miler

so i went swimming today. set up my little counting bouy at the end of the lane. each time down the lane i would move it to the right one foot. it takes 7 laps to get to the end. i dont double the right end and then there are 6 to get back making a total of 13 laps. my previous best was 8 laps and i didnt feel like i pushed myself too hard doing it. so today i decided to do 13. a down and back on the bouy marker. this is also just a touch under a half mile (about 14 yards short). when i started i looked at the clock so i could have a half mile distance time. the first quarter mile went pretty well. mostly i was just trying to not think about how far i was going to go. as i was finishing the second quarter i doing the math in my head how much farther a mile would be. which is pretty easy actually. 2x farther. plus one more length. but i rounded it up to one more lap.

so about 80% of the way through my half mile, and feeling pretty good i decided to double it and do a mile.

which i did.

the only tough time came on the second to last lap. for the last 10 laps or so all i had in my head was to finish the mile. and more and more thinking got me to where i started worrying about the last lap. what if i blew up on the last lap?? cramps?!?!? lungs full of water? dead tired!!! eeeek!

well, the second to last lap i had just the slightest panic attack and had to back off a bit. i spent the lap trying to do some tricky math problem i have been stuck on for about 1/2 year. no luck on the problem, but i almost crushed my head in at the end of the pool. :-) was a great relaxing moment. swimming i think gives me time to think about other stuff. which is pretty good. on the bike i just love what i am doing most of the time - so i dont want to think about other things. on the running i dont like what is going on in my body so i dont like being distracted from trying to keep myself together. but swimming seems to give me some amount of area to think on other stuff.

the last lap was pretty heady. just grinning in the water and a sprint on the last length.

wasnt out of breath - any more than normal that is. and my arms felt tired but not dead. i might have been able to do another mile - but thats for another month ( or day ). so i cruised up to the end of the lane and checked out the pool clock. 44:30! just what i had predicted a few days ago. actually the 30 seconds is a bit longer than i predicted but i did swim an extra length. so that must be worth the 30 seconds. so i will go with 44 minutes for a mile.

first time ever over a quarter mile. wow. :-) i am really happy right now.

someday when things suck i am going to have to read back on the entries for the last month - its been so very positive lately.

so i sat on the side of the pool and of course in one of those incredible moments of my life the next song i heard was Jackson Brown's Running on Empty. this is my all time favorite song to run to. i dont think i have done a run in the last 10 years where i haven't heard that song in my head. its about the only song i ever hum to as i run. just for a minute - its not like i have the thing on repeat for 3 hours.!

but there it was playing... seemed fitting since i just swam my first ever focking mile!!!

12 miles

we might have messed with the last few weeks as far as our long run goes. 17,20 and sunday we we went 12. i think the original plan was to swap the 12 and 20. but whatever. :-)

the 12 went well. i had a bit of a tummy problem, and resa was really good. ran it in 2:10 so thats pretty good for us. we were both tired as its pretty much our peaking week now. another 12 tomorrow and again on sunday and then its time for some beer for a week before the marathon.

legs feel a bit more gassed than normal after this one. will see if we can grind it out on wednesday.

swim on dude.

friday morning we went swimming at the nat. did a 7 lap and 6 lap set. so about 1/2 mile. i timed the longer one and it turned out to be 11:30. doing the math that works out to about 44 minutes on the mile length. provided i could go that far. ;-)

so i liked that the pace is not way too slow. that was a huge relief. up till now i didnt know if i was going only half speed. resa is a bit faster, she did it in about 40 minutes. so we can probably stay together on the swim as i get better. she already has a good swim style and can go a lot farther. so hopefully i improve enough to stay with her.


and here is the video i watch several times a week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNnSM7xAZNU

Thursday Run

we ran 9 miles on thursday. went really easy. at the end we were kinda looking at each other with the 'was that it?' feeling. after running 20 on the weekend it was pretty darn easy to run 9. too bad we cant get up to about 40 mile runs and then a marathon would be that easy! :-)

things going really well overall right now. hope we can keep it up!

Happy Laps

well, again a good day at the pool. really good. they subdivided the pool into either a 33 yard or a 25 yard area. we ended up in the 33 yard section - which is nice - less turning around. but its longer than i have done before. weird. when i thought i was at the end, nope, still lots left. but i got used to that after about 10 minutes. still did the easy return on the arms. also used the floaty bob thing for my legs. its cheating, but, eh. i figure i will use that for a few more months, maybe even a half a year more - just to get my arms into good shape and my distance up. then i can drop the floaty thing and go with just swimming. maybe the wetsuit will be the floaty thing during the event.

well, again i concentrated on keeping my head down and arms forward and return easy and arms out a bit and breathing and ... well, i did one of those at a time, so its still far from being good in the water but... but! but i did spend a lot of time on the easy recovery and pulled off swims of 400 and then 500 yards. personal bests! and!!! i wasn't even out of breath at the end of the 500 yard one. just stopped because resa had to get to work. this is really huge. next time i will see if i can get in a mile. also i will see what kinda pace i have for that distance. that will be a big number. if its less than 45 minutes i think i am golden. otherwise... well, not sure i can even keep my arms going that long, so i will get to a mile first then worry about speed.

good day in the pool. :-)

long and hard.

just the way resa likes it... long and hard. 20 miles of the nasty today. kinda gassed right now, but we did our long run today. might have done it a week early as last week was 17 and i dont think we were recovered from that yet. but done. pace was all over the board... fast and slow.

didnt learn all that much from it. the body glide i put on my chest probably needs to go under my arms a bit too. but really, nothing at all serious there. the bloody toe felt great with a kleenex wrapped around it - so that was also an easy and quick fix. ran out of water a bit on this one. kinda medium severe i would call it. i give myself a running feeling of 7 when it was going well to about a 3 when we were gassed. neither number near an extreme. never great never devastated. probably another week's rest would have made this much easier, but we didnt ever plan on today being good. so we got what we deserved. :-)

one big positive is that i think we can both 'gut' it out a lot longer now. we started feeling pretty bad about 6 miles from the end and still managed to get it done. again greg lemond's not getting easier but getting faster or at least stronger. so all in all we were pretty happy with the day.

tomorrow off then pool day on tuesday. hoping to up the long swim portion of the workout. hopefully with my more relaxed swim style i can get it up a bit. :-)

weekend move

well, we are moving the stuff out of our ann arbor house down to canton ohio this weekend.

on saturday we ran 17 miles. so that was a longest ever north american distance for us. i would say afterwards that running the poto trail is a lot harder, and about 2 miles shorter. but all in all this wasnt easy as it was mostly hills running around brighton lake 2 times. we ran the first loop in about 104 minutes. the second loop we were tired and kinda died, took 105 minutes. pretty amazing that the pace stayed consistent. we didnt wear watches so we only found out when we got back to the car each time around. was feeling pretty gassed after that. but we staged water on the route and stopped to drink that at a few places. i think i am behind the staggering crashed events. hopefully. resa has some stomach issues with the food as we run and i felt pretty good with the eating. just need some more interesting things to eat i think. maybe a box of donuts at mile 15 would be good. :-)

tuesday i ran around the block one last time. its about 4.5 miles around. did it pretty quick, but my legs felt dead.

Swim Breakthrough

for a while i have been going to the pool and working on technique. trying to keep both hands in front of me. today at the pool i did more of the same. still hard to do for sure. keeping from looking forward is hard too. its like on the bike, you want to look down road as you pedal and so are bent back at the neck. thats one of the more tender spots after a long run, the sore neck. same in the water, i like to swim so that i can see stuff as it comes at me. also i like to watch my hands come into the water. ( usually crowded with bubbles! ) so looking down at the pool is not easy. but i was working on that and the forward hands. i think i made medium progress on the hands and very small progress on looking down. actually working on one makes the other harder... lol.

after doing these drills for a bit i decided to see if i could match my personal best ever long swim. and i did. i went back and forth across the 25meter pool 6 times. 3 laps. woohoo! i kept thinking this is the same pool mark spits trained in for the 7 medals he won a lifetime ago.

after finishing the monster long swim of 150 meters i hung on to the edge and breathed for a bit. about 4 lanes over some guy was swimming ( actually the only other guy in this huge pool ) so while hanging on the wall i watched him go back and forth. head up, slow swimming, breathing on one side, arms all over. but he went back and forth for about 30 minutes. no stops. just plodding along. splashing and moving slowly. and i was thinking, hmm, the only thing keeping me from doing longer swims was my breathing. i run out of breath pretty quick. like i feel when i am running too fast.

then i thought back to the video i watched a few weeks ago. one of the drills was to return your arm to the front with your fingertips dragging the surface of the water. so i tried that. just dangled my fingers as i brought them back. this does two things, one, you dont lift your hand too high and second you are relaxed on the recovery. which turned out to be huge. image running where you are pushing back as hard as you can and also swinging forward as hard as you can. sprinting. jogging is more relaxed. relaxed upper body and not a forced run. and you can do this for hours without breathing so hard you run out of breath. same in swimming! what a huge breakthrough that was. i did 5 easy if slower laps. and at the end i just stopped to think about it. it was easy. i wasnt out of breath. it was the longest swim of my life and i felt pretty relaxed about it. i believe, and hope to test, that i can do 3 or 5 times as long a swim if i wanted.

also had a good experience with getting water in my mouth. normally this is a panicky thing for me. i want to stop and re-set my breathing. because i am kinda on the edge with air anyway, one missed breath and its like sprinting with your mouth closed. but with the more relaxed breathing i just got a bunch of water in my mouth and blew it out with the air on the next breath, i was a bit out of breath and went to one sided breathing for a few strokes. but it didnt stop me like it would have before.

also i kept track of the number of strokes to cross 25 meters: 11. so thats a number i am hoping to cut down over the next year. maybe 7-8 would be much easier.

great run last night and a great day in the pool today. :-)

It doesn't get any easier. I just get faster. - Greg Lemond

Wed night we went for a 12 mile run in the park. Used to be a half marathon was something to get all nervous about. Last night i even forgot my knee brace. i have found that if i wear it my knee lasts about 2x as long as when i dont. i dont need the bracing, but the thing keeps my knee warm. and when it gets cold it will lose a lot of strength. not sure if anyone else has this. it might also have something to do with tendons maybe.

well, anyway i forgot the brace. and normally i would have driven back to the house to get it. but we were running a bit late and wanted to beat the sundown. the park is actually an old tow path for horses by a canal. its very pleasant but at night its in the woods and you cant see anything. well, just barely you can see the hole in the woods the path is on, but otherwise you cant see where you are running or if there is a hole or something else on the path.

so we just start running and hope the knee holds out. we ran a pretty fast pace. i dont know if i mentioned before but we are very slow in the run. our bike is respectable, but not our run. but last night we started fast and kept it up. it was great. we ran all the way out to the icecream shop and stopped for 10 minutes and then ran all the way back. 12 miles. and at our personal best ever time too. :-) better than anything we did in africa or in the years before or since. was a great feeling to be running along and my knee was feeling if not strong, at least able to keep me from falling over.

our best ever half marathon was about 2:30ish. which shows how hideously slow we are. this year we did one in about 2:45 and about 2:35. last night if we could have kept the pace up for another mile, which i think we could have, we would have been in at about 2:20. it is flat and no wind or sun and the weather was great. but still. was a wonderful feeling. hopefully we can adopt that pace as our running pace. not sure, but that would be a huge improvement. plus we can use that as a launcher to even better times if that becomes our normal pace. but, more likely we just had a great night.

in other news i am under 200 pounds for the first time in about 2 years.

training on site

i forgot to mention, santa did finish the race at about the 16:20 time. so he was pretty happy.

also some cool shirts we saw while waiting: "Death before DNF" and some chick with "I couldn't possibly! I have to run, bike and swim in the morning."

also i was toying with getting a tatoo. not sure if i mentioned it before. but standing in line i found out what it will be. looks like about 1 in 4 people get a tatoo. on the right calf about the top of a long sock up the leg. so there you go.

while on site we decided to run and bike the course. i was feeling great all the way up to the site but the day after the race i went to bed feeling sick. it lasted about 3-4 days. nasty headache and stomach stuff. resa got it about 3 days after i did and it lasted the same amount of time. weird. certainly not the flu or a cold. ???

but whatever. i was feeling yucky but we biked about 20 miles just around for fun on tuesday. followed by running the run course from about mile 3 to 7 and back. so not much of a workout. but the run course is HILLY. but nothing too killer. just not flat like i read it was. or maybe for having hills all around its as flat as it can be. and it was very hot. must have been about 90 and sunny. killed us. we ran it at the hottest point of the day. probably about 3 hours sooner than we will this coming year. so we drank and drank and chilled in the lake.

the next day was a bike day. we planned on biking the first half of the course the first day and the second half the next. the bike course looks a bit easier than i thought it would be from what i read. it starts out flat does one hill and goes flat for 45 miles. easy. which it was. we road casually out on it at about 16mph. so plenty fast enough. then the first real hill richter pass showed up. and the hammer hit us. wow. the big climb in the tour de france is a long 8degree mountain stage Alpe Du Heuz or something. Richter is 6 degrees and 6 miles long. not worth mentioning to the tour guys. heh. but to us. bam!

down goes frazier.

and ken too. i thought all along this year i might need smaller gears on the bike to handle it. even at the bottom i told resa i was not geared for this. i was right. i grannied it up the hill, but had to stop when i totally lagged my legs. happened to both of us about 3 times. new gears will be an easy swap and that will fix that. the time on those six miles though. ouch. about an hour is going to be lost just there. and getting a good ride after that is going to be hard too. you just get blown up doing that part. i am really hoping now that gears and a new body are going to make it ok. there were a lot of chalk messages on the route too. the only one i remember other than "Go Tom" "Go Sally" "Go whoever" messages was this one: "Get Over This BITCH!!!" if that doesn't make you smile... nothing will.

down the other side we went. zoom, 4 miles down and into the rollers. only got the bikes up to about 35 mph. we had crossed the 50 mile point and decided to call it good when the RV showed up about 30 seconds after we reached the bottom of the hill.

the next day was planned as rollers and yellow lake. but we had driven home that way and other than being annoying it didnt look all that bad really. certainly not nearly as bad as richter. we did some math the next day and decided to head out after lunch. staging and overhead from biking the second half would have gotten us out about 3 in the afternoon so we went for a 7 mile run in the hills instead.

we packed up and went on home.

not as confident. at least not me. looks harder than i thought it would be, but not much. just a bit. also sadly a guy died while doing the swim portion of the race.


under a year to go now.

clock is ticking now. off to swim in the morning. running 12ish tomorrow night. thats the plan. see how i do. :-)

Canada Eh?

so after some adventures and a quick visit/car trouble in fort collins we made it up for the race in canada.

about 2 hours late sadly. the first thing we saw on the road into town were... Pro Bikers! awesome. these guys all had the evil bitch bikes with the $10,000 setups. very fast. they were at the bottom of richter pass as we showed up. we could see the road heading straight up the pass but we didnt try to follow them, instead we headed downcourse to the starting area. all along the way there were bikers coming toward us. as we covered more miles and took more time off the clock the level of the bikes and riders went from freaky fast to just a lot faster than us. towards the end it looked like people we could even ride with. the last 20 or so looked like they were absolutely hating the idea of being in a triathlon. one guy who we called santa because of the 300 pounds and giant white beard looked pretty happy peddling along though.

we parked the RV and started walking the one mile to the start. at least the cop said one mile. turned out to be about 5 miles and we got about 80% of the way there when the pros started coming in. they were totally spread out as there are no teams and no drafting on the bikes. really cool to see them spread out rather than in a bunch. the first chick came in about position 9 or 10. only about 20mins or so behind the lead guy. she looked really strong. one of the guys at about position 20 or so slapped hands with everyone on the course as he went by.

after watching the guys arrive for about an hour we decided maybe we should have a beer. when we came back out, it was more normal people. actually normal people being those that could run a marathon in like 3:30 hours rather than the insane people earlier. we watched them run out of town and followed them 5 miles back to the car. saw all kinds. fat. skinny. fast and really slow. some people are bikers and fat and dont look good on the run portion, others were bad on the bike and were pretty much sprinting on the run now.

we parked the RV and set up for a few hours then headed back to the start line to do our volunteer work. we got to hand out Tshirts to the finishers from 8 to midnight. so if you ran this race, and finished then, we saw you. i would guess you didnt see us as most people could hardly walk at the end. :-)

what stories i could tell about those 4 hours. before hand we thought it would be pretty hard on us with all the people coming in. but after you see 20 people stumble, fall and then puke you kinda get used to it. the last hour the amount of people finally slowed down. the big groups came in trying to beat hour times. so at 14:49 there was a large group and at 15:59 another one. the 16:59 group never showed. only about 4 people finished in the last 10 minutes. the last guy was escourted over the line by the male and female winner earlier in the day. ( they probably flew to vegas and back during the race ) the last guy finished pretty darn close to cutoff, puked and we started packing up. sadly one more person finished but didnt get a finisher shirt after cutoff. also the 79 year old nun ran in with about 4 minutes to spare. oldest finisher ever. next year we might very well finish arm in arm with the first ever 80 year to do it. another set of two people finished at about 16:30 and the guy asked the chick to marry him. he had run the ring for the marathon. sadly the ring wouldnt fit on her swollen fingers. but she said yes anyway. :-0) another woman came in and started pumping fists and had the greatest grin on her face. she was an ironman.

it was emotional, the whole thing. amazing. we thought at the time it looked do-able. the people coming in at the end were obviously athletes. but not extreme. we were confident.

the next day we signed up. there was a line about 2000 people long and it started at 5 in the morning. we showed up about 9 and stood in line for about 4 hours. actually resa and sheila did, mark and i went looking at those high end bikes at a local store. $3000 would get me pretty focking fast i think.

so after 4 hours in line we signed up. they said volunteers needed to use a different line. you didnt have to wait. it was empty. so.... uh.... well. anyway we are signed up.


for ironman. 350 days to go.

YIKES!!!!!