Happy Happy Joy Joy

Endorphins and bicycle wheels go hand in hand in my life. There's something incredibly joy-producing about being on a bicycle for me, especially once the weather gets warm enough to ride in shorts. Oh the happiness of not being bundled up like an arctic explorer just to go for a ride. It's a mystery to me why that "runner's high" so rarely happens when I'm running, but pops out almost the moment I get on a bicycle. And it doesn't seem to matter what kind of bicycle it is - tooling around town on my junker, or out on a tandem ride with the kids, or on my lovely piece of rolling titanium tri-bike (the one my daughter dubbed "Hi Ho Silver"). It seems that any bike will do. I can wax nostalgic about past bikes, too: my college cruiser, with one gear and pedal-backwards braking. I bought it for $25 and spray-painted it red, rode it for four solid years and then sold it for $75 because cruisers had just then come back into style.

Going into a bike store is like heaven and torture at the same time. I could probably use about five more bikes - a touring bike for sure, a much-cooler updated cruiser with comfy seat and town gearing, a recumbent just because they look like fun, a road bike just in case I ever take up riding with a group, oh the list goes on.

So this week the warm weather came out, presumably just for another teaser because now it's cold as an icebox again. I got to do the first real brick of the season with some of my TNT teammates. We did some hill repeats and then an easy run. Went out on a longer ride with another TNT teammate and enjoyed my favorite rolling route along the river. There were these huge black clouds threatening us, which had me worried because I had forgotten to bring any sort of jacket at all, and lately when those black clouds show up they dump either buckets of hail or torrents of water! But a fortunate little blue hole appeared above us and followed us for the entire ride, only to close up as we reached the end when it started to hail. Lucky! I'm woefully underprepared for my first Oly distance race this year in (gulp) 3 weeks, but with the weather and my crazy schedule this winter/spring, I'm just going to have to tough it out and survive it, I think.

Wishing you happy pedaling this week!

Get Your Swim On For That Spring Sprint

Here's a good main set for working on speed for a 500 - 800 yard swim in one of the spring sprint distance tris that are popping up like daisies this time of year...

3 x
{2 x 200
2 x 100
2 x 50}

I did this one tonight, and tried to make the 100's add up to less time than the fastest 200, and the 50's add up to less than the fastest 100. Then I tried to make each of the three sets a little faster than the last. It looks like a simple set, but it turned out to be fairly tough in the end!

The Evil Fairies Are At It Again

I don't know how this happens to me, it isn't the first time the evil fairies have visited me but this time they've gone too far. I have a card I use to get into the club where I teach swimming. I put it in a small pocket on the outside of my backpack. This pocket only has three things in it - my card, my lock & key, and my iPod. One day, I go to get out my card at the front desk and it's not there - it's very obviously not in this pocket. This pocket only carries three things, and the card is not one of them at this point. I look everywhere for it - in pockets, in the washing machine, in my bike panniers, on my desk. It's nowhere. For a few weeks, I sign in on the shameful "missing card" sign-in sheets at the front desk, hoping it will just magically turn up, but I eventually admit defeat and get another card, for which I'm probably charged $5 or so out of my ridiculously tiny paycheck.

So I've been using my new card for a couple of weeks now and yesterday I go to the club and pull out my card, and two cards come of of the pocket together - my new one and my old one, as if I'm a magician pulling a bunny out of a hat. The only logical explanation are that there are tiny evil fairies whose sole mission in life is to torture me with stuff like this. I mean, I know I'm slightly disorganized and a little cluttery and messy, and I do lose things from time to time only to find them later in a completely different place. But this time I can't help but feel that they're mocking me. There's no way, NO WAY I tell you, that this card was in that pocket before yesterday. The evil fairies are probably somewhere sitting on a mushroom and toasting each other with dandelion wine this very instant, laughing at my expense.

How to Scare the Heck Out of the Swim Coach

So I'm on the pool deck, coaching my Monday night Swim Conditioning class, and something on my radar screen just goes off. I look over at the hot tub and my heart stops cold. There's a body floating motionless in there. Semi-casually, so as not to freak anyone out, I hold the class up a minute and walk briskly over to check it out. As it turns out, it's just a lady who enjoys relaxing in the hot tub in kind of a dead-man's float position. Whew!

I'm always amazed at how quickly that radar reacts to small changes in the environment, especially around the pool. I pulled a kid out of the hot tub once that I wasn't even consciously aware was there. I was lap swimming and almost not of my own volition I vaulted out of the pool toward the hot tub. My subconscious brain had noticed that there was a kid there, and then there wasn't. He was under water and his mom (sitting just a few feet away) had not noticed. With the bubbles on, you couldn't even see him under the water. Scary! I guess once a lifeguard always a lifeguard. Sometimes when I'm at the pool in the summer with my kids, I find myself counting noses in the pool and keeping track of the bathing suits: "1,3, 7, 9, kid in red suit...yep... blue trunks....pink ponytail...orange duckie....11, 14...." and I won't even notice I'm doing it.

So my heart is back to normal now, and at least you know if you ever swim or even float prone in the hot tub on my watch, you're safe.

Jonesing For A Swim

I needed to swim tonight like a junkie might need a fix after a week of going straight. I love biking, I like running, but swimming is my habit and when I get as stressed as I was today, I need my fix dammit. So although my to-do list was ten feet long and growing, I took the time to get in the pool and now I feel almost sane. By 6:00 am tomorrow morning, we'll be headed for the airport to Atlanta to the FIRST World Robotics Festival. We've got five kids, two robots, a ton of spare parts, research project presentations, pit table decorations, team t-shirts, trading cards and give-aways, and of course the kids' iPods, Nintendos, laptops, books, and other assorted paraphenalia. I don't think Hannibal carried this much stuff across the Alps, and he had elephants for pack animals. We only have a couple of parents to do the job. Wish us luck, and cross your fingers that the hotel has a good pool. I'm gonna need it!

Cadence and Old Punk Vinyl

Running cadence is one of the least debated bits of running technique. Unlike a forward lean or midfoot vs. forefoot vs. heel striking, running books, coaches, triathletes and runners themselves are almost unilateral in their praise of running cadence and insistence that every runner should be running at a cadence of around 88 - 92. I have been working on my running cadence for a couple of years, and have posted questions about cadence at places like the Trifuel forums, normally a font of wisdom on all subjects to do with triathlon training. What I've heard back is unilateral praise for the merits of high cadence. Even when I've asked questions about whether or not this is feasible for slower runners or for some of the heavier Clydesdale-class athletes I've been coaching, the answer has been that a high cadence is good across the board.

Unfortunately, this advice hasn't matched up with my experience, which is that for runners who are slower than about 10 minutes a mile, a high cadence is very hard or impossible to achieve. And it's not a matter of just practicing it more, it just doesn't seem to work. At the triathlete coach's seminar, Dave Scott was talking about cadence and I asked him this question. He said that over about a 9 minute mile, runners usually can't sustain a cadence of 90. Just one more little nugget of wisdom that I gleaned from that training. As I said earlier, this stuff has been percolating through my brain as I've been training and coaching and these kernels of insight have been popping to the top.

For me, the cadence issue has been both a saviour and a bugaboo. A saviour in the sense that developing a higher cadence finally has enabled me to run off of the bike effectively in my sprint and Olympic distance races. I can keep about a 8 minute per mile pace in these shorter races and the high cadence and shorter stride has helped me transition from biking to running more smoothly with much less effort on my legs. So all of the high cadence work I was doing has been very helpful in that regard. But on my slower paced runs (I'm about a 9-minute miler for a half-marathon, and 10 minutes per mile at the marathon distance), I struggled with implementing the higher cadence. It always seemed to drive my heartrate up, and I could never reconcile the higher cadence with the heartrate needed for the longer distances. So what Dave Scott said rang completely true from my own experience - the 9 minute mile is about where I lose the ability to keep my cadence high. Finally, some cadence advice in running that makes sense to me! This will also help me immensely in coaching my newer runners and Clydesdale runners, for whom a 10 minute mile is still a distant goal.


So with all of this in mind, I set out on a tempo run this week, and was searching through eMusic.com for a useful set of tunes to bolster my higher cadence. I came across this album, Someone's Gonna Ger Their Head to Believe, which was perfect. As I was listening through the album preview, a wave of good old nostalgia washed over me. This album is a compilation of most of the best early American Hardcore punk, brought together on an album called Someone Got Their Head Kicked In, from the seminal punk year of 1982. They've combined it with most of the best tracks from another compilation, 1984's Something to Believe In, and ended up with an album containing many of the best US Hardcore tracks ever layed on good old-fashioned vinyl. I have both of these albums somewhere in my moldering vinyl collection, but I'm not one of those folks who still have their record players. So to find it easily downloadable in an MP3 format on a day when I needed a jolt for a tempo run was a Godsend. Youth Brigade, Aggression, Battalian of Saints, Bad Religion, Adolescents, Social Distortion, Seven Seconds - this album is definitely a soundtrack of my teenage years.

Our city's weekly newspaper just did an article on the re-emerging trend of House Concerts. When I was a teen, they were in full swing in our town, and I was happy to note that the article mentioned my old house as one of the early venues for house concerts in our town that has apparently renewed itself as a music venue. Three friends and I rented a house we called "The Greenhouse" (not surprisingly, for the paint color) in 1985 and nailed mattresses over the basement windows. Our band practiced there and a number of the best hardcore bands in the world played there over the year or so that passed between signing the rental contract and getting kicked out for having a bunch of homeless kids living in our basement. It's funny to walk downtown and see a marquee for bands like NOFX and remember selling tickets at my own back door and begging people not to drink beer on the lawn facing the street.

So my tempo run was bolstered by fast tracks and good memories, and the mystery of why I can't hold that faster cadence on my distance runs has been solved. On Tuesday I leave with my kids and our robotics team en route to the World Robotics Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. This might be the last missive from me until we get back a week from now. Until then, rock on....

And They Win By A Spike....

First volleyball game of the spring season last night. I had to sit out all last season because of that blasted sprained ankle, and was more than a little trepidatious about playing on it. It felt really tight at first in the Achilles, but loosened up and didn't bother me at all after that - hooray! First game we took easily (I can't believe all my serves went in), second game we totally lost (15 - 5, how is that possible), third game came down to rally scoring and only a few minutes left, and we were tied up and it went back and forth until we won it on a spike... by me! Hooray, I can jump again! One more sport I can enjoy once more, four months is a long time to take off from something this fun.

Working From the Core

For years, I've been talking with my swimmers about trying to swim from the core, instead of from the arms and feet. Although we use our core muscles for power in almost every other sport (think of a golfer winding up a swing, or a quarterback twisting that arm way back for the Hail Mary pass), when people swim they often tend to be rather flat in the water, moving only their arms and legs. If they're not flat, they're over-rotating their hips to the sides (often influenced by the Total Immersion method) along with their torso. These styles are the equivalent of giving Barry Bonds a baseball bat and asking him to either hit without moving his hips at all, or asking him to move his hips parallel to his shoulders. In neither case would he be able to muster up enough power to send one out of the park (stand up and try it with an imaginary bat if you don't see what I mean).

So I've believed for a long time that the power in a swimming stroke comes from twisting that core, and while the hips will twist too, to a certain extent, rotating them too far will take some of that power away. The human core is like a gigantic spring of muscles which can store a lot of energy once it is twisted and then unleashed. The bummer is that it's hard to describe this to people and have them just get it and be able to translate it to their swimming stroke.

One of the most exciting drills I learned last weekend was something that I think will really help swimmers feel this concept. We were doing a drill that's something like paddling on a surfboard - arms are flexed at right angles and you're paddling with a very flat and short stroke, with no rotation of the torso at all. One of the things this works on is setting that high elbow catch as well (two birds with one stone here). With the next step, you add rotation of the shoulders, but pretend there's a coffee cup balanced on your hips that you don't want to spill. That lets swimmers feel their torso rotating independently from their hips. Just using these drills the other night with my swimmers, many of them were able to have one of those great "aha" moments where they could feel the muscles they needed to be moving in order to start generating power from their core instead of just from their arms. I love it when that happens.

If you watch videos of great swimmers, like this one of Grant Hackett, you can see the rotation of the upper core, independent from the hips that I'm talking about, and how much power comes from that rotation.

Still Digesting

I spent this last weekend at the Team in Training coaches seminar, given by Dave Scott. It was a pretty intense 2 days of workshops, hands-on technique coaching, and a lot of information. I'm still digesting it all, but you can probably expect to see things start popping out here in this blog that I learned over the weekend. The swim drills were the part I was most excited about, and I wasn't disappointed there. I came away with some new tools for helping my swimmers understand better stroke mechanics. Oh yeah, and I got a killer quick tour of all the wonderful Washington D.C. sights, including an early run down to see the sunrise over the Washington and Lincoln monuments. Unforgettable!

Training With Kids: Part 1

After reading The Dread Pirate Rackham's interesting insights into Training With 5 Year Olds, I thought I'd riff off of that and offer up a few bits of wisdom (or not, you decide) I've discovered over the years of training and racing as a mom with young kids.

Early Years (0-3):

Accessories Are Your Friends

When friends at our church offered to throw us a baby shower for our first-born, the only thing I really wanted and needed was a running stroller. I'd already gotten a heap of cloth diapers, we'd planned to have the baby sleep with us, and with a pair of boobs already in place there was no feeding equipment necessary. So they had a money tree and bought us this great running stroller. Later, we added a Burley bike trailer and a Rhode Gear Limo bike seat to our stash and I was ready to roll with the baby. Unfortunately, the baby had other plans, which brings me to....

Be Flexible

Our son was one of those "extremely high needs" babies that you hear about and secretly wish won't happen to you. Never slept (so neither did I), hated the car seat, the stroller, the bike trailer, and anything that didn't involve being bounced up and down in the sling or nursing 24 x 7. We learned later that he had Sensory Integration Dysfunction (the world was too loud, too bright, too rough, too scary for the little guy) and also food allergies. So our world was turned upside down. Being flexible was the key to getting anything accomplished at all. For many months I couldn't swim - he would start screaming in the daycare at the gym and the ladies would have to come and get me out of the pool. Running sometimes worked out, sometimes not. Sometimes I had to take him out of the stroller and nurse or bounce him once a mile. Being flexible helped me find creative ways to workout whenever I could grab a minute, and I completed my first post-baby triathlon when he was 10 months old, so it all worked out in the end. His needs got met, mine got met, and though I wasn't the active mom-on-the-go I'd pictured myself to be ahead of time, we both were fine. Our second baby was happy as a clam at the gym, in the stroller, or wherever we wanted to drag her along, so things were actually easier with two kids than they were when I just had one. I found that a lot of working out with a baby is finding ways to work with the particular baby you happen to have!

Title Nine Sports Rocks

You might even be too young to know what Title Nine refers to (Google it, girlfriend), but this is hands-down the best place to buy running bras online. When what your husband might happily refer to as the "Boob Fairy" visits, it can be downright upsetting for an athlete who is not used to worrying about the Bounce Factor. Title Nine has a 1, 2, and 3-barbell rating system for bounce control, and sells everything from the Superwoman bra to The Last Resort bra. Don't worry, these things do go back down in size (husbands can get disappointed now), though they may never return to their pre-baby size.

Get Your Workouts In While You Can

When our 2nd kid came along, I got smart and bought a bike trainer and an indoor elliptical machine, so I could work out if they were napping, or I could put on a video for them and get some exercise time in. I would run in the mornings, the evenings, whenever my husband was available for kid duties. We moved to a new town and I started biking everywhere with the kids - trips to the library now doubled as a workout. You might think that miles around town on an old beater bicycle don't count, but I've discovered otherwise. Looking through my last season's journals, I never logged more than five hours on my road bike per week, but managed a 1:09 Olympic distance bike time and a 2:52 Half-Iron bike split, mostly due to a lot of bike commuting and tandem riding with my kids.

There Will Always Be Another Season

As trite as it might sound, babies grow up very quickly. At times, it can sure be frustrating to try to train and compete as a parent of very young kids. But looking back, I'm glad that I made the switch to "triathlete lite" during those years when my kids were babies and young toddlers. It went by all too fast as it was, and while I kept my feet wet with swimming, biking, and running whenever I could, and always did a couple of tris a season, I didn't really turn my head back to getting serious about tris until they were about 5 and 8 years old. By that time, they could ride bikes beside me while I ran, and each of them has done their own triathlon now so they know what it's all about.

Oooooh, Uggghhh, First Brick of the Season

How is it that I can forget every year what it feels like to run off of the bike? I ran for 30 minutes after Saturdays 1:00 Team in Training bike ride, and that first mile was a killer. A couple of years ago I learned that high cadence on the run off of the bike makes a big difference for me in getting through that first mile and luckily I kept that in mind this time around and I always feel better after that first 8 minutes or so. It will be a short and fast Tri season for me this year, probably one sprint and one Oly distance tri is all I'll be fitting in this spring. So I can concentrate more on speed than long distance for the first time in a few years.

More On That High Elbow Catch

Here's a great video that demonstrates the high elbow catch with Sheila Taormina. Another one show's Ian Thorpe's high elbow. And here's a great swim technique video that touches on several points (including the catch) from Dave Scott.

A Swim Workout To Be Eager For

Since starting as the Team in Trainng coach, I've missed my Saturday morning Master's swim workouts, so I have to be content to just do the Master's workout on my own steam when I go in to swim (not nearly so much fun, I have to say).

This weeks' was a good one though. If you want a tough set that will keep your technique tight, try this out:

6 x 100 Fast
2 x 50 Focus on technique
5 x 100 Fast
2 x 50 Technique
4 x 100 Fast
2 x 50 Technique
3 x 100 Fast
2 x 50 Technique
2 x 100 Fast
2 x 50 Technique

Total: 2500 yard main set. I really enjoyed this set as I felt able to swim the fast 100's with really good technique and not let it degrade over the course of such a long and hard set. The good news is that my swim times are continuing to improve. Though my right ankle is still not anywhere near 100%, I am back to a good pace for my fast 100's, stillabout 5 seconds (per 100) off of my pre-injury pace, but much better than a month ago!

It's encouraging to see the speed trickling back in, and although my shoulders are still sore after every swim workout, the new "barrel catch" I mentioned in this previous post is coming along nicely and I can feel the power there that I know will grow over the next six months as my muscles adapt. I can now pull with the pull buoy at a 1:26 average pace, where I was never able to go below 1:30 before (my kick is still a big part of my stroke, I guess I'll never be a true long distance swimmer!), and I think that's all due to that new catch.

Eagerness, The Next Level

After our karate belt tests, Albert Sensei who runs our dojo always has everyone sit down for a pep talk. You never hear the kids moan or groan about it either because he's such a dynamic and engaging speaker and what he has to say is always meaningful in a personal way. Yesterday he was talking about levels of commitment - Obedience, Willingness, and then Eagerness. He stressed that he wants all of us at the dojo to not just be willing to practice karate, or participate in anything in life (even taking out the garbage) but instead be eager to do it.

It got me thinking about my mindset and how it affects my training. For years, I was such a reluctant runner. I only ran because I had to in order to compete in triathlons. I was somewhere between obedient and willing to do it, but I was never ever eager. I would even tell people that I only ran because they had no Swim/Bike duathlons. Then a couple of years ago I decided I really wanted to become a better runner. I asked good runners and coaches about their favorite drills, I checked out books like Chi Running, and I really put some effort into my runs. I did hills, I did strides, I did form drills. And you know what? I not only became a better runner, but I really began to like running. I became, in fact, eager to go for a run. Now that I'm suffering through the rehabilitation of my sprained ankle, I've even found that I've missed running.
















There are so many areas of life that one can work on the eagerness factor. Last night, my husband and I cooked a meal together. To say I'm a reluctant chef would not be overstating the case at all. I actually love to cook and am really pretty good at it (my grandfather even owned his own restaurant, so I must have some cooking genes in there somewhere), but I hate deciding what to make and I hate the mess it makes in the kitchen (that's my engineering brain talking there). But we've decided that, in honor of our upcoming trip to Italy, Saturday nights will be "Italian Night" in our house this year. I checked out the Everyday Italian cookbook from the library, and last night Wayne tackled making a grilled seafood salad (with squid and scallops) and I made a mushroom risotto that was quite heavenly. And we really enjoyed ourselves, you could even say I was eager to get cooking! We all went to the store together and picked up fresh ingredients, stuck an Italian language learning CD in the player and repeated "buona serra" to each other as we cooked.

This week, my aim will be carrying this eagerness forward into all areas of my life. There's no real point in doing anything grudgingly, when you can actually enjoy it (even running, or cleaning up after our Italian feast.

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!

Power Juice

Everyone around me is sick, getting over being sick, or starting to get sick. So here's my power drink for the week:

1/2 glass carrot juice
Fill rest of glass with water
Stir in 2 tsp. pomegranite syrup
Dump in a packet of Emergen-C to make it fizzy and high in Vitamin C

Yumm!! My kids think I'm crazy, but I think it's pretty darned good. I'm also cooking about 5 cloves of garlic in everything I make this week. Hopefully the combo will ward off the bugs.

I Think I Can, I Think I Can, I Think I Can

You remember reading that corny story about the Little Engine Who Could when you were a kid? My son was so into trains that I read any book with a train theme to him approximately 10,000 times. So I read "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can" many times over those years. Yesterday in karate we were doing pushups and our sensei had us yelling with each pushup "I...am...a...future...black...belt" over and over. The ol' Power of Positive Thinking gig. Sometimes we can let ourselves believe that this kind of stuff is "just BS" or really doesn't work. But lately I've seen the results of positive thinking in a big way that confirmed what I've known anecdotally throughout my life.

Just recently, the kids on my robotics team have shown me all over again what kind of power you have when you refuse to be told you can't do something. I have to admit, as they dreamed big about going to the World Championships, there was that nagging adult voice in my brain that said "Don't let them get their hopes up too high or they'll be disappointed." So I tried to be the voice of reason, I tried to tell them that the odds were big, we were one small, relatively new team out of 10,000 teams worldwide. It was all stacked against us, but I was all for them trying. But they knew better. Somehow, they knew that they could do this. When I gathered them together at a local ice cream shop and told them the exciting news, there was no outburst of surprise. They blinked a few times and then smiled. They knew. They knew they could do this all along. I was the one who was not with the game, and that's a great lesson for me to take away. We can do so much more than we think we can if we refuse to let ourselves be limited.

This week, I checked out the DVD of Rudy from the library for our family to watch. If you love sports, any kind of sports, or cinderella stories, you've got to check out Sean Astin in this role. It's not a recent movie, but it's the true story of a kid who really wouldn't take no for an answer. From a blue collar family, he dreamed that one day he would play football for Notre Dame. Despite economic & educational obstacles and his own short stature, he refused to stop believing in his dream, and you know, he accomplished it too.

When I think about my Team in Training team members, the obstacles they're facing and overcoming on a daily basis, it inspires me. I love getting phone calls like the ones I got this week from team members: "I swam and it felt effortless!", "I ran for over an hour, can you believe that!", and all of this just because people think they can do something as amazing as a triathlon!

So yes, when my karate sensei has us all hollering about being a blackbelt, I'll yell it out "loud and proud" as they say in class. Because I do believe it. I can already see that black belt out there in my future, just like my kids could see that world championship in front of them. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can....

A Trip to Seattle and Some Amazing News

We took a short trip to Seattle this week for my sister's birthday. It was beautiful there, reminding me of what a lovely city Seattle is when it's not raining. The snow-covered Olympics and the glassy blue Lake Washington greeted us as we spent a day wandering around the Woodland Park Zoo. I got to run with my sister - it's great to have a little sis' who is active and fun to hang out with. An hour's run gave us plenty of time to catch up, and was the first time I've run more than 4 or 5 miles since my ankle sprain. I had to walk up the steeper hills due to some lingering tenderness in my Achilles tendon, but otherwise was fine!

While we were there, I got this amazing phone call from the woman in charge of Oregon's FLL Robotics program. She told me that the kids' robotics team (that I've been coaching) was nominated to go to the FLL World Festival! They'll be competing with 84 other teams from all over the world (of the 10,000 FLL teams worldwide) in Atlanta, Georgia in mid-April. This will be just an amazing opportunity for my kids and the rest of the kids on our team as well. We are so excited!

It's not looking like this will be a year of triathlons for me. In fact, it's looking like it will be an extremely light tri season with everything else we've got going on. Maybe that's okay though. The last time I took a season off was 1999 when I was pregnant with my daughter, and after 9 years maybe it's time to have another little break.

Foggy Run

The city was wrapped in a deep fog this morning when I headed out to run with our TNT team. The fog was so thick rolling in from the coast over 40 miles away that you could taste the kelp and the sea foam and the ocean. Traffic lights over deserted streets glowed red for long distances and the chill seeped into my bones and didn't come out for an hour or two after I got home.

Still, the thing that stays with me after every workout with this team is the inspiration. Watching people work hard for a goal, hearing their stories of why they're training or why they want to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, it always warms my heart to the very core. Even on a day wrapped in fog.

So, My Husband Was Punching Me Again

Actually, there was a lot of punching going on, and yelling, and a bit of kicking too. And for this, we got a babysitter? Yep, date night at our house: extra karate class. Tuesday and Thursday evenings the class is taught by the husband and wife who run our dojo, and it's an excellent class. The kids sometimes come, but sometimes don't feel like going more than three times a week. So last night it was just hubby and I. Mostly, I'm not paired with him since we're different belt levels. At the start, I was paired with a young teen who is very very talented at karate, fast on his feet, and very serious. We did this extensive sparring drill to warm up and I was breathing hard he asked me a couple of times if I needed to slow down. Hah! I didn't tell him that at that heart rate, I could go for another twelve hours. These young kids might have speed, but they don't have the endurance of an Ironmom, LOL. But I had to work darn hard to beat him to the punch. Now my feet have blisters from all that turning on the floor. DH and I also got to practice together for awhile - elbow techniques, bunkai, and sparring.

We actually have gone out to dinner together this week, and also to a movie. So beating each other up isn't the only kind of quality time we spend together ;-)

Quote of the Day

"Many people cannot excel, even though they practice a lot, because they lack ability. But the fact that they have made a lot of effort means a great deal. The winner in the match is not always the winner in life." -- Toshiro Daigo, 9th Degree Black Belt in Judo.

When I run, I must keep this in mind...

Oh, So That's It!

I was talking to my Master's Swim coach and begging him to watch my stroke. Ever since I modified the "catch" part of my stroke, I knew it would take some time for my arm strength in that specific maneuver to catch up and let me swim efficiently again. But it hasn't seemed to be clicking and I've been slower than ever in the pool. It's been pretty discouraging to tell the truth, because I was hoping that this year I might just participate in a swim meet or two, something I haven't done since college. But I'm slow, slow, slow in the water and everything just feels wrong. I wanted him to take a look and see if he could tell me what was going awry.

Before I could even find a time to get in the pool with him though, he mentioned my ankle injury and asked me if I thought that was the problem. I didn't think so, but on Monday when I swam, I paid close attention to what was going on with my feet. As it turns out, my ankle flexibility on the right foot is almost nil, I'm getting almost nothing out of my kick on that side. Consequently, my arm stroke is all lopsided with propulsion coming with one of my kicks, but not the other. This makes my stroke surge and retreat, giving it a very choppy feel. Additionally, I'm only pushing off of the wall with one foot, completely favoring my other ankle, so I'm getting half the glide off of my turns that I normally do. No wonder I'm swimming so much slower per 100!

I'm so much happier now that I know what the trouble is. I've gotten used to my running being compromised by my ankle, and with over a month off I'm just easing back into that. But I hadn't realized how much it impacted my swimming. Now I know I just have to give it some time. But I wouldn't have realized any of this without my swim coach asking me to give it my attention. So now I just have to have a bit more patience for awhile, and I don't think I'll be sprinting a 100 at a swim meet any time soon!

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.

Faves & Raves

Favorite Pre-Workout Breakfast: I thought I had posted this one up before, but couldn't find it looking through my archives so here it is (maybe again, maybe not!) Since we have our own chickens, we have tons of lovely eggs all the time. I like eating a high-protein breakfast, since it keeps me from the carb-crash later in the morning, but I get tired of just eggs. I love oatmeal, but it doesn't seem to stick with me very long, within an hour or so I'm hungry or just feeling low in the energy department. So this is my solution:

Robin's Breakfast Oatmeal Custard:

1 Cup Organic Steel Cut oats
2 Eggs
3 Tbs Milk
Cinnamon and Nutmeg to Taste

Cook up the steel-cut oats according to directions. While the oats are cooking, which only takes a few minutes, whisk together the eggs, milk, cinnamon & nutmeg. Pour the cooked oats into the egg mixture in a microwaveable bowl (make sure you use a big enough bowl as this mixture will puff up as it cooks). Stir in any (or all) of the following:

Dried cranberries
Raisins
Chopped Dates
Dried unsweetened coconut
Walnuts or Pecans

Bake in the microwave for 4:30 (cooking times will vary, but it will get solid looking all the way through). Serve with milk.

Rave: A friend of mine who was training for the Eugene Marathon got hit by a car in a crosswalk two weeks ago. That's bad enough for any ordinary human, but for an avid runner to have a broken leg or two is doubly agonizing. As athletes, we know how dangerous it is to run anywhere near large two-ton hunks of moving metal, but we don't often have a choice. Remember to wear reflective gear and blinkies in the dusk, dawn, and nighttime hours. I believe my Illuminite jacket and headband saved my friend one night - we were on bikes and the car that was going to smash into her only stopped once its headlights hit my jacket - the blinkies on the front and back of her bike were not pointed in the driver's direction at the time.

Fave Music on my iPod Right Now: Aman Iman: Water is Life, by Tinariwen. I'm not always a fan of world-beat music, but this band definitely catches the ear and holds on to it. Formed in 1982 in Moammar al-Qadhafi's camps of Tuareg rebels, these musicians take musical roots from their own traditions, and combine it with bluesy guitars for a totally unique sound. The lyrics are mostly in French and Tamashek, but the beats are unescapably good, and the theme of their music is independence for their people.

Fave Book On My Nightstand: The Warrior's Path: Wisdom from Contemporary Martial Arts Masters Despite the cumbersome title, this is a gem of a book with photos and words of fifteen martial arts masters who have dedicated a lifetime to their practice. Many of them were born in Japan in the early part of the 1900s. All of them have decades of wisdom that anyone striving to better themselves in any practice can appreciate.


Favorite Quote: From the above book: "You can easily recognize whether the archer hit the target or not. But this is not what we should be judging for success. Did the archer tackle kyudo with an empty mind, one that will create a healthy body and healthy mind? That is the Way that kyudo is seeking - whether the archer has contributed to a healthy society. Of course there are targets to shoot, to aim for, but hitting the target is not the final goal. In kyudo we say "Shoot at your heart" -- shoot at your conscious thoughts. You yourself must recognize whether you exerted the utmost effort toward the target. How many arrows were shot is not important -- the contents of those arrows is what counts." -- Nobuyuki Kamogawa.

I am absorbing much from this book that is relevant to my own martial arts training, but also to triathlon and other sports, and to my endeavors as a teacher and coach to others.

And Another

Since my ankle sprain is still keeping me from running (though I did a very very chilly bike ride with my Team in Training team this Saturday - 36 degrees before you figure in the very brisk wind chill, and sleeting rain!), I'm in the pool a lot more these days. Here's another great distance swimmer's workout:

Warm up and then:

6 x 500, Descend x 3 on 8:00 (or interval of choice). 2nd set faster than 1st.

When I do these, I aim to do the first one at a total cruise, then medium, then pretty fast. The second time through, I go about 15 seconds faster on each one than the first time around. By the time you're done, you should feel good and thrashed!

Triathlon Swim Workout

I coached the morning master's this week (5:15 am - eeeeouch!). The workout I put up is a great one for any distance swimmer looking to improve their time in anything from a 500 to an open water mile or more. After a good warmup, this is the main set of 2,000 yards.

2x the following:
=============
50-50
50-100
50-150
50-200
50-250


The first time through, you go easy on the 50's, and really work the longer distances - they should be swum at your distance tempo pace, the kind of pace you would swim a hard 500 at. Take 10 sec. rest after the 50's, and 20 sec after the longer distances.

The second time through, you swim the 50's hard, and the longer distances at your long distance pace, the pace you would set for a 1500. Take 20 sec. rest after the 50's, and 10 sec after the longer distances.

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:

At the Worst Possible Moment

I've got my first Team in Training triathlon team run this Saturday, and my robotics team's State Championships on Sunday, and I've managed to badly sprain my ankle this Monday. So, no running for me for awhile, and all of the stairs at the Robotics tournament are going to be quite a challenge in this splinty thingie I'm supposed to be wearing.

And how did I injure myself, one might ask? Diving for a volleyball? Running that 10th mile? No, I was taking a photograph. The challenge of the day on my 365 Days of Self Portraits photography group was to take a photo that tells a story. So I took this one and injured myself in the process. Ah, what we do for art.

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.

First Faves & Raves of the New Year

Fave Food: Dates, stuffed with cream cheese and pecans. I like to make these for parties, but they're great after-workout snacks as well! We have a local organic creamery that makes awesome cream cheese, cultured with acidophilus and all that good stuff. Yummy!

Fave Music To Work Out To: ChangesOne by David Bowie. One of the first pieces of vinyl I ever bought, I was in our little local corner market the other day and the gal that works there was playing it. So I had to find it on CD. You just can't resist moving to tracks like Fame, Rebel Rebel, Sufragette City, Jean Genie, and of course Ziggy Stardust!

Fave Activity: Hiking with hubby and the kids, any day it's not raining lately! We took a New Year's Eve hike up a local butte in a lovely break of good weather and it was just gorgeous up there. Quite unfortunately, I managed to get poison oak! If you've read my blog for awhile, you know this happens to me all the time, but rarely in the middle of the winter. Argh.

Fave Workout Tip: That Holy Grail swimming move. Still working on it, I've been using the big rubber bandy things at home to simulate the movement of the catch and build up some muscle power. I have to say I think it's working. I swam our traditional New Year's morning workout (108 x 50 yards on the :45 interval) without much trouble, despite not putting in much pool yardage at all in December. I think that's largely due to more power in my stroke.

Rave: By the time I get to vote in the primary elections, out here in Orygun, we'll be winnowed down to just a few candidates. I understand why the system is the way it is, but I don't have to like it.

Fave Quote to start off the New Year: “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” -- Benjamin Franklin

No Resolutions Here

I don't do New Year's Resolutions. I know it's practically an American Institution (not sure about the rest of the world) and I've been asked a dozen times this week what my resolutions are, and my answer's the same every time: nothing. I've thought a little bit about why that is, and I think for me the answer is that it's more of a daily process than a yearly one; and that resolutions are not as useful in my life as goals. A resolution carries the implication that one will do this thing or else, and that if the resolution is somehow not accomplished, one has failed. I refuse to accept the language of failure. In fact, one of the big reasons that I unschool my kids is that I can't state strongly enough (at least not in polite words) my dislike of our society's win/lose, succeed/fail mentality. I tell my kids all the time: mistakes are opportunities for learning and growth. To resolve to do something is different than to have a goal to do something. A goal is a target you're aiming at. Goals are measurable, achievable, and if need be, alterable. How many times do you hear people resolve to do such nebulous things as "get in better shape", "exercise more", "eat better", etc. ? If I have a goal to complete a certain race, then for sure I don't need to resolve to exercise more. I'll exercise more in order to achieve my goal.

While my goals are a bit in flux for this year's triathlon season, I've got lots of other stuff on the plate to fix my attention on. I've got goals for my photography and writing, for my Team in Training coaching, for the kids' robotics team I'm coaching, and for getting our family ready for a big bike touring trip this coming fall. When the right races present themselves, I'm sure I'll sign up and then I'll have my triathlon goals in place as well. And the rest will sort itself out.

On the Journey To Swimming's Holy Grail

You might recall that I've been working on swimming's "Holy Grail", the high-elbow catch. Recently we all showed up for Master's swim practice in the morning and the pool was closed for repairs. Our coach took the opportunity to show me an exercise you can do in the gym (or at home with exercise bands) that allows you to build the muscle memory and strength into your arms to accomplish this maneuver. The idea is to keep your upper arm flat and elbow high when you start the catch, and you can verify that you're doing this with a mirror while you perform this exercise.

I'm sorry for the crack in the mirror right in the middle of my arm in these photos, but hopefully you can see what I'm talking about.




















Reaching forward like your hand has just entered the water.



















Make sure as you pull your hand toward you that your upper arm stays parallel to the floor and your elbow remains high. You can repeat just this part of the catch over and over until it feels natural to your muscles.

















If you want, you can rotate your hips to the other side and follow through with the rest of the stroke. I like to do five catches, then a full stroke, and repeat that. You can add weight or thicker bands for resistance.

And yes, that's me as the Black Knight above (you Python fans will know from whence this scene hails. One of my 365 Days of self portraits.

It's just a flesh wound. I'm invincible!

Recipe Makeover: Yummy Holiday Cookies

I took the following recipe (which is scrumptious in its own right) and made a few substitutions to make some reasonably healthy cookies that everyone in the family loved.

First off, I substituted coconut oil for half the butter. Since the cookies are coconut anyways, I think it actually enhances the taste. I doubled the eggs (because I often do when I use more whole-grain flours - it helps bind them together more and helps them rise more). For 1/4 cup of the flour, I substituted flax seed meal, and used whole-grain flour (Spelt/Wheat mix) for the rest. I upped the coconut from 1 1/2 cups to 2 1/4 cup. And I substituted xylitol for half the sugar.

Here's the original:

Coconut-Cranberry Chews

Ingredients

About 1½ cups (¾ lb.) butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon grated orange peel
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 large egg
3¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1½ cups dried cranberries
1½ cups sweetened flaked dried coconut

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, with a mixer on medium speed, beat 1½ cups butter, sugar, orange peel, and vanilla until smooth. Beat in egg, until well blended.

2. In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt. Add to butter mixture, stir to mix, then beat on low speed until dough comes together, about 5 minutes (see notes). Mix in cranberries and coconut.

3. Shape dough into 1-inch balls and place about 2 inches apart on buttered 12" x 15" baking sheets.

4. Bake in a 350°F regular or convection oven until cookie edges just begin to brown, 11 to 15 minutes (shorter baking time will yield a chewier cookie; longer baking time will yield a crispier cookie). If baking two sheets at once in one oven, switch their positions halfway through baking. Let cookies cool on sheets for 5 minutes, then use a wide spatula to transfer to racks to cool completely.

Leaping Into the Unknown

This is looking like it might just be a Lite Tri year. Yes, Lite as in Lite beer, as in Not Too Much Of. I'm spectacularly unmotivated right now to do any kind of wintertime tri training. I have worked back up to running four miles, so that's feeling a bit more okay. Swimming is, well, there. It's always there, though, so that doesn't count for much. Bicycling - there have been some days lately where I'd love to be outside on my bicycle, even in the cold. But it seems like the amount of stuff I have to get done in those same daylight hours (the hours when, unfortunately, businesses are open and such) has been overwhelming me and I haven't made it outside. So it's grudging trainer miles on the bike. Not Much Fun. In the last few years, I've had some pretty big goals to keep me moving through the winter - marathons, Half-Irons, Iron, trying for a personal best in the Half-Iron.

I've kind of run out. Of goals, of time to accomplish them, of impetus to make new goals. I think this year will be the Year of Fun. I might do some sprints, I might do some Oly's. I might not. I might play lots more volleyball and concentrate on Karate - I played two hours of volleyball this morning after a hard karate workout yesterday (40 jumping squats - aiiiiyah) and I'm sure it's keeping me in good shape still. I know we'll be doing lots of cycling with the kids, getting ready for our big touring vacation in September.

I'll be busy with Team in Training, helping others accomplish their triathlon goals in the new year, and I'll be training with them along the way. It feels weird to read everyone's blogs with their races already penciled in for next year. Normally, I'd be doing that. But I guess I'll just have to wait and see what shakes out for me in '08.

A First On My Blogs

For the first time ever, I'm going to duplicate a post across all three of my blogs. Usually, I keep them pretty separate, figuring that athletes might not be all that interested in my vegetable-growing and chicken-farming adventures. Or that people interested in my family's unschooling days might not care what kind of swim workout I'm using these days. But this one post cuts across all lines of interest in my life. It's about homeschooling my kids and the amazing things we get to do, it's about alternative energy, and it's about teamwork and fostering a positive approach to competition. And I'm so proud, I'm not just going to post a link, I'm putting the whole thing right here as well:

So, my kids' robotics team, the Solar Dragons, went to the regional tournament last weekend. I knew that they were very well prepared, their robot was solid, they had put in a lot of time perfecting their programs, their runs on the challenge table, their research project and presentation, and I knew that they were operating as an exceptional team with respect for each other and for the other teams. What I didn't even imagine in my wildest dreams is that they would WIN THE WHOLE TOURNAMENT! Yep, that's it. They really did it!

First of all, their runs on the robot table went very well. They practiced their approach so many times that there was no fumbling or nervousness at the table, just a smooth running of all the things they needed to do (remove and replace attachments, add cargo, aim robot, select program, run robot). They had decided that they would all run their programs at the table, but according to Lego competition rules, only two of them could be at the table at any given time, so they took a tag-team approach. They helped each other out, and as each kid was done with their turn, they tagged the next.

They also faced three panels of judges. One teamwork panel that asked them questions about how they worked as a team (my favorite moments, when they asked things like "who is your team leader" and the kids said "we operate by consensus", LOL.) One panel was technical judging, where they had the kids run their programs and asked them about their programs and robot design, and a third panel evaluated their research project (they had five minutes to do a presentation, and another five minutes of Q&A - they actually knew their stuff so well, the panel ran out of questions to ask them!). When we saw the research projects of some of the other groups of kids, I knew that our kids would do really well. Many kids from school teams had used their classrooms or part of their school building for the energy audit. While this was probably technically admissible, I think the real goal from Lego FIRST League in setting this as a project for this year was to get the kids out and interacting with the community. Since our team really did choose a big and complex public building to audit, and researched extensively on alternative energy solutions, I knew they'd wow the judges (and they did!).

I am proudest of the fact that they scored a perfect 100 on teamwork. I know they're a great group of kids and they have worked so well together and have had so much fun together, it really showed. Whenever they've made a team decision, it has almost always been unamimous. I think it also really speaks volumes that we have two pairs of siblings on the team (not always the easiest to work with your own family members!) and that the kids come from different educational venues (two different schools plus some homeschoolers). They also got the highest score on their research presentation, something they've put so much time and effort into (see my previous post for a description of what they did). The got the 2nd highest score on the robot table as well, garnering 195 points with their seven mission programs.

So without further ado, here's some pics of these magnificent kids in action!

Here's the table setup in the main competition hall. Two teams compete against each other in timed table runs.



Their first run at the table, Claire and Asa work together to send the robot out on a mission to plant trees.



Time for their technical presentation. Whoops, I forgot to bring the folder with printouts of their programming. Good thing I'm a trained runner!




Waiting for their turn.



Mackenzie and Daniel get the power lines in place, the rest of the team waits behind for their turn to be tagged.




Waiting outside the presentation judging room. It was cold enough to snow and the poor kids were shivering. They're holding the photos for their research presentation.




Presenting to the panel of judges.



We were all so impressed with this kid, Thomas. His entire team backed out, but he came and competed all by himself!



We can't believe it, we won the whole thing!

Recipe for Thankfulness

First of all, happy American Thanksgiving from my family to yours! If you want to feel truly thankful on Thanksgiving, try getting really really really sick the week before. It puts all else into blinding perspective. You come to appreciate the little things - walking up a flight of steps without feeling so weak you're afraid you're going to totter right over, eating food and having it stay in your stomach, being able to keep up with your kids, let alone do simple things like prepare them a meal. This Thanksiving, I was grateful just to be able to eat a tiny bit of the lovely food and sit there with my family talking about the things we are most thankful for.

In general, I think I am a pretty grateful person. Many times as I go about my day, I smile and feel thankful for the life I am incredibly lucky to lead - for the beauty that surrounds me, my loving husband and healthy happy kids, my strong and fit body. But this little brush with incapacitation taught me about all the small things that go unnoticed, how I take my body and its capabilities largely for granted. I'm not talking about the ability to run fifteen miles either, that's easy to be thankful for because it really does seem like a miracle to someone who can still remember not being able to run one. But on a daily basis, my body performs a thousand small and seemingly inconsequential miracles, things like moving me from the chair to the counter to pour a cup of tea, or swallowing that tea and digesting it around in my stomach instead of staging a mini-revolution and sending it back where it came from, things like breathing easily and moving without pain. This week I've had cause to examine all of those privileges and realize how easily they can disappear. How quickly you can go from vibrant good health to can't get out of bed.

I've been reading a book called The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World , which is really a fascinating book if you have any interest in epidemiology, cartography, the history of cities, and many other related subjects. But it wasn't the best book to finish shortly before being struck down with a mystery virus. The book is all about a dreadful cholera epidemic that literally took 1 out of every 10 people in the 1800's London neighborhoods it visited. As I suffered through my little bout of stomach flu, I thought of those people who went to bed one night healthy and woke up the next morning knowing that they'd be the next corpse tossed on the loaded carts that made their rounds through the streets. We go through our lives thinking the next day will be just like this one, that all the things we can do today we will be able to do tomorrow, and some days this just isn't true at all.

I'm still nowhere near 100% after this illness took my feet out from under me this week. I'm reduced to eating the BRAT diet (Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, Toast) and even my usual mug of mate' sits uneasily on me these days. I've lost about 6 pounds, but sadly my high tech scale says my body fat has gone up (now that is just blatantly unfair, isn't it!!) I went thrift-store shopping with my good friend the week before taking ill, and all of my new cute jeans that I bought now hang a bit baggily in all the wrong places. Still, I did get in the pool this weekend and tagged behind my lane of guys for aboue half the usual workout. I know it will come back quickly and for that I am grateful, as well as for everything else I am vowing not to take for granted anymore.

From Good to Bad, Bad to Worse

First the good - my son and I competed in our first ever karate competition this weekend. We had a fun time, he took a second place in his category in sword sparring (with foam swords, thank heavens!) and I am especially proud of myself for entering the sparring competition (which scares the bejeezus out of me, but I did it!) and taking 3rd in my division. I actually beat someone sparring, which is impressive given that I have a hard time not closing my eyes when someone is throwing punches and kicks at me.

Entering this competition reminded me of how much I have learned in sports over the years. I watch my son, who is such a perfectionist and so very hard on himself fret and fuss over how he thought he was doing and I remember being exactly like that as a kid. I hated to lose. In fact, I was much worse than he is, because while he does tend to get down on himself he takes full responsibility for his performance. I used to invent reasons that I hadn't performed as well as I thought I should - I hurt my leg or I was getting a cold, or whatever I could come up with to soothe my ego. I am so impressed by his ability to be comfortable with himself. He said something very profound afterwards: "Even if I was the only one there and I got a first place ribbon, I'd be proud because after all I showed up and lots of people don't!" It only took me about twenty years in sports to learn what he knows already - you're a winner if you show up and do your best.



Unfortunately, my good mood at having faced my fears and entered this competition evaporated yesterday as I began to feel sicker and sicker and sicker. At first, I thought I was just sore from the karate competition. But then it became more than just muscle soreness and descended into that horrible achey feeling that precedes an ugly illness. I hardly ever get sick, so it really blindsides me when I do, and I begin to wonder if I'm dying or something because I'm so unused to feeling this way (and yes, I do feel grateful that I don't have to face this more often!). I haven't thrown up in about a decade, but spent last night hanging out in the bathroom and losing my lunch, then my dinner, then anything else. So I'm about to head back to bed and re-bury myself under the covers, vowing to not take for granted my good health, vitality, and the wonderful thing that is being healthy most of the time.

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!

Overheard...

I was out riding with the kids today and overheard this argument..

"You're tailgating!"
"No, I'm drafting"
"You're tailgating!"
"Drafting"
"Tailgator!"
"Drafter, like the Tour de France guys!"

And so it goes, LOL. But, what a nice day to go out and run through some leaf piles!

Going For the Holy Grail

My swim coach has been talking lately about "The Holy Grail of Swimming" aka the catch phase of the stroke and getting your shoulder rotated so that you can start your stroke keeping your elbow high and your hand and forearm lower. It feels a bit strange and different, and I can tell that if I do it too long at one time right now I will end up with very sore muscles. But I can also tell that it's a powerful move that communicates more force to the water than my previous stroke, in which I wasn't rotating my shoulder so that when my elbow bent, my hand came further underneath my body than it does with the new catch. So the other night at the pool when I was swimming by myself, I tried to throw in one 25 of this new stroke into every 200 yards. It was immediately noticeable when I went back to my old stroke how much power I'm losing with my old way of catching the water. That leaves me hopeful that if I can train up my muscles to adapt to this new stroke, I might be able to get some speed back into my swim (largely I've been going for distance over the last few years of HIM and Ironman training and have lost some of my snap in the sprints.)

If you want to see the catch I'm talking about, check out this video of Ian Thorpe from the front. You can actually see the shoulder rotation in play in the slow motion:

Vibram Five Fingers: Trail Report

Despite not having much luck with running in the last few weeks, I took the toe shoes out to the trails to give them a try. The best news is that they seemed to break my streak of miserable runs, and I had a lovely autumn run on paths through the woods. Here's my full report:

Bark running trail: These shoes are the business! I love the way I feel like I'm running totally barefoot, and yet not getting splinters. They have plenty of arch support, and I definitely can feel that my running stride is much more natural than it is in regular running shoes. It's really a joy to run in them. I did notice that while I thought I was doing a good job at holding my ChiRunning style, I don't really do it for very long at a time. These shoes will remind you any time you revert to a lazy, heel-striking or flat-footed running style. So it's almost like doing a constant drill when you start out with them. Unless your running form is excellent, I'd recommend planning on a few twenty-minute runs in them and work up from there. I did find it a bit exhausting as my muscles obviously aren't used to running like this all the time.

Gravel Running Trail: Part of the woodland trail I was on was 1/4 inch crushed gravel, and the rest of it was very finely crushed gravel. Some of it was covered in leaves and some not. On the finely crushed gravel, the shoes were fine. When I got to the 1/4 inch crushed gravel though, especially the part that was covered in leaves (so I couldn't see the pointy rocks), I kept getting poked in the bottom of the foot. The shoes do protect you to a certain extent, it's certainly not like really running on gravel would be, but any rock that is pointing upwards will definitely be felt in the bottom of your foot, and I didn't find that part of the path very pleasant to run on. On rocky paths or gravel paths where you can see the path, it's easier to avoid the pointy rocks, but it does take a lot more attention, so it's a different feeling from the kind of running where you can look around or let your mind roam. Also, I noticed on the downhill segments you can't descend heels first like I usually do. I had to adopt a completely new downhill running style, and I started to feel it in my shins. Again, I'd give these shoes a wearing-in period of shorter runs and don't do too many hills off the bat until you get used to the different foot positions that you use in them.


Grass: Terrific, I can run on the grass when it's wet, muddy, or the trees are dropping sticks and spiky seedd pods all over the place. These shoes have reasonable traction to them, so the wetter portions of the grass weren't a problem either.

Pavement: Wouldn't do it. Even the short sections of pavement between the grass and the trail were not very comfortable.

In general, these shoes are wonderfully comfortable. I'm a barefoot kind of gal anyways, and they make me wish to have a pair just for knocking around town in. When these are too worn out to run in, I'm sure that's what I'll use them for!