inauspicio.us

last year’s usa triathlon age group rankings came out the other day, a rare cause of simultaneous confusion, depression, and elation.

• confusion: i was ranked in the 25-29 age range, a category i raced in zero times last year. i understand that rankings are based on your age at the very end of the year, and that this is necessary to maintain some consistency across age groups. it might be a good idea, though, to assign age groups based on your age at the end of the year. in bike racing, your “racing age” – the age that determines what age range you race in all year long, as well as the the age that determines your ranking and eligibility for championships – is your age at the end of the year. triathlon has you race according to your age on the day of the event, but gives your year-end classification based on your age at the end of the year. beh.
• depression: i was ranked 48th. i feel a little bit as though this isn’t reflective of my performances last season. i did skip the national championships and a couple of other races that are weighted in the rankings, which came back to bite me in the ass. oh well. 48th.
• elation: 48th got me classified as an All-American in the 25-29 age group. so never mind that i was never in the 25-29 age group, and never mind that 48th is less awesome than what i was hoping for. a usa triathlon all-american. sweet!

also my apartment flooded this weekend, which was a huge pain in my ass, and although i was able to dry it out it now reeks of mildew, and is covered in a fine layer of vile gray silt. i’ve taken the precaution of marinating the carpet in febreze, but i ask you: what the hell?

simple guidelines on how not to behave in a health club or other high-capacity shower or yes, this means you, creepy guy who always seems to be in the shower when i get done running on weekday mornings, so listen the hell up

1. This one is very important. The room has twelve showerheads in it. If I am the only one showering, and you decide that you also need to get clean, do not, under any circumstances, choose the shower right next to me. Taking the shower right next to someone is acceptable only if there is no other choice. Sadly, this means the shower room can really only accomodate six people at a time without the risk that two naked, soapy people will bump into each other. It’s not a huge risk, so long as everyone is careful, and generally we’re willing to live with that risk. When we have to.

You could even think of showerhead etiquette the same way you think of urinal etiquette. And why don’t you waltz in to a huge bank of urinals and take the one closest to the only other guy in there? Because if you walk into an empty room (any empty room, let’s imagine it’s an exhibition hall just to give ourselves some more space for a moment) and there’s only one other person in it, you walk up to them only if you want to chat, become freinds, or otherwise be socially engaging. The very forces that compel you to do this in an exhibition hall should keep you from doing it in a multiperson shower. No one wants you to be socially engaging in a multiperson shower.

So Creepy Guy, please let the others maintain their personal space, the last veneer of privacy they have left in a multiperson shower room.

Going on:

2. Fighting is not appropriate. At any time. For any reason. If, because of some misguided sense of honor or desire to prove your virility (and at the risk of sounding crass, if your virility is in doubt why not reassure yourself about it in the normal way, in some sort of semiprivate location? at the very least, it would be more fun) you really must throw down, engage yourself in fisticuffs, or even just dole out a good old-fashioned ass-kicking, do it outside the shower. Inevitably, fistfights take up more space than standing still in the shower, and you are bound to take some poor unsuspecting person by surprise. Probably while they are trying to rinse shampoo out of their eyes.

So even though wet, soapy, naked people make porn sell like hotcakes, it is neither interesting nor appropriate in a multiperson shower. And CG, while I’m on the subject, fighting over a kickboard is a tiny bit juvenile all by itself. There are more than 100 kickboards in the pool; use another one if you must.

3. Noises. Not bodily noises, I know better than to try to criminalize the occasional fart that slips out. I’m sure they fart over in the women’s locker room too (oh, blasphemy! alright, i take it back: women don’t fart, they fluff). No, I’m talking about loud, Herbal Essences-style groaning in the shower. So the “mmm!” “aaaaahhhh!” and “oooohhhh yeah”, along with all of your other booming, creepy proclamations of contentedness (or, i shudder to think, something entirely esle) are once again more appropriate in any other place than the multiperson shower, and best kept in total or near-total privacy.

This is not an exhaustive list. However, it should give you something to start with, and CG if you are reading this it is plenty for you to work on right now. In the meantime, if you would shower a little later or earlier you might spare yourself being singled out for a lecture once everybody has at least a towel on.

my nephews david (shorter) and ned (taller) love to play cricket. cricket, like the metric system, is very popular in many countries but tends to baffle americans.

i woke up sunday morning at seven thirty miles from home with a searing hangover and only the slimmest of desires to actually get out the door for my sunday long run. i even went so far, in a last resort of low motivation, as to root around in my head for the demon of rational thought. i found him passed out like the cartoon drunk that he is, wearing a bowtie and a black derby hat, holding a cane (strictly for effect) in one hand and a glass wih three partially melted ice cubes that smelled faintly of red bull in the other. no love.

i mused that it served me right, having consumed possibly as many as three bottles of beer the night before, and knowing full well that my body is – understatement alert – a little fine tuned these days. anyway, first things first. i made a pot of coffee, and realized i hadn’t had much success when i poured a cup of something that smelled like coffee, looked like tea, and tasted like shit. sigh.

so i drove home, via a deeply unsatisfying can of red bull. the saving grace of my morning is that it was warm enough for shorts. it was also windy though, so i took to the trails in thermal long sleeves, windproof underpants, and a pair of track shorts. it was, thankfully, a gorgeous morning. after an hour i was cruising across boulder valley ranch and i passed a radio tower, the kind that wind whistles through when its above 30 miles per hour or so. this time it was whining, like a jet engine, and i knew it would be a rough day out by the res. after another half hour i turned and the wind that had been a tailwind became a crosswind. it was a major victory that i didn’t fall down. the next thirty minutes were some of the hardest that i’ve ever been associated with. i trudged along, listing dangerously to starboard. every so often a cyclist would pass me in live slow motion. and thus the morning passed.

then scrooge. then i fell asleep at 7 pm.

frigid: the furnace is on the fritz

my apartment last year had a tempermental furnace – cold weather caused it to stop producing heat. this was a curse at the time, but i bought some goose-down shoes and did alright despite the indoor temperature dipping as low as thirty-five degrees on a couple of nights.

this year, my apartment is right next door to the laundry – specifically, the dryers – and despite the fact that i have shut off the heat entirely and even left the windows open some nights, the indoor temperature has only occasionally dipped below eighty degrees. i greatly prefer the latter to the former.

but now, i’m at work, and something’s mixed up because it is freezing in here. it might get warmer, or i might go home to the relatively tropical temperatures of my apartment. the moral of the story is to dress in layers, i suppose.

after last weekend’s debacle my coach (really just a comittee consisting of several of the demons) made some modifications for this week. not a “that was too much, we must do less in the future” kind of change, just a “whew, well we’re knackered and we need some more time here”. minor modifications all around. anyway in honor of deep fatigue and flu season, and in the wake of an unplanned day off this past sunday (cf. below) this week was prudently declared check-your-ego week. this was probably a good idea – even though i still have north of fifteen hours for this week, i was careful not to overextend. the repercussions of last week were there though, and i went through a lot of oh-god-the-body-is-rebelling moments. i’ll spare you the real gory details, since it was the same old stuff – dizzy spells, night sweats, hot flashes, basically menopause without the whole being a middle-aged woman part -as it always is. beh.

but now its friday and i feel relatively human, even to the extent of trying out a real saturday workout tomorrow morning. hopefully i’ll be up to it but there’s no way to know for sure until tomorrow morning. and that’s fine, too. gordo says that endurance training is like turning a styrofoam cup inside out. basically, it’s a slow process. the analogy actually works on many levels, but that’s detail for another day.

in more thrilling news, my sister amy was the subject of a deservedly flattering article in the new york times magazine! saving the world on a shoestring.

i am haunted by demons.

there are several of them, possibly as many as a dozen or maybe as few as five, but surely there are enough of them to keep me on my toes. they have been with me for years now, and i’ve learned learned enough to be able to keep them at bay more often than not, but lately they and i have been going through an adjustment period, and i’ve been blindsided more than once in the past couple of months. there is no defeating the demons; the best hope is to develop the tools to keep them at bay, to push them back as far as an uneasy cease-fire, and then to remember not to let your guard down.

this weekend i went up against them: thursday i notched a significant victory over the confidence demon. saturday, while i was busy feeling smug, i suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the hubris demon. it started out innocuously enough when i skipped out on thanksgiving despite the kind and generous offers of friends and family, and instead got up early, dressed in layers, and went for a bike ride.

three hours and fifty some miles later the cold wind got to be enough to drive me back inside, where i spent two more hours on rollers in the kitchen with troy jacobsen. i should mention, as an aside, that his workout video is a great deal more taxing during hours four and five of a workout than it is during hours one and two. but i made it through that still feeling relatively human, and i toweled off and got dressed for the dreaded bonus run.

the bonus run is a name that i came up with last season as a weapon against the confidence demon. i try to schedule short runs after hard bike rides to develop the idea of running on legs that are already tired from biking. the problem, of course, is that hard bike rides are hard, and sometimes i am too tired to run afterwards. so i started calling the runs “bonus runs”, so that if i missed them, i didn’t feel like a total failure, especially since the main point of the workout is usually the bike ride anyhow. in practice, i get out the door for the bonus run eight or nine times out of ten. which is probably about right.

but the bonus run, up until thursday, had maxed out at around four and a half miles. at the terrain on and pace at which i take the bonus run, four and a half miles is a distance that utterly fails to tax me. and i decided, at the end of what may well have been the hardest hundred miles i have ever ridden on a bicycle, to stretch that out. to ten miles. in the hills.

i was actually alright for about two miles when the confidence demon began to suggest that perhaps i should turn around, i didn’t want to get stuck out in the cold especially since it was about to get dark, i didn’t really have enough base training to expect to be able to do this kind of workout, it was probably dangerous to be out in this weather, my jacket was really too thin, and perhaps i should try again another day when i was not such a useless outofshaper. it was so obvious, in fact, in its attack, that i recognized it immediately (it masquerades as the Voice of Reason from time to time), and began to reprimand it at full volume. it kept coming back, every five minutes or so, and i would come back wth stern determination. i told it – still out loud – that it had best take its fight elsewhere, because i had peered into the abyss of fatigue, and the abyss had peered back into me, and the abyss had blinked first. this is what passes for “positive self-talk” when i am close to the edge. i must have looked a bit crazed.

but i made it home, and when i collapsed into bed at 5:30 pm (inexplicably wearing lacrosse shorts and a dress shirt) i was proud of having got the better of the confidence demon, even though i’d essentially had to shout it down. and friday went as well as could have been expected, i got through the usual seven mile run, core weights, and swimming in the morning, although i had to cut the swimming a bit short when i became too hungry to continue.

so on saturday morning i was not too worried about a workout that promised to be a great deal easier than thursday’s. i got out the door for an hour and a half of easy biking, and back in to start two hours on rollers with troy. but half an hour into that, i was completely unable to continue. my legs were ok, if a bit tight, and i’d had enough sleep and breakfast and water. it took about one minute to realize that i’d been taken out by the hubris demon. my own pride (could it have possibly been any other way?) snuck up on me and knocked me out with the “easy there killer, you’re not that good” stick. i got out for a four mile bonus run, but it was a slow, halfhearted token of trying to hold the day together. and as an added penance, i had to take today off when i woke up with legs even sorer than they were yesterday morning. that gave me two days off in november. it as the right thing to do though. i know i’m overly proud from time to time, but i’m not a total idiot about fatigue. honest.

hot investment tip of the season: endurox futures.

two more hours with coach troy in the kitchen tuesday night. the workout could be harder — i mean, i suppose one could be forced to do it while being hit in the knees with a hammer every so often – but from a practical standpoint, its about as hard as workouts get. i might change that tune, of course, when the new three hour spinervals video comes out later this month. the rollers provide a good feedback mechanism though. you stay smooth, or (and this is the voice of harsh, 40 mph crash-in-the-laundry-room experience talking here) you fall down. even indoors, this is no fun. but i haven’t fallen off my rollers in years, knock on wood.

anyway, the beginning of my training week has looked like this:

Saturday: Morning, two hours with coach troy, very hard. Followed immediately by 30 minute run.

Sunday: Morning, 22 mile run in foothills and around boulder res.

Monday: Recovery day. Morning, swim practice (1:15). Followed immediately by easy 7 mile run.

Tuesday: Morning, 14 mile very hilly run. Evening, two hours with coach troy, very hard.

Wednesday: Morning, swim practice. Lots of kicking sets, which did nothing to make my legs happier. Followed immediately by easy 7 mile run.

Today I’ve scheduled the same hilly fourteen miler as tuesday (gotta spend some time in the hills, it will make me strong), and tomorrow is morning swim practice followed by eleven or twelve miles moderate. I’ll wind up with seventeen or eighteen hours for the week. Nothing to write home about, especially stacked up next to the training of some others who are hitting up to forty hours a week, but I’m working pretty hard for me right now.

[UPDATE POST-WORKOUT]

Coming down off of a big big hill, where I always see deer, there was – shock – a family of deer. I run past deer all the time, and it freaks me out a tiny bit to know that I am miles from anywhere near an animal with big spiky horns that could gore me to pieces. Of course, deer don’t attack people, but it is still just a tiny bit nerve-wracking to run past what is often an entire herd of deer, half of them looking at me nervously from time to time as though a fight’s about to break out.

Today there were only three deer, and only one had any antlers to speak of, but man, we’re talking big antlers. Like, if there was deer porn, these antlers would be prominently featured. That big. And, lacking the background to really know for certain, I can’t help but assume that these antlers hadn’t been … enhanced.

But, like I say, I don’t really know.