Lessons

Halfway through my first swimming lesson yesterday I couldn't help but wonder who had first had the brilliant idea to breathe out your armpit? Apparently that's how you're supposed to do it -- keep your head down and chin to your chest and then turn and follow your arm as it comes back and out of the water. I admit, it works better than my method, which was to lift my entire head out of the water and take massive gulps of air, drawing the attention of every other swimmer in the pool. But still, it's strange. There were lots of other things I learned about swimming -- bend your arm at the elbow, not the wrist; hold your breath for the first stroke and then blow out on the second; reach your arm back and forward as far as possible every stroke; and kick from the hips, not the knees -- but don't kick too much or your legs will be worn out before you get to the other parts of the triathlon. It was a lot to try and put together in one hour, but I could have gone swimming forever on my own and never considered breathing out of my armpit.

I went for a short run Monday and my IT band felt ok, but I joined a local running group for a holiday light run on Thursday -- supposed to be five miles at a conversational pace that was really 6 plus miles at what is my interval pace -- and the knee hurt a lot by the end; I sure was happy to get to the dinner and drinks part of the outing. Back to rehabbing the leg I guess. But it was fun -- we gave South Philly something to talk about as fourteen of us went running the streets wearing jingle bells. I'm not sure I'll go running with the group again -- despite my "I'm a runner proclamation," these ladies were Runners with a capital R, the kind that don't wear fancy GPS watches because they like running so much they don't need the positive reinforcement of knowing their exact minute per mile pace; the kind who say they can't run with their cell phone because it's too clunky; the kind who looked at me like I was crazy when I mentioned the three-day-a-week marathon training plan I followed. But it was fun to see the holiday lights and a bit of Philly that I don't usually explore on my own.

Still didn't get that much exercise this week, but I'm trying to stay positive -- the swim lesson was an important step and the group run was an important mental health break even if my recovery was put back a bit. It's all about the balance. Well, that and the cold -- training in the winter is hard!

Do-Over

When you're a kid and things don't work out the way you want, the answer is simple: you call for a do-over and try again until you get the result that you want. This week pretty much sucked in terms of working out and rather than spending time worrying about it or figuring out where things went wrong (and that is actually pretty clear -- somewhere between going to bootcamp on Wednesday and spending time parked in front of the chocolate fountain at the office holiday party on Thursday) I've decided to just call a do-over and see if I can get it right next time. A few things to change? No boot camp class -- the debilitating muscle pain that lasted three whole days and prevented me from attending my first swim lesson means whatever benefit I get from doing 250 push ups, sit ups, m0untain climbers, etc. doesn't offset what it takes away from the rest of my training. And stuffing myself on appetizers followed by chocolate shot glasses will not make me want to jump out of bed the next morning. And a bad day at work will not actually be made better by skipping the gym and eating nachos on the couch. I'm not sure if I fully believe that last one yet, but I'm working on it.

Feel the fear

There's a Homicide episode where a young teenager shoots another teenager (ok, there are many Homicide episodes that start like that) and then confesses and acts like he doesn't care if he goes to jail. Pembleton goes to see him after one night in jail and it is clear that the kid is much more concerned and Pembleton leans down and whispers into the his ear, the way only Frank Pembleton could do, and says "You feel the fear now, don't you?"

I went for my first "long" bike ride this past weekend. It was 34 degrees out with wind gusts of 30-40 miles per hour. I went with my friend from work so I had company and someone to follow. The good part was that I got to see a cute part of Philly I had never been to and learn where a nice bike path started outside of town. The bad news is that there were hills and I had to walk some of them and that night I had calf pain and a case of the shakes that no combination of hot showers, icy hot, or Advil PM could seem to fix. Needless to say, I felt the fear.

I know I'm early in the training season and I've never been one to drop out of something based on fear (more likely to get myself into something to prove that I'm not afraid when I really am) but after looking more at the particular half-ironman race that I had signed up for, and how it refers to the "challenging mountains" on the course, I've decided to pull back to the sprint distance in that race and look for a longer, and flatter, race later in the season or early in the next season. As the Penguin would say, I'm going to correct and redirect. I know I could get up to the bike distance required for the race and if I really pushed it, I could probably do the hills too, but the thought of doing the hills and then running a half marathon at the end doesn't seem that smart right now, especially with winter just getting started (my indoor bike trainer is a great tool but there's no way it can imitate "challenging mountains") and my IT band still being uncooperative. Plus, I was already starting to worry about fitting all the workouts in, and being new to the city I don't want to be in the position of choosing the gym over opportunities to meet people.

I still feel like I have a lot of training to do for the sprint in May and then the Olympic tri in June but this way I'll be able to focus a little more on basics and technique and less on adding up the hours. I've never been good at base training -- just never had the patience for it -- but with so many aspects to the two new sports to focus on and areas to improve in running as well, I think some time laying the groundwork will be well worth it in the long haul.

In the deep end

The good news is that I am no longer worried about my IT band (although it has not improved). The bad news is that it's because I'm now worried about the swim portion rather than the run portion of the race. Running I can handle, even without the training I would like to be putting in I know how to adjust my pace and my walk breaks. But I went swimming for the first time tonight and it was not pretty. And apparently my pool is only 43 feet long, which means that to practice doing the 1.2 miles I will need to complete in May I need to swim about 148 lengths of the pool, or 74 laps. The sign on the wall of the pool said it was 63 laps per 1/2 mile, and my swimming book said that a lap means up and down, so I was thinking 126 lengths just for a half mile, but now I think I did the math and it's a little better. I'm going to walk the edge of the pool myself next time to see about the 43 feet.

Anyway, regardless of length, I spent most of the time today fighting to breathe through my hair and coughing up water. I kept trying to think about the techniques I had read about -- turning my body, keeping the lower half of my body near the top of the water by pushing my top half down, trying to keep one arm in front of me at all times -- but it felt so unnatural and forced and in the meantime I was sucking down huge gulps of air and then forcing it out under the water.

I guess I have some work to do :)

IT Blues

I tried running this morning, and the positive thing was that I actually got out of bed to go run in the cold, something I have been having trouble with this week generally (the getting out of bed part), but the negative is that I made it about 12 minutes and my IT band started to hurt. It had been feeling really good this past week and I had been stretching and using my foam roller so I thought a short run would be ok. Apparently, not so much. So I walked back home, thus my 12+ minute mile average. If you think it's cold running in the mornings, it's even colder when you run one way, get warmed up and sweaty, and then walk back, slowly, into the wind.

I'm trying to avoid thinking of worst-case scenarios. Plenty of people have come back from IT band injuries, so I'm sure it will just take more rest and stretching on my part. Maybe this is good for me because despite my recent announcement that I really am a runner, running and I have had a strained relationship these past few months, so maybe I needed an injury to realize just how hard it would be to live without it. Lesson learned! Now let me heal!

As for training, I guess I will continue to focus on the biking and swimming. The race is still nearly six months away and it only takes 12-16 weeks to be fairly well trained for a half marathon as long as you are not starting as a total beginner. I'll lay off the running for a bit and try to throw in some more gym classes to keep from losing too much cardiovascular fitness and do as much on the bike as I can. I know one of the marathon moms was forced to stop running for several weeks during the peak of her marathon training and she kept fit on the bike and still had an awesome race.

In other news, I am still not a morning exerciser. I always think that magically one day I will bound out of bed at 5am and embrace the gym, but alas, it has not happened. The last few years, where nearly all my running has occurred, I've been a student and so I either ran in the middle of the day or late at night. Next week I'm going to shoot for one morning workout and at least one post-work gym class. Now that I have the bike trainer, I mostly just want to come home and use that all the time because it is convenient, but I know I don't push myself hard enough on it. Probably half my training hours will still come on the weekends, but as the training increases I know I will have to fit more into the week, so it will be good to practice doing that now.

So, I like goals. I add every little thing I can think of to my to-do list so that I can feel more accomplished when I cross them off. And sometimes I make big goals for myself, like running a marathon, or doing a half-ironman. But the thing I like about these kind of goals is that you finish them and then you get to cross them off the list. No matter how out of shape I might get in the future, my marathons are done and can't be taken away (Oh God, I hope they can't take the finisher's medals away!)

The kind of goals I don't like are the more open ended ones. I used to make goals about weight loss, like lose ten pounds. I can't even tell you how many times I've lost those same ten pounds. And gained them. And lost them. Recently I've tried not to think too much about my weight. I can get myself into these cycles where I count every calorie and then when I count too many I stop counting and instead eat everything in sight, decide to start counting again in the morning, positive that in the morning I'll be able to start again for the last time. But I'm also an all or nothing kind of girl -- either I'm obsessed with my weight or I purposely overeat to show how not obsessed I am.

But instead of giving up on the bigger goal of actually losing weight and keeping it off in a healthy way for a lifetime, I think I have been inspired to make that my goal again. I spent the morning reading posts from Duane and I was inspired by the long haul approach he took to getting "ironfit." I don't even have that much weight to lose so I think if I take a long term approach to making little changes I can live with year after year then I can also be successful. And I've decided to put down "eat healthfully" on my daily to-do list as motivation, because it really is the day to day stuff, not the end results, that matters the most.

First day of half-iron training!

And I'm already injured! Well, technically I'm still injured from last week's half marathon, but it still wasn't the way I wanted to start it all off. Oh well. My IT band continues to be sore so I think I will skip all running workouts this week. Tonight I did 60 minutes on the trainer in my new bike shorts (thanks Dad!) and used the heartrate monitor to keep me honest -- I definitely need to work harder at that because my heartrate was pretty low most of the ride. I had planned to do weights afterwards but decided to stretch instead, focusing on some IT-specific stretches plus using the foam roller. I might put some ice on in a minute -- that good ol' bag of frozen peas.

Otherwise I'm excited about training. This week snuck up on me after the holidays but I think I'll still be able to get some good workouts in. And if I can just get the knee to heal, I'll be off and running!

I'm a runner

I trained for my first marathon using a book called "The Marathon Guide for Non-Runners." It was meant to take people who were in decent shape but hadn't been running that long and train them just enough so that they could finish the race sixteen weeks later. The plan got me across the line, albeit with a very slow finish time, and it also left me with a complex about whether or not I was a real runner. For a long time I would tell people that I ran but I wasn't one of those crazy runners, which in my mind meant that I didn't run seven days a week, avoided early morning runs if at all possible, and more than anything else, I was slow. I felt the need to warn people that I was slow and feared that if I called myself a "real" runner people might think I was fast. I assumed you had to qualify to be a "real" runner just like qualifying for the Boston marathon, and it was clear to me that would not happen.

But it's been two and a half years since that first marathon, and it's been followed by a second one plus three half marathons -- all of which I ran in the last twelve months. I'm still not a "crazy" runner -- no one has to hold me back from running the week after a marathon (or the month after for that matter). But I also know that as much as I sometimes don't like running, most of the time I do or I wouldn't continue to do it. All the health benefits in the world wouldn't get me out of the door week after week if there wasn't something enjoyable about the time outside and the burn in my legs. I'm still not fast, but I think I'm ready to call myself a runner. More than that, I think I'm proud to call myself a runner. Here's why:

1. Running holds people accountable. Lack of training? You're going to feel it. Those extra calories? You have to carry those every step of the way. Standing at the starting line of a race forces you to ask the questions you can ordinarily ignore: Am I strong enough? What will I tell myself when it gets hard?

2. Racing comes with cheerleaders. People who are not even related to you will get up early on the weekend and say encouraging things to you as you pass. They'll even give you high fives.

3. Women will wear unflattering clothes when they run and not even care. Women who normally wear big sweaters or relaxed-fit jeans will wear tiny shorts or tights that look like they're been painted on. Fashion won't get anyone a finisher's medal on race day but wick-away fabric might just make all the difference.

I'm sure other sports offer similar benefits, but for me, I'm satisfied to say that I am officially a runner.

Finding the right balance

I ran the Philadelphia half marathon this morning and as I passed by the Unitarian Church I read the weekly quote that they post in front and it said "If you spend your time dreaming about your future self, you miss out on the person you are." Well, I had about seven miles left and the relentless knee pain was slowing me down, so there was plenty of time to mull the quote over. So I wondered, how do you draw the line between embracing who you are and wanting to be better or different? One of my favorite movie lines of all time comes from Junebug and goes something like this: "God loves you just the way you are, and too much to let you stay that way." But how could I embrace myself today and still have the motivation to be better?

I think it's all about looking at the positives. For example, today the person I was was someone who hadn't really trained as much as I should have and had also been ignoring knee pain for weeks. But I was also someone who ran a half marathon even though one side of my body felt like it was on fire. In the future, I would like to be someone who trains more but maintains the mental toughness to fight through pain when it comes.

Today I am someone who is a decent runner, but has little experience with biking or swimming. In the future, or in about six months when I do my first half-ironman to be more exact, I would like to have decent skills in all three sports.

Today I'm excited about the next finish line, but more importantly, I'm also excited about the journey.