It was the best of times; It was the worst of times...

Tis the season. Offseason. Down time. Time for half hour workouts and growing muffin tops.

In-season Steve rules, no question. But offseason, a time when intellect and cunning prevail- offseason is mine!

I'm the solid front runner in our "Facebook Friends War". VO2 max be damned when it comes to facebook friending strategies. I Rule!

Fast twitch muscle dominance is great, but not too helpful in a game of chess. Again, I Rule!

Humility is all mine during race season, but offseason... I RULE!!

Pics say it all

My latest project...

As Clearwater looms in the not so distant future, it has become apparent that Miss Sarah, my original sherpa companion and in fact one of my reasons for pushing Steve to do this race in the first place, cannot go. She is far too busy with school and work and seems to have put her plans for a big move to Tampa on a back burner anyway.

So I decided-who better to go along with me, sherpa a big race and enjoy the energy and vitality of the great triathlon experience than my oldest, and undoubtedly sweetest daughter, Shannon!? At first glance she doesn't really seem like the obvious choice. She smokes cigarettes, lives on candy and caffiene and almost drown trying to snorkel in two feet of water on our misguided trip to Honolulu last year. She moves like a turtle and isn't usually up at the crack of dawn so the entire endeavor will be challenging for both of us I'm sure.

But I've got some high hopes. I'm thinking that she may very well be inspired. She and Chrissie Wellington are the same age...she's never seen Steve actually race..and there's just something about being at a big race that makes people wonder "could I do that?".

Sarah was an easy lure into this triathlon stuff. She was running before she was even born.

Shannon, on the other hand, was four years old when I started running. I used to drag her and her big wheel to the local junior high school track and she didn't much like it. When she was in junior high herself she used to be horribly embarrassed when her school bus would pass me running. I guess actually having a mom was embarrassing enough without having a mom that ran all over the neighborhood.

Should be interesting.....

Positive thinking

I was raised by depression era parents. My dad joined the Navy when he was 17 and saw men die in a war before he was even 20. My mom had her first job when she was 12and pretty much worked her whole life. They were hard working, blue collar people who would never have considered doing something as 'frivolous' as triathlon. Especially when they had three kids and a mortgage. What little extra money they had was spent on piano lessons, horseback riding lessons, dance lessons...anything they could think of that would give us opportunities they never had.

The problem is that I'm not really sure they were happy. I'm pretty sure they weren't. They made sacrifices and worked hard but they didn't hold enough back for themselves. As a parent myself now, I partly understand that. You always want things to be better for your kids. But I also see that the fact that they weren't really happy created a sort of negative atmosphere even in the midst of their good intent. It was all way too serious; like a great sense of responsibility they could never quite master.

Sometimes I feel that negative atmosphere around me still. Like the cloud of dirt that follows Pigpen in the Charlie Brown cartoons.

I've been watching successful athletes lately. The well known professional ones and athletes successful on a local level. They all train hard and consistently. But I train hard and consistently too. The trait that stands out to me is their attitude. They are positive, they believe in themselves and manage to feel good about training even when it isn't always stellar. No matter whether they race successfully or things turn out dismally, they find something positive in every race and focus on that. If they made mistakes, they don't beat themselves up over them, they accept them and find ways to correct them.

I'm beginning to think that is a major part of their success. They feel positive about themselves and their efforts. They believe that their training will make them better athletes. They believe they will do well in races. And even when things dont seem to be going well they find something positive in the midst of it and believe in that one positive thing.

I'm starting even now to plan for my races next summer. I'm committed to doing two half ironman races and have already signed up for one of them. The planning starts now and as I pull out the training calendar; this idea of being positive and believing in myself and my abilities is going to become a reality for me. I'm going to find a way to include it in my daily training. I'm going to train myself to be more positive.

I'm going to start by changing the name of my blog. I am not a wannabe, I am a triathlete.

Addicted?

Lately every time I get out of bed I feel creaky. Creaky and stiff actually. Slowly, I hobble into the hallway and creep down the stairs for my coffee.

I'm used to aches and pains; even when I was 30 I was achey and painy sometime from running; it's inevitable. But this is different. This is aches and pains combined with a sort of unsteadiness that really makes me feel rickety. Before it just hurt, now it hurts and I feel like if I'm not careful, I'm going to hurt myself even worse - just going for coffee!!

Getting my blood moving seems to loosen things up a bit. But once I stop moving and then get up; the old lady is back, creeping and rickety.



My hips hurt, my knee hurts, my shoulder hurts - I'm the personification of pain! So I take an ibuprophen. I read somewhere that Joe Bonness (old guy - great triathlete) said yes he is on drugs - 1,200 mg a day of Ibuprophen. That makes me feel better. It comes with the old triathlete territory then, this creaky, painful, ricketiness.

I'm going to be increasing my run mileage these next few weeks prepping for the Cape Henry ten miler. I'm at a whopping 17 miles a week and 600 mg of Ibuprophen. I'm sure I'll have to incrementally increase both over the next six weeks or so.

Liberal doctors will write scripts for the maximum dosage of this stuff; conservative docs will tell you that it eats up your insides, destroys your liver and kidneys and allows you to run at the risk of injuring yourself even worse. At the age of 50 I don't listen to the conservatives much anymore. Some people would say it's insane to run if you have to take pain killers to do it. Maybe...but consider the alternative...

Ironman...

Steve is a really impressive guy. As I observe him through this insanity he calls "training for Clearwater", I just have to say for the millionth time he is a really impressive guy. He is the most disciplined, enduring, strongest person I have ever met. And the really amazing thing is that he is so not egotistical about it. When he knows he has to do something, he just does it. And he can do quite a lot and never show any wear and tear.
Witness our trip a few years ago as we hiked into the Grand Canyon from the south rim. The before picture has us both looking bright, chipper and ready to conquer the canyon.

Eight hard hours of hiking later, it is obvious who the pillar of strength is and who was conquered by the canyon!

I'm looking forward to watching him race at Clearwater. It's going to be an exciting trip and an exciting race.

Licking the Big Lick!

Until last Sunday, this was the only guy who knew that I was secretly planning to once again take on the monster of my nightmares....the Olympic Triathlon. Morgantown was such a complete disaster. If I didn't try again this season, who knew how big that monster could become by next spring.



So I signed up for the Big Lick Olympic at Smith Mountain Lake. Steve decided that rather than Sherpa (he's really not cut out for the whole sherpa experience anyway) he would do it with me as a training race.

Huddleston, VA is a four hour drive from here. I was antsy to leave early Friday, I had hoped to get a swim in the lake the day before the race. But it wasn't meant to be. I mean we did get there early, but I saw both a boat and a jet ski tooling around the little beach area and if there's anything that scares me more than open water swimming, it's open water swimming when there's motorized watercraft about.

I told Steve I wanted to get to transition at 7 a.m. even though the race didn't start until 9 a.m. We got there at 7 a.m., got great parking and were one of the first five folks in transition! Steve was loving it! Never in the history of our time together have I been the one to push the morning pace. Not on local 5k and 10k race days, not on century ride days and certainly not on Steve race days.

We had consecutive race numbers so we were right next to each other in transistion. I thought that was a really good omen; well for me anyway. Steve, being Steve, felt compelled to do double duty and checklist his area and then mine. The odd fact is that Steve is a better sherpa when he's racing with me than if he's a spectator. Probably a sign of a man whose at his best under double transistion pressure on race day.

Obviously the spectator gig works well for me even if I am racing.



At the risk of sounding like Amanada L. let me just say here that for the very first time on an event morning I was able to poo before the race. Usually it is an accomplishment that eludes me on those stressful mornings, yet the lack of it sort of lingers. I used to think AL was alittle weird about the whole poo thing. Now I think she is definitely on to something. I really felt like part of the 'load' of race day was lifted after that.

Anyway, we did a quick warmup on the bikes just to make sure everything was in working order. Then put on wetsuits and headed down the lake. The water actually warmed my frozen toes (the first good sign) it was mostly clear and fresh tasting (second good sign) and we swam a really nice relaxing 200 meters (third good sign).

Got out of the water in time for race announcements and then headed to the start. The collegiate crowd goes first and we all watched as the obviously 'used to the pool' swimmers got horribly lost without a black line and walls and swam totally off course. Then the ladies 45 and under went, mostly alot of light splashing and polite waiting.

Then Steve's wave; men 35 and up. He always seeds himself towards the front and I'm always amazed he comes out alive. Those guys are ruthless; it was hard to see anything but arms and splashing. One guy I swear was sending up a rooster tail with his kicking!

I was in the 'miscellaneous' wave. Women 45 and up, novices, relay racers, athenas and clydesdales. I seeded myself in the back (this is only my second open water swim race after all) and the gun went off. I had planned to try a bit of drafting and hung on with the group for a while. The problem was that I could not see a damn thing but them in front of me. If they veered off course, I was going to be going right with them. Not knowing these folks or their navigational skills, but armed with the knowledge that they could be old ladies or novices, I decided to let them go, slow down and just swim alone.

At the first bouy I had a momentary panic attack. I don't know why; there was no obvious reason. I don't really believe in reincarnation but my fear and phobia in the water since learning to swim last March makes me think I must have drowned in a former life. A wave of desperation just came out of nowhere. I almost stopped, decided not to stop but swam for a few moments completely disappointed in the realization that I would not be able to be a triathlete because I couldn't control this primal fear of the water. I can only describe it as an overwhelming instinctive sense that if I don't get out, I'm going to die. This time I swam anyway, in Morgantown I gave in and stopped. This time the feeling went away. YAHOO!!! I do get to be a triathlete, I do get to be a triathlete!!!

The rest of the swim was just perfect. I saw the police boat enough to know I was close to last but not enough to actually think I was last. I finished in 43 minutes; within 6 seconds of beating Sarah's Morgantown swim time which was my secondary goal and killed my Morgantown swim time of an embarassing 1:06 which had been my primary goal.

The bike was awesome. A very hilly course, not quite parkway hills but much bigger than williamsburg hills; but perfect roads the whole way! I loved it. I stayed aero more often than not which is something I usually have a hard time with during races.

As I started the run, Steve was finishing the race so I got to see him finish. I love watching him race so that was awesome and as usual he looked focused and strong.

I always feel better running after biking then I ever do just heading out for a run. I never do bricks in training but never have a problem with transitioning from bike to run. So I felt really good at the start of the run. Around mile 4 I started feeling tired, the course was always either up or down. My run was slow but still much better than Morgantown.

All in all my first successful triathlon experience and I loved it. This winter it's master's swim and definite weight training.

Even Kitty expressed surprise and delight at my successful finish: