Posts from — December 2005

Well, as I have discussed ad nauseam of late, about my lack of desire to swim, I now find myself as one sixth of a relay team for the 2006 Manhattan Island Marathon Swim. There is nothing like a large pending deadline ahead of you to motivate yourself into getting back into gear. Now that I have committed myself to being part of a MIMS team, I will have to get back into swimming form.

I volunteered to swim the portion through the Harlem River. This appears to be a particularly polluted and nasty stretch of water, but it looks very interesting from shore. I need to make sure I get some dosed of Cipro for before and after the event.

Really, I need to get myself motivated for all kinds of workouts. I’ve signed up for several events next year and I must get in shape for them. I tried to take off from working out yesterday, since I was tired from a holiday party the night (Wed.) before. However, my coach wouldn’t let me take off and told me to do whatever it takes to get a workout in. Mind you, this is before another party that I had yesterday (Thu.) evening. So I went to a nearby NYSC and rode on a spin bicycle for about 45 minutes, while listening to nothing and looking at 4 walls – Pure, unadulterated torture. At least I sweat out the toxins from the prior evening.

This morning I somehow managed to bang out 6 miles on my basement treadmill. I had to keep slowing down the pace in order for the effort to be comfortable. I suppose the difficulty came from once again drinking alcohol night before. Back to back parties are something my poor mind and body are not accustomed.

Maybe if I trained for a Beer Mile I would be able to have a few drinks at night and not feel like shit in the morning. Or maybe I am just getting old and decrepit.

Thanks to the folks at Brightroom Photography, I found the person who smacked me in the face as I crossed the finish line at the Joe Kleinerman 10K. Here is the picture…

You can find out his name by clicking here

This morning I staggered around like a punch drunk boxer taking a standing 8 count as I contemplated heading to the pool. My Polar alarm went off at 4:30am and I awoke to a staggering heading. I got up, took two Excedrin, and then hid back under my covers.

The caffeine immediately coursed through my bloodstream however, and at around 4:40am I started to feel awake. I didn’t feel any better, but at least I was awake. To further supplement the Excedrin, I popped a Gurana capsule to boot.

I so didn’t want to go to the pool. The last thing in the world I wanted to feel was the cold water enveloping my warm dry body after I leaped from the edge of the pool deck.

With these negative thoughts swirling around my mind it was time for some introspection and to search for my motivation.

My first thought was I need to go swimming in order to prepare myself for Ironman Lake Placid so I can qualify for Kona. This wasn’t working though. Doubts have started to creep in to my mind and I am thinking it won’t happen. I needed to think of something else.

I thought of how I would feel after I did the swim. Undoubtedly I would feel good and satisfied afterwards. Just like a reluctant wife who at first doesn’t want sex, but afterwards is glad she had it. That worked somewhat.

Next I reminded myself of some dreams I’ve been having lately. In the dreams, my upper body is becoming weak from lack of any upper body exercise, like swimming and I am no longer able to lift up certain objects; like my children. My children like to play a game called “Garbage”. It is where I pick them high up in the air and toss them onto my bed as I yell that I have to throw away all of this garbage. They keep rolling back down the garbage hill making me throw them away over and over again. In my dream I am too weak to toss them away. That was good motivation.

Lastly, I reminded myself about the times I’ve been on long training rides, where I grew tired and weary of riding around in circles; usually in Prospect Park, where I was doing 30 plus loops of the park. I would want to quit doing the ride so badly, but I didn’t because I knew it was just my mind playing tricks on me because my body needed something. I used what I was feeling this morning as analogous to those long rides and made myself get over it. While this wasn’t motivating, it was the final push to commit to the morning swim.

So I made it to the pool as described in my earlier posting. Yes, I feel good about it now, but I am sure come Friday morning, I will be dreading the trip once again. Maybe I will pray for a Transit strike – That’ll keep me at home.

Email to coach@slb-coaching.com in response to me needing to get into the pool and doing the New Years Day Polar Bear swim.
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I got in the water this morning. I swam 4×500 yards. I know I was supposed to do drills, but I felt it more important to just get used to swimming. The thought of swimming was painful enough, without having to concentrate on kicking drills, etc. which I don’t like. Jumping in the pool in the morning is like being reborn and we all know what babies feel like when they come out of the womb.

I also ran 8 miles on the treadmill. 7.6 miles according to my Polar 625x. Which do you think is more accurate? At the 10K it said I ran 6.6 miles. I do see though that for a couple of segments, the speed was registering much lower than I was running. I’ll try the error correction. At first I just planned to go 10k. Then I said let’s go to 7 miles/60 minutes. Then I went over 7 miles on the treadmill to get my Polar up to 7 miles. Then I said fuck it, let’s just got for 8 miles on the treadmill. I didn’t really feel like stopping, but I wasn’t scheduled for a long run and I had to get to work. When the treadmill stopped I didn’t know what to do for a second or two. I think I am getting senile. Further proof of that is the fact I told my daughter I remembered a couple of stories from my childhood to tell her (she likes to hear that at bedtime) and for the life of me, I can’t remember what they were. Could I be running out of brain cells?

I need to complain to Caroline about my member card. I keep having problems with it. Sometimes it doesn’t let me on the pool deck. Sometimes, like today, it doesn’t let me on the gym floor. Maybe I will redo their website so sometimes it doesn’t work.

I am not sure about the Polar Bear Swim. I am really having a tough time with the cold. Even when I run, my hands are very cold and painful. My feet are even worse. I am pretty sure I suffer from Raynaud’s Phenomenon.

I am watching a young, pretty girl do Vector Calculus while riding the F train home from work. The fact that she is a young and pretty girl and is writing off equations with apparent ease is very impressive and amazing. Personally, I had a difficult time in college once I got past remedial algebra. That’s actually not true, but I did find doing any sort of calculus harder than training for an Ironman.

This holds true for even now as I struggle to get my training back in focus. I just feel cold and tired and feel like sleeping through the winter. I wish I could plug in all of my variables into a Vector Calculus equation and see what the results would be. Variable x could be my current state of fitness, y could be my mental state, z could be the past few years of training and q can be the training I will do between now and Lake Placid.

If I could do that and see the results, then I would know what to expect next summer. Of course, that would change my mental state (for better or worse) and that would change the results altogether.

Tomorrow morning I am going to make a very concentrated effort to get myself to the pool. It is the last thing I feel like doing, so perhaps it is the first thing I need to do. There is nothing like getting the difficult stuff out of the way quickly so the rest of your tasks appear easy.

Today was the first bit of exercise I’ve done in the past 5 days. I’ve taken off training on the advice of my wife, coach and doctor in order to get over some sort of bacterial infection in my lungs and throat. I just started taking antibiotics and I will know I am better when I am no longer hocking up great globs of green loogies.

I picked up fellow runner and blogger Cris on the way to the Joe Kleinerman 10K in Central Park. We’ve been emailing each other for the past 8 months, but have yet to meet each other. When I found out he was also doing this race, I said I would pick him up. I was looking forward to meeting him. Cris is a runner and aspiring multisport athlete who has been fighting a lifelong battle with Cystic Fibrosis. He understands to the Nth degree what dealing with lung related issues is like, including the nastiness of coughing up great gobs of green guck from your lungs. I think he may appreciate this posting I found on the web.

We had plenty of time to make it to race packet pickup, find parking and head to the baggage check before the race. While driving Cris told me about CF and we compared notes about sticking to it with our training in order to achieve our athletic goals. Cris started to cough a few times and the sound of it gave me the urge to cough as well.

Whenever I have trouble with my chest or lungs, I begin to obsess over them. This probably started from the time I was a teenager, when I suffered a punctured lung in a car accident. Other incidents in my life that add to my lung paranoia are:

* Exposure dirt and debris when cleaning out a basement after a fire at a printing company.
* Renovating my basement and discovering I was handling Asbestos.
* Nasty paint fumes
* Exposure to second hand smoke while driving in a car with my parents as a child in the winter when they kept the windows closed.

My troubles are nothing compared to Cris’ and I should take what he has to go through as a smack in the face to put my issues in perspective.

It took a while to park, but after some aggressive driving and some luck from the parking gods, I managed to find a spot for my car with plenty of time to spare. We made it to baggage claim, headed to the race start and said goodbye for the day. I would be running much faster than Cris and we were going separate ways afterwards.

My plan for the race was to take it easy since I wasn’t supposed to overly stress my body. I started out at a strongly comfortable pace and held it throughout the race. I will sum it up here by way of my email to my coach. He sent me an email asking how the race went, here is my response:

Neil -

Charles

I did forget to mention to him, that as I crossed the finish line, a runner right in front of me felt exuberant about his finish and tossed his arms up on the air for the finish line photo, smacking me right in the face with the back of his hand. For the first time during the day, I was glad I wasn’t running faster.

I’ve been sick the past couple of days, so I have nothing much to write about concerning my training, since I took the last three days off. Instead I will recant some trivial observations I’ve made over the past week or so.

I observed that my friend Todd has decided to leave another message on my blog, this time using a misnomer, instead of leaving a message anonymously. Really Todd, for a poet who uses his imagination to weave proses that are thought provoking, you show an incredible lack of talent in your creative processes. I expect more of you and I am left profoundly disappointed.

At work this week, I observed someone brushing their teeth at the sink in the kitchen area of my office. A bathroom was not that far away and I thought his actions showed an incredible lack of class. At least he used a paper cup for water to rinse his mouth instead of his hand.

Climbing the steps out of the subway one day, I had the pleasure of walking behind a woman in a short dress with a though high stocking not quite making up above the end of the dress. Unfortunately, the thigh the stocking was pressing against was quite cherubic and caused a ripple of fat above and below the elastic on the top of the stocking. Not a pretty sight.

I also had the pleasure of darting into a restroom in a local food place on 56th Street. In the bathroom was a sign that stated “Please do not put any paper in the toilet. Not even toilet tissue”. I guess that even shit encrusted toilet paper was not allowed. I supposed they meant for you to take any and all paper with you, because the bathroom didn’t even have a garbage can. I felt like asking them what about if I have to wipe my ass, but I was late for work.

On the train today, I observed someone holding a door from the outside in the hopes of forcing the conductor to open the door so she should get on. The ball of her boot ensconced foot was between the doors and she was making quite the scene about not being able to pull it out. The conductor refused to open the doors so we sat their in a stalemate for quite some time.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves and I started yelling at her from across the car to get her foot out of the door along with several other people. One gentleman even walked over to assist her in pushing her foot back out of the door, but she made a statement that he was hurting her foot, so he just backed away.

Finally, the conductor giggled the door open and closed quickly and this woman proceeded to stick her foot further in. Finally, the conductor had no choice to open the door, whereby she and several other passengers made their way into the car.

I told this woman that she was wrong and obnoxious for what she did. She started to defend herself by saying that she has the right to get on the train, just like everyone else. I pointed out to her that she has the right to miss the train just like everyone else and that holding the doors was wrong and that she could get a summons for doing so and she should now look around at all of the people she was making late.

Now that she was on the train, the doors refused to close. She made a comment about what the rush was since we were now just standing here. I let her know that the reason we were standing here was because we had other trains passing in front of us and that the whole train schedule is now screwed up because of her.

Some people were viewing this conversation with amusement, others with the look of why I was bothering to get into it with her. I didn’t really care and I wanted to make her feel really bad for making 100’s of people late for work. As if I cue, a gentleman further down the car started speaking on his cell phone (we were on the elevated portion of the F line at 4th Avenue/9th Streets) in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear how he was running late due to problems on the train. When I then said to her “You see that? There’s someone letting his boss know he is late for work right now”, all the passengers around this person erupted in laughter. The further laughed when I said I hoped he doesn’t get fired for being late.

It turns out that this woman decided to only ride with us for one stop. As I saw her starting to leave the car, a couple of passengers, with me being the loudest said “That’s it? You only had to go one stop? You could have walked to this station in the time you held the door open.

After she was gone the mood in the car was definitely brightened. It was a classic New York street scene that I think most people on the car appreciated.

The good thing about being confined indoors for working out due to inclement weather is that you are able to catch up on all of the TV you missed while you were otherwise sleeping or working out. For me, this is usually means flipping on a movie that passed through the theaters while I was too busy sleeping to spend a night out in the Cineplex.

This could have both desired and undesired consequences when it comes to the tempo of your workout and your mood upon its completion. Sometimes what I watch is action packed with a good music sound track which helps elevate my HR into acceptable training zones. Other times the movie that captures my attention is slow and depressing which is not conducive to a good workout and will leave me feeling defeated and depressed by the end. I should know better than to let myself get snagged into watching such a movie, but sometimes there is just nothing else on the myriad of premium channels my cable system delivers to me.

The movie I watched today wasn’t depressing, but it had moments of melancholy and regret. I am susceptible to mood fluctuations in the morning dependant upon my visual and auditory input. The movie that I watched this morning set me up for a tough day, where the last thing I felt like doing was going to the office to work. If only I could have hopped off my trainer and lived the life of a full time Triathlete, I am sure my mood would have been much better for the remainder of the day.

Somehow I managed to survive the day. It was very tough. It didn’t help that I used up my comfort crutches by 1pm in the afternoon. This usually consists of the food items I bring from home. By 11:30am I had already eaten my lunch and at 1pm, I already snacked on my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I escaped the office around 3pm in search of the fruit stand vendor around the corner of my office, but for some reason he wasn’t at his customary spot. I was now too hungry as well as too depressed to go look for more food.

As my training has slowly increased as of late, I find myself always being hungry again. I am going to have to start stockpiling food in my office to fend off the inevitable hunger episodes with comfort foods that elevate my mood. The only problem with eating all of the time is that it leads to frequent trips to the bathroom and excessive amounts of gas; but that is another story.

Enough kvetching for one day.

In the physical sense of the term, everything about today’s workout was slippery. It snowed overnight and the loop around Prospect Park was covered in several inches of snow. By the time I arrived in the park, the snow was already crunched down and very slippery. I didn’t think much of it at first, but the slipperiness of the snow made the run a bit more difficult than normal, especially when climbing up the hill.

In the esoteric sense, the slipperiness of today’s run got me thinking about the tenuousness at which anyone who pursues fitness and athleticism can find themselves easily start slipping back down the road to fitness. I have been battling this slippery slope a great deal as of late. I suspect that the hardest part of my training for the 2006 IMLP is going to be to staying focused. But this seems to make a lot of sense.

Often times it appears that the hardest part of reaching a goal is that short distance just before it. Maybe that is why so many people fall short of reaching their goals. As you get closer to it, the cumulative gains you see may be smaller and smaller. It is not like when you first start out and see great leaps of progress. Just think of Roger Bannister’s attempt at breaking the 4 minute mile. He kept creeping closer and closer to it, before he actually did it; and he was just going after seconds of improvement.

Maybe the discouragement in long term goals are those inevitable moments when you need to take a step back in your fitness levels in order to adequately prepare again for the next level. I have to admit that my current fitness level compared to the way I was several months ago sort of fills me with depression. Just yesterday, I was looking for excused not to finish a 50 mile ride, whereas back in the spring, 50 miles was barely a warm-up. I couldn’t imagine riding 100 miles right now and the knowledge that I have to first build up to that distance again at time seems daunting.

In any event, I am using my observations about how I am feeling to approach my coming training rationally. I absolutely know that if I stay the course and achieve the goal I set out for myself, I will relish it forever until the day I die. If I let my negative thoughts conquer me, I am sure I will regret it until the day I die. What I am going through now is just like a long training ride. Inevitably the negative thoughts will arrive and you need to tactically work through them in order to finish the ride. I am going through the same thing now only it involves a much longer ride; one of years rather than hours. I’ve worked through the negative thoughts for those all day rides. Now I just have to work through the negative thoughts on my multi-year journey towards Kona. It is new territory for me. My advantage is that I now know what happens when you don’t keep chugging towards your goal. It’s called “Regret”.

Today’s Run Stats:
10.5 miles
1:32:52
139/151 HR

Weekly Stats:
Run: 27.3
Cycle: 59.5
Swim: 2000 yards

IMLP 2006 Totals:
Run: 53.3
Bike: 140.3
Swim: 4000 Yards

p.s. I understand my friend Todd went to the city yesterday with his wife and that is why he couldn’t ride with me. I am sure it was more like his wife taking him to see Santa Claus so he can ask Santa for a magic elixir that will allow him to beat me at IMLP 2006.

I have trouble deciding on whether I am pushing too far or wanting to slack off. At what point is it ok to say enough is enough without feeling like you were looking for an excuse to stop a workout early. This was the thought was confronting me today.

The weather was very windy, partially cloudy skies, an air temperature of 32 degrees and a wind chill of about 16 degrees. I was scheduled 50 miles of cycling and I decided to do it outdoors. Completing a 50 mile ride would be the longest I’ve accomplished since Ironman Lake Placid back in July. When I reached around 30 miles, I found myself looking for excuses to cut the ride short.

On the side of cutting it short was the fact that the air temperature was the coldest I’ve ridden in quite some time. It was very windy and my pace was very slow. Add to that the fact I have ridden over 40 miles exactly 1 time in the past 4 months and getting in 40 miles was looking to be quite the accomplishment. For added influence, I tossed in the thoughts of my children waiting for me back home.

Conversely, there was no good reason for me to pack it in early. I was dressed properly so I wasn’t cold at all. My feet were in excellent shape and my hands were only slightly chilled. I decided to let my annoyance at being dropped on hills a couple of times by pace lines to be incentive for me to keep on going. How am I ever going to regain my Ironman like fitness if I can’t even complete a 50 mile ride?

I was hoping to see Todd in the park to have some company while riding. A short time after I returned home from the ride, I received a message from him giving all sorts of lame excuses for not showing up in the park. Yada, yada, yada… I am used to him coming up with reasons for not doing a workout or event that is tougher than normal.

In the end I decided that I didn’t have any good reasons for not finishing 50 miles. It was too cold to take my children outdoors, my son was resting with a cold and it was still early in the day. I wasn’t tired, injured, thirsty or hungry. I just needed to finish it and not let any excuses get in my way.

That is pretty much it. I rode in a pace line for a while, by myself for a while and chatted with the occasional rider. It was a perfect winter ride.

Stats:
Data Value Unit
Duration 3:04:55
Sampling Rate 5 s

Energy Expenditure 1765 kcal
Number of Heart Beats 24975 beats
Recovery -25 beats
Minimum Heart Rate 88 bpm
Average Heart Rate 135 bpm
Maximum Heart Rate 163 bpm
Standard Deviation 12.6 bpm

Minimum Speed 3.2 mph
Average Speed 16.8 mph
Maximum Speed 29.9 mph
Distance 51.3 miles
Odometer 166 miles

Minimum Cadence 31 rpm
Average Cadence 93 rpm
Maximum Cadence 150 rpm

Minimum Altitude -55 ft
Average Altitude 7 ft
Maximum Altitude 80 ft
Ascent 1539 ft
Descent 1660 ft

Minimum Power 3 Watts
Average Power 195 Watts
Average Power (0 W incl.) 185 Watts
Maximum Power 442 Watts
Pedaling Index Average 22 %
Pedaling Index Maximum 41 %
Left Right Balance Average L52 – 48R Left – Right
Left Right Balance Maximum L76 – 24R Left – Right