June 18: Eating Like a Lumberjack

I have serious concerns about my ability to carb up for this tri event.  I'm really trying to eat like a lumberjack for a few days and so far today I've gotten down a veggie burger, a few Doritos, and a lemon scone.  And I'm stuffed.  Like I won't wanna eat the rest of the day.  When I was a young woman I was a professional at pigging out (much to my chagrin at the time).  What happened?

June 17: Longest Bike Ride Ever

Today I rode from Vienna out to Ashburn on the W&OD trail.  Things to remember before undertaking a trip like that on a sunny hot day:  sunscreen.  And sports goo.  Oh, and it helps to have eaten a decent meal sometime beforehand.  A cup of yogurt doesn’t give you much to go on.  So I was kinda riding on empty but thankful for my natural nervous energy, which I can channel into physical energy, it turns out.  I finished in time to change my clothes in the parking lot and head to wonderful Dr. Krakos, the chiropractor who tuned me up to be in perfect alignment (or as close to that as possible for me). 

What I learned from this bike ride:  I have no desire to ride much further than I went today.  Two-plus hours on a bike just seems like ENOUGH.  While riding I thought about the distance I was covering and how people used to get around on horses to cover these distances, and how much physical energy it took just to go a few measly miles that I don’t even think about when I’m in my Prius. My only exhaustion from driving around here is from sitting in traffic.  But our pioneer people, they must’ve been exhausted all the time and chowing down like lumberjacks just from the sheer physicality of their travel.   

With the Tri only 5 days away, I feel like I have to focus my training on learning how to eat like a lumberjack. 

June 15: Who can tri without yoga?

After my 2+ hours of training yesterday I got up and did hot vinyasa power yoga this morning, Down Dog Yoga style.  My thinking was that this total sweat-dripping experience would help drip out the lactic acid build-up in my legs.  I’m not sure if that’s true (see previous blog entry about beginner’s mind), but it sounds good.

Honestly, I don’t know how any serious distance athletes survive without yoga.  All that cycling and running yesterday left my legs like concrete and my joint tendons and muscles all tied up in tight little knots.  Boy does it feel good to stretch everything out in a 92-degree, high humidity environment!  And how do athletes SURVIVE without doing backbends or headstands?  What great counter-moves to being hunched over on a bike and upright for so long.

So I noticed while in warrior 2 pose (one of my least favorite yoga poses, btw), that my legs, while tired, didn’t burn like they usually do.  My quads, which usually hate that pose, were completely silent about the matter.  The “ugh, I hate this pose and it seems so easy for everyone else and why do we have to hold it so long, this sux!! “ banter was completely absent.  Could my female warrior energy be growing stronger?  Taking on a different perspective? 

Soon I’m going to the gym to complete my training for the day by swimming a mile.  And I will attain one of my other tri goals, which I forgot to mention before:  time my workouts so that I only have to wash my hair once a day.  Who said I wasn’t goal-oriented?

June 14: Am I a "Serious" Female Warrior?

Today I did a 20 mile bike ride and followed it with a 3-ish mile run.  In between, Doritos and Cheetos were consumed, I’m not gonna lie.  The run was easier this time, but I was still sloowwww and my foot ached, even taped with KT tape.  Pain: just gonna have to make friends with it.

A friend commented that I am really taking this tri training seriously.  Well, duh.  It never occurred to me that working out for 2+ hours a day could be interpreted as serious, but I guess it is.  I often tell people I love working out, and if someone would pay me (a lot) to do it, I’d do it all day long.  I once had a leadership coaching client who spent some time as an Olympic hopeful, and I secretly salivated with envy when she described to me her Olympic training schedule, which basically consisted of inhaling her sport or some kind of training preparation for 12 hours a day. 

There’s nothing more head-clearing than good hard, sustained exercise.  In fact, since I’ve been training for this tri, I have found that the room in my brain usually reserved for useless chatter and worry seems to have shrunk.  It’s like I’m just not “thinking” as much.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to become a Ryan Lochte or anything (although I do admire his “qualities”), but what a gift to have a semi-quiet mind!  It is easier for me to achieve this through exercising all day than it is through an hour of meditation.

The other reason why I never considered that I am being “serious” about this training is because I am approaching it with a STRONG beginner’s mind (we’re talking pre-school consciousness).  I’ve never done a sprint tri and I haven’t set a goal time.  My outfit matches poorly, I’m clearly no pro.  But I do have goals, and they are as follows:

1.       Finish, and not in last place (any other number is fine).

2.       Be fit enough that my brain is unflappable, so I can stay anchored in the present moment even when it’s tough.

3.       Have fun, yes, fun.

4.       Honor the female warrior in me (actually this goal will be a by-product of goals 1 - 3)

June 12: On the Bike

Today was the day to get comfortable with Jan’s racing bike and clock some distance on the road.  I am happy to report I achieved those goals:  I biked 20 miles on the w&od trail on a really hot, humid day.  After getting the bike seat adjusted at the bike store in Reston and figuring out (almost!) how to work the gears, I was in really good shape, I thought.  About 3 yards into the trail, I made a sudden stop because I thought I forgot my car keys, and my left clip didn’t unclip so down I went.  Yay, I thought.  I knew I was gonna fall sometime, and I wanted to get it over with early.  It was only a bloody knee, but probably a mis-aligned knee too, as I was gonna come home and run but my knee felt too funky.  Off to the chiropractor first.  Thanks to the helpful guys in the truck who stopped to see if I was okay.  And how embarrassing that I couldn’t have just fallen out of sight of everyone!

That bike trail is another world.  A very testosterone-laden world.  It was not highly traveled during the time I was on it, and of the people I encountered I only saw one or two other women.  Mostly it was fine; one or two times I was on high alert.  But no evil came of anything so I’m gonna go with it’s a safe trail. 

Covering that distance was not hard, although it took a lot of time and I was so afraid at times of going airborne, so I just backed it down.  Who can account for a cat running out in front of you, or a dog that an owner isn’t watching who suddenly wants to visit?  All the critters, they gravitate to me, which is fine, but not when I’m going 35 miles an hour.

I am still wobbly on the bike and feel like a total outsider to this biking world.  It’s kind of like a cult.  I just tell the other cult members hello, I’m clueless, I don’t know what I’m doing, forgive me, I will try to stay upright and ride in a straight line.

June 11: Approaching the Limits....Again

Today I did power hour hot yoga, which was fun and it GAVE me energy.  So, still in my sweaty mess mode, I went to the gym and swam 42 laps again.  I swam quicker this time, even though my arms felt more tired.  I think I’m finally starting to figure out this swimming thing, which is really embarrassing to say after all these years.  But the “crawl” is basically named that because one does indeed “crawl” down the lane.  I never really felt that before, but I did today.  I tried to remember all the stroke advice I’ve received from the “experts” who have done this forever and have good-naturedly shaken their heads in disbelief at how lousy my stroke is, but it’s so much HARDER when you have to do the proper stroke! I watched other swimmers at the gym and they were SO doing it wrong and they could go forever.  That’s my idea of swimming!

After swimming I sat in the sauna with argon oil all over my hair.  This swimming stuff is tough on skin, hair, etc.  My hair color is gonna be neon blonde/white soon.  My head is like a beacon in the dark. 

June 10: I love exercise

I love exercise.  It’s just amazing how the body works and movement feels like magic. It's the only time when my mind really lets go and lets my body take over.  So yes, I’ve recovered somewhat from yesterday, even though I felt massively tired most of the day and at first thought I couldn’t possibly do dance class.  I did a little yoga on the deck in the heat and humidity, which helped limber me up a bit.  And which also showed me that I had tons of energy for yoga.  But then yoga tends to put energy INTO the system (all that breathing!) and sweating out toxins.  I could’ve done a full yoga class if I had the time, but decided instead to head to dance class.  Dance class starts with a warm-up that is super core-intensive…lightweight by power yoga standards but I felt it this time.  I followed the choreography surprisingly well and gave my inner female warrior a high-five afterwards.

June 9: Why do people do this?

Exercise sux.  Let me state up front however that I have nothing but pure gratitude for the people who are helping me get ready for this tri endeavor and that my bad attitude is just something I have to get through, it has nothing to do with any of you.

So my lovely neighbor Jan offered me the use of her racing bike for the tri, and I rode 9 miles on it, in 90 degree weather, really high humidity, no big deal.  The bike is darn light, though, and I felt almost airborne a couple times.  Then I couldn’t figure out the gear shift and was only able to add on more oomph and not take it off.  Not really sure how I got up some of the hills in the neighborhood, because I was going so slow I almost succumbed to gravity and toppled over.  But the shoe clipping into the pedal was no big deal.  Pretty cool that my spinning shoes are useful also on the open road.  Yes, they are 10 years old and a fashion violation, but this whole event is gonna be a fashion violation for me.  I have paired together the most mis-matched set of exercise garmets between the swimsuit + jogbra plus biking pants combination, it’s a lost cause.  Even my helmet doesn’t match.  Enough about fashion.  I’ll be sure to get my nails done the day before.

Taking Jan’s advice about the killer part of the tri being the transition from bike to running and how I should practice that, I went right out on a run (still 90 something degrees and really high humidity, but felt like a spring day compared to hot yoga so I thought, no big deal!).  Except it was a big deal, and my legs felt like concrete, and my poor arthritic foot throbbed, and the whole run, done at a lousy, unpublishable pace, was just pure punishment. 

Hence the comment:  exercise sux.  I was so sore during the night I kept waking up (more than unusual!), this time due to physical pain, and finally popped some pain medicine to take the edge off and get some sleep.  I hate taking vicodin because it makes me feel SO annoyed and moody when it wears off, but I was willing to put up with that for some relief and sleep.  I’m annoyed and moody generally anyway lately, so I figured nobody would notice.

June 8: Biking Bling

My day of no exercise yesterday left me with a night of no sleep.  Literally, I was wide awake until close to 3 am.  I even resorted to half of a sleeping pill:  no effect.  It seems I have to physically exhaust myself to be able to sleep for even a few hours.  What happened to Julie the professional sleeper? 

So today I went to the bike store and bought a bike helmet.  It was surprisingly fun.  Helmets these days are really cool looking, kinda like the fashion statement hats I saw worn by the stylish attendees at the Royal Wedding.  Plus, they fit so well!  Nothing like the last helmet I had (a decade ago) that was like a styrofoam globe wobbling all over my head and making me feel like an astronaut in Apollo 13. Ugh, maybe Apollo 11.

So I came home and helpful husband pumped up the bike tires of his hybrid bike, which I intend to ride in the race, and I set off with my GPS tracker and just tooled the neighborhood for 45 minutes.  And discovered, luckily, that “tooling” for me is more like becoming a machine with piston legs.  Thank you spinning training.  There will never again be any such thing for me as a la-de-da kinda bike ride.  I get on that thing and I want to hammer it.  My main fear is going super fast and hitting a bump or pothole and becoming airborne, so I tested that out with this bike and am happy to say that it’s heavy enough that I felt pretty securely tethered to earth even when going at jet speed.  I only rode 9.5 miles and had to stop at a bunch of stop lights, etc., but I could’ve easily done twice that distance, even with a bike seat that felt like a concrete slab. 

June 7: Yes, limits exist

The day after day 2 of hard-core physical activity and I’ve resurrected my own little wall of exercise exhaustion.  Trying to tell myself that this is a good thing because it’s better that I constructed this wall in full consciousness than having it coming crashing down upon me out of the blue.  So now I know one of my limits, and I shall therefore not trespass against it again….maybe.  That limit being:  working out hard (to the point of being drenched) for 2+ hours, 2 days in a row, is not good.   Doing that leads to being overtired and a night of restless sleep and weird dreams where I feel trapped in a grueling physical struggle and I just have to keep going because there’s no other way out except spacing out, and that’s not working, at least not in the dream.  Hello trauma response.  Maybe Christine was right when I told her what the sprint tri entailed and she said it sounded “traumatic.”  But NO! I’m doing this because I WANT to.  My female warrior WANTS to; no one is making me.  (repeat to self 10 times)

June 6: Limits...do they exist?

This day was about integration:  forcing the muscles to work together in a way that results in overall physical harmony and prowess.  That’s what yoga and dance do, as opposed to isolated working out of legs or arms (kinda what spinning and swimming feels more about, altho the whole body is obviously used there too).  Power hour yoga felt surprisingly effortless.  All that swimming really does stretch out the lungs, to the point where power yoga in a room so humid it feels like breathing water does not feel hard.  And balancing on arms upside down does not feel strenuous (swimmer’s shoulders!). 

I was so amazed at how do-able yoga was, I decided why stop here? And went to Zumba class with Canz at the gym, looking for integration benefit from dance.  And thinking that it would be easy.  Uh uh.  There was not one part of me free from sweat, and it ran down my head into my eyes, just like at power yoga.  And my poor brain was losing traction after awhile trying to keep up with the choreography.  And HOW in the world does that instructor shake her hips like that?  I thought I had flexible hips but, whew, apparently not.  I just followed the little Asian woman in front of me who really seemed to know what she was doing and later secretly blessed my daughter for driving and for not making fun of me.  I was so tired I was not sure how I made it into and out of the car to get home.  Lesson learned:  just because power yoga feels great doesn’t mean you have to keep going.

June 5: Wonder Woman defeated by Target

Today I jumped on the spinning bike at the gym and cranked through an hour workout, full-on dripping to the beat of Green Day’s best anarchy-filled tunes.  Felt awesome.  I stretched and headed right to the pool, jumped into the 81 degree water and swam 42 lengths, the approximate distance of .61 miles.  It took me 28 minutes.  In an outdoor swim situation, which is what this tri entails, I’m not sure how much longer it will take.  I tried to imagine the feeling of swimming that long with no flip-turn after 25 yards, and it honestly seems like I will be swimming forever.  Even in the pool, I started getting antsy after 10 lengths, thinking “I can’t do this; what was I thinking just because I could swim a mile in college, etc.”  I kinda had a mini-panic attack going on in my head but my body just kept going, and at length 27 it clicked:  I can do this. 

After all that physical exercise, I didn’t feel exhausted like I thought I would, so I ran a bunch of errands.  Turns out a trip to Target is more exhausting than 2 hours at the gym.  Like I didn’t know that already.

That night, I slept the whole night through without waking up once:  a first in maybe 6 months.

June 3, 2013: Day 2 into crazy decision

Two-mile run on the treadmill in the morning:  fun, fun, fun.  I can’t super-train in the running area of this competition, because of my arthritic foot, so I’m just gonna take it in spurts and when the event comes, do the best I can.  But it sure felt good to run, even with the pain in my foot.  Ended the day with jazz dance class, where the teacher put us through a warm-up that clearly indicated he had no knowledge of what my legs had already done that day.  (Oh, and just before that I RAN up the whole Bethesda metro escalator as well, which is like a mile long.)  My quads were on FIRE.  Dance was sorta physically challenging, but mostly mentally challenging with the choreography.  It so hurts my brain to focus on opposition while moving and turning, when all my brain wants to do is space out when the going gets hard.  But I made it stay and work for me, and my almost total lack of ego (thank you, yoga) made it possible for me to stay through a class where I am 25+ years older than everyone else, oddly  the most fit by far, and yet also clearly the dorkiest dancer when it comes to getting the routines.  I’m sure people wonder if I have a learning disability.  I wonder if I have a learning disability.

My blog about preparing for my first sprint triathlon with 3-weeks notice

June 2, 2013

I could be nuts.  I’m still not sure I know what I’ve gotten myself into signing up for this sprint triathalon shortly after turning 53, the most miserable birthday of my life.  Not because of the age; just because of how it marked a day that should be happy, and I was not.  Not even close.  The “let’s-celebrate-a-birthday” call to action could not be answered by me on that day, and that’s the first time in my life where that has happened.  It kinda scared me, to be honest. 

But that’s not why I signed up for this sprint tri.  Or maybe it was, partially.  Anyone who really knows me knows I’ve been looking for the next thing to “birth” in my life, what with the most important job I’ve ever had, being a mother, pretty much fulfilled.  Nothing compares with witnessing two young women become the awesome people they are and realizing, looking back, that this activity consumed a lot of time, energy, attention, devotion and that every moment was pretty darn sacred.  It’s hard to find anything else that seems as important, and duh, that’s because nothing else is.  Realizing this now I would have had another child (maybe 4 more!), while I still could just to prolong that active motherhood phase.  But prolong is all it would do.  Eventually we all have to show up for our own role call. 

My search for my role on this planet continues.  And the undertone to this search is fraught with questions about what it means to show up, to just be present and engaged in a powerful way.  I am that for other people when I coach.  I am not that for myself. 

And so I started getting little inklings that my female warrior energy was in need of being “oomphed” up.  The huge hornet in my bathroom sink (= shamanic symbol of female warrior energy), which I ended up drowning because I just couldn’t deal with how powerful it was (me who once saved a poisonous spider and set it free). 

And then the hornet that alighted on me… just making a guest appearance on my sweaty arm after my Power yoga class.  And then my overwhelming urge to get back to swimming laps, hard and long as I can.  I just wanna feel really powerful.  And I think that’s because feeling physically powerful will help translate into feeling powerfully present.  And yet a real part of me also keeps wanting to run away, to escape, to find safety.  And being powerful lets you escape readily, at least physically.  So I’m still trying to sort out what this whole sprint tri activity is about for me. One thing I know for sure:  I have always been hugely kinesthetic.  How could I not let my body lead the way in this endeavor?

So I’m gonna go with the idea that my first sprint triathalon is dedicated to honoring my female warrior energy, the really strong, robust part of me that holds firm and steady through anything; the part of me that enables me to feel safe, all by myself, without looking to others, without running for cover.