inauspicio.us

Well it’s my second to last night in Colorado Springs for a few months and a bittersweet time.  I brought Steph to the airport this morning – she’s off to Greece for three weeks – and came home to the large pile of packing still to do.  Ugh.

So here’s what’s going on in the meantime: I’m going to Boston to visit my family on Thursday.  This weekend is my old church’s 25th annual retreat, and my 25th time attending.  Not that I’m the posterchild for maintaining your roots, but for whatever reason there are some things in life that I don’t feel like giving up even for a little while.  Also I get all nostalgic and weepy when Steph is not around.  She has been gone for eleven hours now, hmm, yes, check back with me in a week or two.

The other thing that I’m doing this weekend is testing my fitness at two races.  Then I’ll have two weeks to chill out in Boston, visiting my family and training a lot, before I deliver myself for a summary ass-kicking very competitive race in Maryland.

Then back to Colorado.  Steph and I will be in Boulder all summer, and I will be staying through the fall to do my buildup for Ironman Florida.  I planned to race there in ‘05 and ‘06 as well, but circumstances prevented me from actually doing it.  So this year I’m Making The Commitment, so to speak, and I’m going to hole up in boulder all through the fall and train like a madman.  Which is probably exactly what I will be.

This whole plan just begs for a little elaboration … which I will maybe get to, after I pack 500 more boxes.

I rode my bike five hours yesterday with an average power of 220 watts.  I was pretty proud of this until last night, when I realized that that’s 1.1 kilowatt-hours, aka just about eleven cents worth of electricity.  Bah!

Well, maybe my evening run can count for something too.

With a week’s worth of allergy medicine, and a new asthma inhaler, I have been feeling a bit like a superhero for the past few days.  I won’t lie, this is pretty awesome, but I am wary of it.  Over the past few months my health has been teasing me, giving me a couple of weeks of solid training to get my hopes up,  then dashing those hopes with a sinus infection, a head cold,  or a touch of hantavirus.

So I am approaching health warily – forty-seven times bitten, forty-eight times shy, as they say.  There is a malady among cyclists and hikers called “climbers syndrome”.  People who have been riding or hiking uphill for long enough begin to distrust any downhill section of trail, knowing that any elevation they lose will only have to be reclaimed soon afterward.  Any crest can only be a false summit; any corner will inevitably reveal a new hill to scale.  I feel that same way about being healthy, which is too bad, because I’m not enjoying feeling healthy as much as I want to.

On the other hand, as I said, I do feel like a superhero.  Every morning when I wake up, I think “Oh, OK, NOW I am healthy, wow, this feels good, much better than yesterday!”  And – cautiously – I push a little harder in my workouts, feel a little better.  I must be the most circumspect superhero on earth.

Also, I got a new bike helmet!  Pointy, eh?

Sniff.

Haven’t written in a while because I am a big self-pitying lump. It turns out that staying positive ( sorry, Staying Positive, it’s not just a proper noun it’s a book title ) is just about as hard as any other thing you might try to get better at. Ugh! All these things to practice! It would be nice to have something that wasn’t so goal-driven to do. I do know that stayin Staying Positive is not really something you’re supposed to try to be good at, and that in fact like many head-things it’s counterproductive to try really hard to be good at it. But at the same time, how do you improve except by trying? It’s a true conundrum.

I think that I might, finally, after many months, have begun to get the unnaturally-fragile-health thing under control. I have ne drugs to keep my asthma and allergies (allergies! who knew?) under better control. Also strict, explicit instructions to use one of those god-awful sinus washers as often as possible. So I may not stay healthy but darn it if they ever have a contest to see whose nostrils are the cleanest I am going to WIN, baby!

So I am back in to bread and butter training this week, feeling more or less good and cautiously optimistic about my chances of staying healthy for the foreseeable future.

Well what?

Will: What do you call that?

Stephanie: A hearty meal!

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

It is taper time again, far too soon after just a few days of solid training.  Maybe this post will help remind me that I’m not invincible after races even though I feel like I am, and that I am invincible before races even though I feel like I’m not.

This morning, five days out from my longest race in over a year and less than fifty hours removed from life best swim, bike, and run performances, I’m nursing a psychosomatic head cold.  Which is to say I feel like death, but only when I think about racing on Sunday.  I will get past it.  That said, it does suck and I hate it.  You spend all this time dealing with and preparing for the physical challenges that race day will bring, and even some time preparing for the mental challenges that race day will bring.  But who prepares for the mental challenges that taper brings?  Should training even include that, or is that giving too much credence to something that’s “just in your head”?  Fortunately I’ll probably never know.

I am still learning to embrace, or at least accept, the physical pain of training.  Not the “oh god, my legs hurt, wish I could slow down” pain but the more or less constant ache, slightly lightheaded foggy feeling of never really being at your best.  The full-body throbbing when you’re lying down, the fact that it takes upwards of an hour into a workout to start feeling good.  These are all warning signs – “You are near the edge” – and I understand that they are to be cautiously embraced.

One day I will have taught myself not to worry about things I cannot control.  I practice, maybe not more than everybody else, but as much and as carefully as I can.  I know there is no such thing as 100% prepared, and that “as ready as I’ll ever be” is an unidentifiable state.  But the mental difficulty, the uncertainty, is still a huge issue for me though.  I worry about not performing up to my capability, not being aware of my limits, making a stupid pacing mistake, making a stupid eating mistake, and making a really stupid equipment mistake.

And I’ve gotten a lot better at dealing with these uncertainties in training.  I’ve gotten through any number of tough workouts in the past few months simply by knowing I could do them.  If I stopped to think about why, I’d have no reason.  No data to back up my belief, nothing that you could say would indicate a breakthrough – and I know better than to stop and think about why.  There is no why, there’s only this belief and confidence.  I don’t know where it comes from or how to summon it, so on days when it isn’t there I’m shit out of luck.

Ah well.  Taper is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?

“It was eleven more than necessary.”
-Jacques Anquetil, after winning a race by twelve seconds.

I was having a bit of a throb this afternoon between workouts when a sudden brainstorm hit. Often when talking with someone who’s relatively new to triathlon or running I’ve found myself attempting to explain the appropriate intensity of, for instance, a tempo run or a threshold run. So here is my handy dandy guide to intensity levels. If you follow this, you’ll get really fit without having to spend all of your time ruminating on percentages of your VO2 max. You still can if you want to, but it won’t be a necessary part of the program.

• Not Easy: This is your basic workout level. If you get out the door to go for a run, this is the pace you go. Since it’s a “work out” and not an “easy out”, the pace is more strenuous than what you would choose for, say, walking up a flight of stairs. Some people call this “zone 2″.
• Somewhat hard: Also known as “tempo”. Here’s how you do a tempo run: Go to a half-marathon intending to run as fast as possible. Drop out after seven miles. That was a tempo run. Don’t get pedantic with me on this, you can do a tempo run of just about any distance from two to fifteen miles. We’re working on an effort level, or a pace if you’re more experienced.
• Quite hard: Sometimes referred to as “threshold”, but less so lately since people started asking “Threshold of what?”  If you want to think of it in terms of an actual threshold, it’s the point where if you worked any harder you would have to stop after a minute or so.  A good way to find your pace for a threshold run is to take the average of miles 2 through 4, inclusive, of a 10k running race.  A good way to find your effort is to think of mile 5.

The special secret I will now let you in on is this: these are all you need.  You don’t even really need “somewhat hard” and “quite hard” to be separated, but it’s convenient to have two datapoints on the continuum for specificity.  If you work out in such a way that you’re not being lazy but also not killing yourself, you won’t have to worry about whether you’re doing it right.  The important thing is that you’re out there.  Improvement happens automatically.

A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn’t.

After a really lackluster couple days of training last weekend, I reached the inevitable conclusion that I was actually sick and not just being lazy. I started a course of antibiotics late on Sunday morning and the effect was nearly instantaneous: two good workouts on Monday, yes, count them, two good workouts in a day for the first time in weeks. Because I’m just so tickled about it, here’s the rundown:

• Monday progression run.
• Tuesday 30′ zn3 bike
• Wednesday 60′ zn3 bike
• Thursday long run
• Friday 60′ zn3 run

Yep, FIVE days in a row of quality workouts, good power numbers, second workout of the day still feels good, etc etc etc.

FINALLY!

Yeah, that’s all I have to say about that. For now.

Norman, Will is not going to throw you off the pier!

I went back to the grocery store the other night, because that’s where they sell groceries. Steph was out of town (she’s back now!) and I was out of bread, yogurt, sugar, condensed soup, ice cream, and other necessities. Grocery shopping doesn’t really worry me any more; I’m practically a grown person, and generally I manage to get through the grocery store without major error. Since I am a child of the internet generation, I also know how to work the self checkouts. However, since I am a smug bastard about it, I always get stuck behind the one moron who just doesn’t understand the phrase “please place the item in the bag.” As an aside, whoever you are, in case you are reading: it means “PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM YOU JUST SCANNED IN THE BAG, YOU NITWIT.”

But the complexity of yogurt remains beyond me. Other grocery items require a solution in two dimensions, usually brand and flavor (ie. “Cheese: Tillamook, Pepper Jack” or “Energy Bars: Powerbar, vanilla”). But yogurt requires a solution in four dimensions:

• Brand: Store brand, because all the other yogurts are too damn small. If you’re not getting more calories out of your food than you expend opening it, you’re really wasting your time eating.
• Flavor: Peach. Yum.
• Stratification: None. Fruit on the bottom yogurt is more like two different kinds of food, yogurt and jam. Yogurt and jam are both great, but blended yogurt is more delicious.
• Aspartame content: None! What is the deal with sweetening yogurt? You can get unsweetened yogurt, which is not that delicious; sugar-free yogurt, which is like fruit flavored yogurt only disgusting; normal yogurt (which is always called “low fat” even though it’s more or less impossible to buy higher fat yogurt in any US grocery store); and “Fat Free” yogurt. It is this last one, “Fat Free”, that continues to cause me much anguish. “Fat Free” yogurt, I guess in a lame attempt to try to taste more like a “diet” product, is partially sweetened with aspartame! What the hell?

And the packaging for the different types of yogurt is exactly the damn same. Which is how I managed to come home with fifteen containers of aspar-freaking-tame-sweetened peach yogurt instead of fifteen containers of delicious, wholesome, healthy peach yogurt.

To illustrate my frustration, I visited their website to get a picture of the offending yogurt, to illustrate how poorly differentiated its features are. Shamefully, although the show photos of fifty-nine different varieties of yogurt, not one of them is of their house brand.

Damn.