Off to The Frozen Arctic

Well, we're not going above the arctic circle, but my Team in Training teammates and I are heading off to camp for the weekend at Wickiup Reservoir, site of their upcoming Pacific Crest triathlon. Only snag? It's supposed to be 38 degrees there tomorrow morning!! Oh, doesn't that make you just want to get in a wetsuit and climb into a lake? And then bike 28 miles? No? Me neither, LOL.

But we'll do it, for the same reasons I talked about in my "that's why they call you Ironman" post. Because sometimes to reach your goals, you have to do the hard things in life. At least I'm bringing S'mores fixings and firewood!

So, How Lucky Am I ??

When I joined this amazing sport of triathlon in 1986, I was just occupied with trying to stay on my bike without falling over in my toeclips, and finishing the run without walking. Meanwhile, on the international scene, Dave Scott was busy winning his 5th Ironman. Ten years later in 1996 as I temporarily hung up my running shoes during the summer of my first pregnancy, he was coming out of retirement for the 2nd time to place again at the Big Show in Hawaii. He's definitely an icon in the sport, and someone who is still actively competing but also coaching, consulting, commentating, and speaking about triathlon.

He's also the National Advisory triathlon coach for Team in Training, and he'll be conducting the coach training session that I'm going to in two weeks! So, how lucky am I?

And by the way, I'll be a nervous wreck come the end of this month - the training is all the way across the country in Washington D.C., and will be the first time ever that I've gotten on an airplane and flown away from my babies. Okay, well they're hardly babies. My big guy borrows my shoes and just got braces, my not-so-little gal grew an inch this month and regularly updates my iPod with bands I haven't even heard of. But still. Yeah, they'll be fine. I'll be a wreck. Luckily, I have the fact of getting to go learn how to be a better tri coach from Dave Scott to keep me cheered up!

They're Killing Me! But It's Okay....

So Saturday was my first day back to running after my ankle injury. We had a Team in Training group run, and I figured I would hang out with the run/walkers and give it a good trial to see how it felt. My running coach though had different plans: hill repeats! Up this hill that overlooks downtown. Fortunately, the ankle feels fine, but oh my aching quads and hamstrings now. That's probably not the best way to "ease back into" running.

Then today our karate sensei hammered us with an abdominal workout from hell, somewhere over 300 reps of various ab exercises. I know really strong abs are imperative for karate, and I actually try to do ab work about 5x a week anyways. But taking a class that's used to doing 30 - 50 reps and ramping them up to 300 in one day is a bit of a shock.

Still, I am impressed with what my body can now do. I was remembering how with both of my pregnancies my abdominal muscles split apart right down the middle. You could lay a chalkboard eraser in the trench down the middle of my stomach where they're supposed to meet up after each of my babies was born. I have a very short torso, so my babies just stuck straight out when I was pregnant, and the ab muscles just separated to accomodate that. I had to start with very slow crunches - one or two only - supporting and holding together my abs with both hands. To come from there to being able to knock off 300 reps with the young people in the karate class feels just great.

I was also reminiscing with our Team in Training crew about how I couldn't run a mile after my 2nd kid was born. It really is true that with incremental improvement, we can do amazing things. Just running a bit farther each time, walking a bit less - it really does all add up. I just know our whole team will do great on race day, because I know they can do it. I've been from there to here, and I know they can too.

Kicking Off With Team in Training

We've officially kicked off our Team in Training triathlon season, with two run workouts and a bike fit/road repair clinic. Although I've felt very frazzled as the beginning of the Team in Training (TNT) season overlapped with the State Robotics Tournament (where the kids did very well!) So I had one very insane weekend where everything came together, and now I should be settling out into just doing the TNT coaching thing. So far, we've got a team of 10 people setting out to do an Olympic distance tri, and it's been great getting to know the team members.

My ankle's still on the mend, so I've been riding my bike with the team as they run, but hopefully by our next run workout in two weeks I'll be able to hobble along. I'll get to coach our first swim workout this Wednesday, and that's the part I'm most looking forward to, but am also the most nervous about since usually when I've coached bigger groups of people it's been Master's swimmers, who all pretty much know the drill. I definitely want to help everyone on the team meet their goals and I know for many of them that means making it through the swim.

Hopefully by the time Wednesday rolls around, some of the snow that's been falling here will be melted. I think we're going to hoof it down the hill tomorrow and catch a bus into town for our Karate class, since my car is definitely snowbound unless I want to throw the chains on. So for today, this is what my hill repeats looked like:

Beauty in Motion

This morning I was playing volleyball at our club, and the tall guy on the other side of the net went up for a spike. As I was moving toward the place where the ball was going to rocket at a 120 mph, it suddenly hit the net and ricocheted off in the other direction. As I put a fast-stop on my lunge and turned, I saw out of the corner of my eye two of my teammates in oddly choreographed high-speed motion change directions to deflect the new course of the volleyball. In that blink of an eye, it occurred to me (as it has so many times over the years) what a wonderful machine this human body is - how responsive, how complex, how fundamentally miraculous. If you think about the internal chain of events necessary for even this one small motion - the eyes perceiving the direction and velocity of the ball, the muscles tensed, the brain computing speed and direction and plotting where the ball will land - and then think how quickly your body can change and respond to a whole new set of inputs, well it's pretty humbling. So often in our bodies, we concentrate on what they are doing that's not to our liking. They gain weight, they get wrinkled, they dehydrate, they don't snap back for that workout we wanted to put them through. But we rarely take the time to appreciate the miracle that we've been handed.

Sports give us back the miracle. At least they do for me. When I'm out on my bicycle, I'm often glorying in the sheer beauty of flying along the road under my own steam. When I can still leap or dodge or remember a complex set of moves, it's a wonderful thing to me. That's really the gift of sports in my life.

I'm so thrilled to start sharing that gift again with others. We had our first information meeting for Team in Training this week, and getting to meet some of the people who will be on my triathlon team was really exciting. When I think about being able to help people meet their goals, cross a finish line they didn't think they could make, open up a whole new world of fun and appreciation of what their body and mind can do, it's something I am looking forward to. But I'm also really nervous. These folks will be depending on me. Organizational skills are not my strong suit. I'll be responsible for getting them to a point where they can swim a mile in an open body of water. This week is going to be a very tough one to get through as I try to get everything organized. Fortunately, I've got an awesome team of assistant coaches (experts on the bike and run respectively) to help me out. But ultimately, the success of these people is my responsibility. With the kids robotics team State Championship tournament also looking up next weekend, time will be short and I may not be blogging again until it's all over.

Until then, I'll be falling farther behind on reading my favorite blogs, watching presidential debates (thankfully I'm recording them) and even finishing a sudoku puzzle here or there. Life will get crazy and then it will smooth out again for awhile. It always does.

Good News!

It looks like I will be the new triathlon coach for Team in Training for our area. This will be a pretty big commitment for me, and I think my summer race schedule next year till be pretty light, but I am really excited!

I've been running in my toe shoes a lot, as running on the street was still giving me nausea and headaches. But the other day on the trail, I came across this amazing sight and ran a mile or so back to the car for my camera then lugged it back to the lake to snap this photo of the spiderweb covered in sparkles and the fall colors. Definitely worth it!

In other news I'm close to being able to run on the street again. A couple of trail runs in my toe shoes that were really pleasant and it looks like I've mostly got the strange physical running aversion licked. I had a nice run home from our volleyball game last night and am hopeful that this will last!

When You're Going Right and God Tells You to Go Left

For this entire season I've been so excited about the Nationals being here in Oregon again next year, finding a qualifying race, and snagging a slot to go. They're usually in June, when a lot of other good races get going, so I called USAT to find out exactly which weekend in June they would be. They're not, in June that is. They'll be in September next year, mid-September. Mid-September as in right smack in the middle of a family vacation that we've been planning for six months already. Not that I'm complaining really, we're planning on taking the kids on a one-month cycling tour of Italy and that trumps the Nationals any day. But still, it's really disappointing to find out that after all that, I won't be able to go after all.

So it seemed rather serendipitous that the same day I found out about the Nationals date change, I got an email in my inbox saying that the local Team in Training chapter is looking for a triathlon coach. It's something I talked to them about doing a couple of years ago, but at the time they didn't have a local group doing triathlons, just running events. It's a reasonable time commitment, but one I might have a hard time fitting in if I was going to have a serious triathlon season on my hands, and also they're aiming to take a team to the Pacific Crest race, which would've fallen right when I thought Nationals was going to be. So it seems as if maybe I'm being shown a different path for this upcoming season. Maybe one that involves less tri-ing for me, and more tri-ing for other people. I've coached people on and off through the last fifteen years, but not in any large-group format, so this would be an interesting stretch.

To top it off, my neighbor died of cancer last night, she is probably only a decade and change older than I am. It's sobering to think of how quickly all that we take for granted here on earth can be gone. This summer she was riding her bike up our hill with a smile, and now she is somewhere else entirely. It seems like a good time to be giving back for me, so keep your fingers crossed that this opportunity works out!