Countdown to Ironman, Week 15: Hawaii 5-0, or is that Hawaii 4-6??

We've been here in Hawaii just a bit over a week. Sure, it's vacation, and it's been great to just be able to swim out in the ocean most days, except for two when the flooded rivers dumped a ton of yucky mud into the ocean and made it more or less unswimmable. But mostly I've been using this time to do a run focus, ramping up my running mileage to 34 miles in the last week, which is about double what I've been running. Unfortunately, I should've thought to bring something other than my Vibram Five Fingers along, since all of the running is on pavement and I'm not used to cranking out that many miles on hard surfaces without any cushioning. 

Fortunately for me, my feet have taken the challenge well, and I haven't had any problems running all that mileage in the Five Fingers. My only hitch while exercising here is that I hurt my back surfing a few days ago, I bailed off of a wave when another surfer and I were on a collision course, and while my body was twisting one direction, the wave sent my torso in another. Ouch. I probably wouldn't even have noticed it at 25 years old, the last time I surfed, over two decades ago! But now at almost 46, yeah, I notice. My back has been sore and tight since, but fortunately hasn't bothered me while running.

But that just brings me to yet another one of those "this is why I train" moments. How cool is it to be able to just get on a surfboard on the North Shore of O'ahu (granted, not during the winter big wave months) and have the strength, flexibility, balance, and stamina to surf for 2.5 hours?? When you train your body in all-around fitness, not just endurance  but all of those other components as well, you can go out and do whatever it is that you want to do. And right now, with the crystal clear waters and reefs right off of our balcony, that looks like an hour or two of snorkeling...hang loose.

Fire Your Muscles

"Okay, that's it muscles, you're fired!"

Though I've sometimes felt like saying this (most often at the dreaded "wall" of a long race), that's not what I mean by firing your muscles. What I'm talking about is the ability to consciously control which of our muscles moves, when, and how much. Gaining mastery over our muscles is something we typically call "coordination", and people have widely varying abilities to do this.

When I teach swimming skills, I can readily see that some people can easily change the way they move a single body part - a hand, say, or the twist of the abdominal core. And some people can't do that easily at all. I wonder how much it boils down to innate coordination, and how much is learned? How much depends on what kinds of things we did as kids - did we run, jump, play, tunnel, climb? Or were we inside watching a TV or reading a book? I wonder about the current generation of kids, and how much control they'll have over their bodies when they don't use them as much as my generation did.

One thing I do know for sure, you can improve your muscle coordination skills. If it's sport-specific improvement you're looking for, you can do that simply by practicing that sport well and often. Malcolm Gladwell (among others) makes the point that it takes approximately 10,000 hours for a person to master a subject. That includes academic subjects like computer programming, musical endeavors like playing the voilin at a performance level,  throwing the perfect karate punch or winning the 100 meter butterfly at a swim meet. So part of it is just time spent doing the particular thing you want to get better at.

I frequently have people come to my Monday Swim Conditioning class hoping to improve their stroke, but they never get in the pool between classes. I'm sorry to say that one hour a week just won't give you much in the way of improvement. Let's see, those 10,000 hours for mastery would take you about 27 years at that rate! In swimming, I'd say it takes a minimum of two swim sessions a week to maintain whatever level you're currently at, and a minimum of 3 - 4 to improve. I can see a real difference in the people who come to my class who also swim a couple more times a week. Frequency is as important for improvement as the total amount of time you spend.

If we're looking to improve our general muscular coordination, and not just sport-specific, we can do this by engaging in a wider variety of activities. Often, we get in a fitness rut, going to the same classes or activities over and over and over. A marathon runner might be quite accomplished in his sport, but if he gets nudged sideways he can hardly hold himself up from falling because his lateral muscle stability is near zero. He's only worked his leg muscles in one particular way, and his arms and upper body not at all.

So what can we do to improve? Take a lesson from the kids and PLAY. Run, jump, roll down a hill, run up a hill, run up a sand dune, play frisbee, catch, badminton, sprint, spring, leap, climb a tree, knit, thumb-wrestle, use a hula-hoop, jump-rope, or pogo stick, do familiar exercises in different ways. I think the more different things you can do, the more likely you can gain mastery over how your body works, and it will respond more quickly to the things you ask of it.

This last Monday, I was teaching my swim class to do the butterfly. We started with the kick. In order to kick the butterfly or dolphin kick, you have to fire the muscles of your abdomen (your rectus abdominus, or "six pack muscles") in series, one after the other in order to create a wave that runs through your whole body, ending at your feet. This is tricky for many people. Some folks can only fire them all together or not at all. When they try to kick butterfly, their whole body bends in half in what I call the "inchworm" approach. No momentum is generated from this motion, and they stay almost in place in the pool. In short, you have to become like a belly dancer to swim butterfly, or someone who can roll a quarter down their abs by contracting them one at a time. By the end of class, everyone is making progress but some people have had a much easier time than others. I would put money on a bet that anyone who could use a hula-hoop as a kid though could do the butterfly kick.

So if you're trying to learn a new skill, or want to improve your overall body coordination and conditioning, remember to go and fire your muscles in new and exciting ways!

Bust Out Of Your Fitness Rut! Five New Ways To Keep Your Mind and Body Challenged

Are you in a fitness rut? Are Sundays always your long run, and Tuesdays always your gym night? I know I tend to do the same types of workouts on the same days, day in and day out if I don't catch myself and change it up. Some of that is schedule-related, it's hard to fit in a long run or bike ride on a weekday. Some workouts need to be done during hours the pool is open, or hours of outdoor daylight. But whenever possible, we should shake things up and change our routines around. It's not only better for us physically, but mentally as well.

We already know that exercise in itself causes you to grow new brain cells:

In experiments in which mice were timed running through mazes or recalling patterns, the rodents that broke a sweat on a hamster wheel performed better. After slicing into their brains, scientists discovered why: The exercising mice had grown new brain cells.

But varying mental challenges also goes a long way toward keeping you mentally and physically stronger.Both the connections between brain cells and the strength and tone of your muscles depends heavily on getting out of your ruts. You can challenge yourself in small ways: Move your kickboard and water bottle to the other end of your lap lane when you swim, run clockwise at the track. You might be surprised at how much this shakes up your workout!

Here are five good ways to shake up your workout routine, build new muscles and connect those brain cells:

1) Do It In the Dark: Are you used to going to the gym or only running or biking during daylight hours? Do it in the dark instead! Of course, safety precautions are a must, and a good headlamp goes a long way as well. Fortunately, with lightweight LED technology and reflective clothing like Illuminite, being well-lit doesn't mean carrying fifty pounds of flashlight and clothing covered in reflective tape. My favorite items are my Illuminite headband, and a couple of reflective wrist and ankle bands. They cheap, and because your arms and legs are moving they draw attention to you as you move through the darkness. You can continue your bike commute or even something dramatic like nighttime mountain biking through the woods if you're well lit (by that I do not mean by a thermos of the hard stuff). My husband swears by his mountain bike lights from GeoMan Gear. I've used the smaller one on my bike commutes and I always get comments from other cyclists about how bright it is.

2) Do It At Different Intensity: How many different tempos and durations do you use for your workouts? Chances are you have a few fallbacks: the 45 minute run. The 30 minute Ab Lab. The hour in the weight room. Try something new. Try a ten minute run as hard as you can for those ten minutes (with appropriate warmup of course!) Try using half the weights that you're used to and going twice as many reps, or twice the weight and only doing one or two reps. This guy did a spontaneous marathon one day on his treadmill. He just had his family keep bringing him food and drink! Shake it WAY up and see what happens.

3) Do It Someplace New: Does your jogging route always go down the same street? Go one block over instead. Drive to the next town and start your bike ride from there.Go to another pool (I recently took my kids to a wave pool in the next town and swam laps in the pool there. It felt completely different than my normal workout.) Visit a new gym (most will give you a week's trial membership around this time of year).

4) Do It With Someone Else: Are your workout buddies stagnant? The same topics of conversation keep coming around? How 'bout them Ducks? Okay I had to throw that in, as a UO alumni, I never thought I'd see my Duckies as #1 in the country. Find a new running group, a new yoga class time or instructor, an all-woman's hiking group, my mom even found a "Kayaking and Poetry" group. They each bring a poem, kayak to a location and take their lunch and share their poetry. Now that's keeping your brain and body engaged!

5) Do Something Completely Different: I just signed up for a Flashmob online. Yes, a Flashmob. No, I'm not a very good dancer. But I'm going to learn the choreography, I'm going to show up, and I'm going to make sure I'm standing behind at least three or four rows of better dancers! How about Parkour, Geocaching, Night Orienteering? Organize a midnight game of tag on your local soccer fields. Go on a snipe hunt. Re-enact a civil war battle, go inner tubing without a rope tow and hike up the hills. Tie your dogs to your scooter and practice dog sledding. Just shake it up and your brain and your body will thank you!

Punching Things, With Julie

So Julie, from Chubby Mommy Running Club came over to my garage/gym yesterday for some coaching - ostensibly aiming to do a triathlon in the spring. But somehow one thing led to another and we ended up punching things (well, things like my punching bag at least) and maybe kicking a little bit too. The great thing about spontaneous fitness is you never know what you'll end up doing. A few laps around a track or a session with the boxing gloves. Having fun with exercise is the single most important thing in my book. If you can't have fun and play like a kid, why bother?

Well, let's just say that Julie knows how to play, and brings a lot of enthusiasm to the table. You can see our adventures and misadventures with our impromptu kickboxing lesson in this hysterical video on her blog.

Speaking of spontaneous fitness, this is a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately, what with the winding down of my triathlon season, thinking about what fun things I might do next year (a swim of Crater Lake with our Master's team might just be in the works, wheee!), and of what, really, I want out of my personal fitness goals. Are they serving me? Or am I serving them? What do I want to be able to really do with my body and why? How do other people approach their goals? What things work and don't in order for people to stay motivated? Stay tuned for more aimless ramblings on this subject at some unspecified time in the future.