraine.

Training in Clermont at the beginning of preparation for 2009 season.

That was a good block of

 training for last couple months down in Clermont: swimming with Alec Rukasue

v (I never swam more and

 harder than I did with him); biking with Nina Kraft at least

 two days a week (learning from her how to be more professional)

; bike rides every Sunday with Epic group (fun+ great training). I met so many nice people and good friends. I started feel very comfortable in Clermont, like it’s my home town.

 At the end of first training block I ran a marathon in Tallahassee. It was mostly a training run, but I still planed to do well enough to make some money :).  I won that race last year with time 3.03 and this year I wanted to brake 3 hours and I did, 2h. 55min. I think it’s not too bad for a beginning of February and without special workouts. I felt like my fitness was good enough, but my muscles wasn't strong enough (lack of interval running). And I've got a bad muscles sore, which actually took a while to get rid of. 

Time off passed so fast. Back to training.

After a last race at November 1st I took one month off. For the first time I've decided to stay in US for couple months in staid of going home to a cold Ukrainian winter straight after an end of a season. I use to stay in Clermont, Florida, a great place for winter training, but nothing else to do there except of training. And an idea to travel for a little bit wasn't the bad one. A first trip I took was the trip to Atlanta, GA to see my Ukrainian friends. For four days I have so much fun with a girl friend (I miss girls company sometime), we'd done so much: we took two classes of Bikram Yoga, that was new for me and I really liked it, although not every pose came out well during my first class; next thing we did was a shopping, you can't find as good person as my friend Roksolana for a girl's shopping; then we went to visit other friends and went to a park with them kids.

After that I spent another week in Clermont, before I’ve planned my next trip. I went to Arizona to watch a last Ironman race in 2008 and to visit my home stay family-friends from 2007 year. Next flight I took was the flight to Las Vegas, I never been there before. I don't think I would go to Vegas by myself, I don't think it would be fun. But my friend, Oliver from Germany stayed in Vegas for couple days. It's hard to imaging better time than I had for those 3 days in Las Vegas: a helicopter flight, a Great Canyon trip, driving around city and walking around old down town.

After those trips it was time to start training again, get my fitness back at, then build some running and swimming mileage. And to my opinion a good place to start doing it is Los Alamos, NM, one of my top places in US. And now I am almost one week of training, still feel crappy, but I keep it easy I have time.