inauspicio.us

my training diary is up on Reeks of Havoc, if you want to read it.

a man sent ten puns in to a wordplay contest, hoping one of them would win a prize. 
unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

i’ll get to how the great knee debacle of 2004 was finally solved pretty soon. for now, rest assured that all is pretty much well. that is, except for the fact that i am horrendously out of shape, all is, well, well.

and if you want to, check out reeks of havoc, a customizable online training diary that i wrote while i was injured. aren’t i just clever as hell sometimes?

my good friend joel drew this awesome comic. it’s titled after the antepunchline (you know, the line right before the punchline) of a hilarious and tasteless joke. without further ado, i give you Now Clap:

still cannot run.

i am just a huge goddamned ray of sunshine, aren’t i.

in desperation, i went to see a rolfer. the short synopsis of rolfing is that it is exactly like deep-tissue massage, only more painful. what differentiates it from massage is that its goal is not to treat muscles. muscles are only of peripheral importance to rolfing, which is primarily concerned with fascia. the idea is that fascia can be reshaped, and the changes to it are more or less permanent. and needless to say, they hurt like hell.

it’s a little new-agey for me, but i feel like it’s working so i am sticking with it for a little while longer. meanwhile, the physical therapist thinks the problem might actually be in my other leg. the chiropractor thinks i need to just give up and rest for a while. i think they’re just getting desperate, and i have taken up yoga to help pass the time. also i rearranged my apartment to have slightly better feng shui. if the injury never heals, at least my chi will be in good alignment.

while my running fitness slowly spirals downward, i’m managing to keep up, at least a little bit, with my biking and swimming. you could be forgiven for thinking that with all the time and energy i am now not devoting to running, i could bike and swim more. you’d be wrong, but i understand why you might think that. training is not a zero-sum game: it’s tied inextricably to motivation. anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or inhuman, maybe both.

as far as i can tell, all athletes have problems with motivation from time to time. demons, habits, neuroses, what have you. i get it worst when i can’t train the way i’d like to, and i skip workouts because i think if i can’t run fourteen miles, what’s the point trying to run three? anyway this morning i rode my bike in the kitchen again, did a workout that is quite popular among cyclists the past couple of years. ten minutes warmup (hardly necessary, since the temperature in my apartment is once again hovering in the mid-eighties), two times twenty minutes tempo with ten minutes rest, ten minutes cooldown.

since i have nifty new power-measuring trainer, i even have data that can tell me a bit about this little project. i did my intervals at 320 watts today, which felt like just a little bit below threshold. i’m just getting over a cold, but before i got sick, i was pushing 330, sometimes 340 watts at the same effort. hopefully i’ll be back there next week. and my swim times are coming down too. if only i could run. sniff.

stared down my old arch-nemesis, pool running, this morning after swim practice. i’m still too hurt to run outside (although i did manage 4 extremely painful miles yesterday morning) (sniff), so after swim practice i moved over three lanes and started aquajogging. beh. have i mentioned that i hate aquajogging?

all you ever hear are these gratingly inspirational stories about how this person spent two months aquajogging and ran a huge 5k pr when they got out, or how that person got two inches taller by aquajogging for two hours every day, or how someone’s friend’s friend ran an 8:02 3k off of nothing but pool running for a year. i’m going to destroy a little myth for you today: running underwater does not make you faster. everybody together now: DUH.

also, your cousin’s friend who once went all the way around the top bar of the swingset? that person isn’t real. and your mom is the tooth fairy (“but … how does she get into all the other kids’ houses?”). see you in the pool.

in an effort to push that unflattering picture a little further down the page, i will now, in a single line, tell you a sad true story and give you a hot stock tip.

i’m injured. buy stock in advil.

this is my first injury in about fifteen months, so i am trying to take a philosophical view of it. it isn’t really working, of course, and my sense of self-worth – i mean, my running mileage – has dropped from about 80 miles a week to around ten. i’m still in the pool, and riding my bike more frequently. so on the plus side my threshold power output on the bike is up to about 350 watts, which means i will get to the run portion of the triathlon that much sooner. of course i will have to drop out when i do get there, but you have to take what you can get in a silver lining.

treatment and rehab so far has consisted of icing, stretching, yoga, deep tissue massage, weights, visiting the chiropractor, advil, aleve, and tylenol. altogether much more work than just going out the door and running, and as expensive as at least two new pairs of shoes.

that’s my sad story for today. sigh.

it figures that i would have a huge breakthrough in my swimming right after the most important race of my life so far. that’s life, i guess, but we are talking about a huge, huge improvement, a breakthrough on par with learning the flip-turn. yes, last wednesday i learned how to breathe to the right. ever since i began mediocre competitive swimming as a freshman in high school, i have only been able to breathe to the left. now i can also breathe to my right. for some reason (and i am certainly not complaining about this) i am now way, way faster in the pool at low to medium effort levels. at higher effort levels, i swallow a lot of water so it’s not so helpful. but i am working on resolving this.

in the meantime, i dragged myself out of bed at 4 in the morning this past friday for a classic boulder early-season workout. it is normally done in a group, but i couldn’t find one so i did it myself. the workout is this: leave boulder at 5:15 in the morning on bike, ride 50 miles to fort collins. run in the horsetooth half marathon. ride back to boulder if able. i thought that would be a good endurance workout for me. the executive summary is that it was, in fact, an excellent endurance workout.

the full version is that i woke up way too early and put a rack (!) on my triathlon bike, duct taped my running shoes to it, and adorned myself with enough lights to illuminate a stadium. then i got out the door at the sort of late start time of 5:45, and rode up toward fort collins. stopped along the way to stash my lights (which are HEAVY) behind a building, and then stopped again near fort collins to fix a flat tire. this, combined with my later-than-intended start time, meant that when i got lost in downtown fort collins just before the race, i was a bit nervous.

but i got to the race in just enough time, changed my shoes, locked up my bike, and went to the start line. i was eager to try out my new race clothes, recently acquired from the boulder running company (shorts) and wal-mart (shirt) (really). if i dare say so, it looked pretty slick. not so slick on the body that was determined not to run faster than seven minutes per mile, but it will be cool when the time comes to run faster. here’s a picture, evidently taken right after someone told me a funny joke.

if the point of the race was to run fast or place well, then it didn’t go well at all, but fortunately it was really just to run thirteen hilly miles in the middle of a seven hour day. so i ran pretty slow the first ten miles and then ran tempo to the finish. which meant that i picked off about fifty people in the last five kilometers, and i finished around thirty fifth, in 1:33:00.

then i changed my clothes and rode my bike home, pretty fast. and it took hardly any time at all before i started to get real tired. i bargained with myself, i sang, i yelled, i became fiercely introspective. i did pretty much everything, in fact, except cry or slow down. usually when i’m that far gone i cry, but i managed to hold myself together and made it home ok.

then on tuesday i tried out my new stationary trainer. but that’s a whole nother story. soon.

let me introduce you to my special friend stephanie. if you have been reading for a while, you already know her. we met at the theater.

she is witty and charming and smart and interesting and supportive and nice, and tall, and distractingly beautiful. she wears outrageous socks, and is right now playing a featherduster in Beauty and the Beast. we share a voice part in The Secret Garden, which is too high for me and too low for her. she taught me my lines last weekend when i was standing in for a kid who was out of town.

and in other news i was accepted to the master’s program in linguistics at cu-boulder last week. and this saturday, drum roll, i’m racing at ralph’s half ironman in oceanside, california. it will be my first pro race, and judging by the start list i am horrifically out of my depth. a few of the folks i will toe the line with:

• rutger beke – second last year at the hawaii ironman
• luke bell – fifth last year at the hawaii ironman
• michael lovato – won ironman coeur d’alene last year
• will ronco – once won a small race in greeley colorado when no one really good showed up

so i’m jittery – that’s read “terrified” – although i think i am ready. there was no time to get more ready, and i guess i have done as much as i can. i practiced, and practiced, and practiced some more. i did endurance and tempo and threshold and sprints and hills, and i swam in the morning and i swam at night and sometimes i swam in the middle of the day. i ran, less than last winter but still up to 85 miles in some weeks, rested and tired and hung over and sick, overdressed and underdressed and once with only one sock on. i rode my bike outside and inside, fast and slow, with music and without music, yelling at troy jacobsen. i rode in the kitchen at night with all the lights off, and i rode outside in winds that nearly knocked me off my bike. i rode my tri bike and my road bike, and i blew snot rockets on the door of my oven doing a workout video. i did yoga.

i suppose you can never be completely ready, but i have worked very hard, and i am definitely more ready than i have ever been before, so i guess i will go and race. wish me luck!