Season Revisited

Triathlon season ended, not with a bang but a whimper.  I feel like I put in a really, really good season of training, and in many ways I feel like I’m now in the best shape of my life.  But racing-wise it could have gone better.  I opened the season with a good performance at the Brian’s Beachside Boogie duathlon in April but then got lost on the bike leg at my first actual tri of the season in May and followed that up by bonking right at the end of the NYC Tour de Cure in June.  After that, I laid down an absolutely crap-tastic performance at the Ocean Beach sprint in July and followed that up with exactly three-quarters of a good race at Litchfield Hills in August.  And yeah, I did eventually manage to close out the season with a reasonably strong performance at the Westport Kiwanus Triathlon, finishing 3^rd in my Age Group and 12^th overall, and that’s fine.  But even there, there was still plenty of room for improvement.  I mean, I was actually leading my Age Group with less than a mile to go on the run, so more than anything, I feel like the lesson of this tri season is the same as it’s always been—I’m a good swimmer, and I can hold serve on the bike, but the better guys always seem to close me out on the run, and it seems like there’s never anything I can do about it.  To be the triathlete that I reallywant to be, I need to find a way to get in some three- and four-hour workouts in there early part of the season, and I somehow need to find more time to focus on running.  And oh by the way, as a 38-year-old husband and working father of two, I doubt strongly that I’ll ever be able to either find more time to train or to recover enough to train successfully if I do actually manage to commit more hours.

*sigh*

I love triathlon, but living that lifestyle is a constant struggle for focus, balance, and discipline.  Which is to say that I like being a competitive athlete again, but I have to really work at not letting it take over my life.  I’m not on scholarship.  I’m not doing this professionally.  I’m not even on a team.  Truth: no one really cares about this stuff except me. 

When tri season ended, Sally and I decided to do the Hartford Half-Marathon.  It was a no-brainer, really.  Sally’s already run a few Half’s, and for me, though I’ve never run that far before, I also know that I’m still carrying a full season’s worth of triathlon fitness.  I didn’t need to get in shape for the race so much as I needed to just refocus my fitness and build some more strength in my legs.  Yesterday I finished an 11-mile training run in exactly and hour-forty, so at this point I feel pretty good.  I mean, I’m tired and a little sore right now, but I nevertheless feel reasonably confident.  I don’t think the Half is gonna be easy by any means—in fact, I expect the last half-hour to be downright painful—but I ‘m pretty sure I can finish, hopefully in something like two-hours.

After Hartford, it’ll be the true offseason.  Given how tired I am right this minute, that sounds kind’a nice.

First Saturday in September

Okay, so yeah... I took yesterday off in order to take the kids out to Six Flags, but as it happens, Six Flags was closed when we got there.  And that sucked.  But we went to the Hartford Science Center museum and ended up having a pretty nice day.  Not exactly the day we'd planned, but I can't complain.

Training for the Hartford Half-Marathon seems to be coming along.  Ran a touch over 8-miles last week and a touch over 9-miles this week, and I felt pretty good doing it.  As I posted on Facebook, my first half hour or so felt pretty good.  Then I struggled from, say, the 45-minute mark until I got to about 55-minutes or an hour.  Call it 15 minutes of suffering.  After that, I kind of broke through and settled down and actually managed to pick up the pace a little.  Ended up making it back in 1:21:59--right at a 9-minute/mile pace.  Which is not bad at all for me for a run of that length.

If you're wondering, the Half is on October 15th.  So with a race next week--the Westport Kiwanus Triathlon, a mini-sprint that's also the last multi-sport event of the season--bottom line, we've got four training weeks and two rest weeks to go before the race.  It seems like we're on track in terms of mileage, but I'd like to get in at least one 10+ mile run without injury before we actually sign up for the race.

And... Sally and the kids are home.  Have a great weekend!

Post-Run Postmortem

If you’re wondering, last night’s run wasn’t all that great after all.  I felt good yesterday afternoon, and I felt like I rode reasonably well during the ride back to the Harlem train station after work, but then I spent an hour on the train heading back to Stratford before riding the last mile to my house, so that by the time I got home, it was after 6:00.  Honestly, at that point the last thing in the world that I wanted to do was to go run.  But that was the only time I had, and I knew that I needed to put in at least some miles during the week, like it or not. 

I made myself some Gatorade and then popped a handful of jellybeans in an attempt to raise my blood glucose long enough to get some temporary motivation, and then I went out to stretch.  That worked well enough, and fortunately, that last mile on the bike had at least warmed my legs a little.  I eventually headed out around 6:20, iPod set to a mix of Tool, Tears for Fears, Van Halen, Daughtry, and a selection of cuts off of Slash’s recent solo album.  I started out trying to keep my cadence high while holding my effort at or below an aerobic threshold—roughly 80% effort or less.  Or, to put it another way, I started out trying to take it easy while simultaneously holding decent form.  But that’s a tough balance for me personally because my cadence has a tendency to fall when I’m either tired or just running easy.  Which is another way of saying that I’m a natural over-strider, but over-striding can lead to injuries.  To keep my cadence up, I have a choice of either shuffling along with teeny-tiny steps or just pushing a little harder to maintain better turnover—and better form—naturally.  So, bottom line, yesterday’s run was about finding some balance between relaxed pacing and proper running form.

In any event, the jellybeans Tool’s Ticks and Leaches carried me through about the first mile or mile and a half, and after that, I had to start gutting it out.  It wasn’t as bad as all that, but that third mile took some real effort, and if not for a couple of timely up-tempo songs off of Slash’s album, I suspect that last mile would’ve sucked a lot.  Regardless, I got back home just before seven o’clock—total run: four miles exactly in 33:09.  That’s right at 8:15/mile.  That’s not quite a tempo run for me, but it’s a touch faster than I’d meant to go, and it took considerably more effort.  I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not.

I got home to find Sally sitting on the front porch with a glass of wine and the phone, talking to her sister.  She’d worked the morning at her job with Birth-to-Three and then taught art to kiddos for the City of Stratford in the afternoon.  She’d therefore ordered pizza for dinner, and after I got home, I had maybe ten minutes to stretch before that pizza arrived.  I did some ab work while my kids set the table, paid the pizza dude, and then took a quick shower while Sally and the girls started eating.  After that, I read Super Dinosaur #2 to the girls and then put them to bed, and then Sally and I sat down and watched Covert Affairs on Hulu.  I was in bed at 9:30.

And I was up this morning at 5:00.  I felt tired and a little hung-over, which tells me that I probably didn’t drink enough water when I got home last night.  Also, my legs were a little more sore than usual, and my right knee is aching where I had the plica earlier this year.  Again, that’s probably caused by a mix of dehydration and inadequate stretching, especially post-run.  I’m sure the rain outside didn’t help.  But truth be told, I was just as happy to see the rain because I think my legs can probably use a day off from the folding bike.  In any event, when I go for my long run this weekend, I’ll have to make sure to wear my knee brace, or I’ll be risking injury—a concrete example of why stretching is important and what the consequences are when you fail to train properly.

Tonight’s a swim night, and I’ll do my long swim of the week Saturday morning.  I’ve got to give some thought to balancing those workouts—and the necessarily short recovery time between them—but that’s at least a surmountable problem.  In the meantime, there’s a whole day to get through, along with all of its inherent challenges.

Yo Joe!

The good news is that the movie was a lot better than I thought it was going to be.  In fact, there were parts that I enjoyed quite a bit.  If you haven’t seen it, Rise of Cobra tells exactly the story that the title implies; it’s an origin story for Cobra, especially Cobra Commander, and for the old cartoon series’ perpetual male lead, Duke.  There’s some other crap in there about high-tech weapons and something that someone in another, dumber universe might possibly conceive as a critique of the military-industrial complex and the ongoing privatization of the Pentagon weapons procurement process, but mostly the movie’s plot is a vehicle for far-fetched car chases and other often extremely wacky action set pieces.  And perhaps not surprisingly, those are the parts of the movie that I liked the most.  For example, there’s a car chase set in Paris that I thought was absolutely brilliant.  The chase itself is cleverly constructed with action shots that built through a series of hits and near-misses to a crescendo of wackiness that’s at once exhilarating, wildly implausible, and fully committed to delivering on the implied threat that the sequence’s antagonists represent.  On top of that comes the fact that the sequence itself is nearly all CGI, but the CGI is so well done that it actually looks real.  That’s a help with both suspension of disbelief and the sense of danger surrounding the characters.  Which is to say that you’re not worried about Scarlett when it’s obvious that “Scarlett” is really just a CGI construct drawn onto a blue-screened cartoon backdrop, but when you can’t tell which shots are real—when a real, live actress might actually get crushed by a truck—and which are CGI, it’s a lot easier to just let go and just believe.

All of that is not to say that there aren’t a host of valid critiques of the movie.  Even for a dumbass summer action flick, this movie had moments that were either so idiotic or so poorly constructed that they yanked me completely out of the story.  For example, GI Joe is supposed to be this team of international super-commandos comprised of the very best soldiers that NATO and the Western powers have to offer.  And yet, when Scarlett gets on a treadmill, the actress that plays her, Rachel Nichols, runs so badly that it looks like she’s never actually been on a treadmill in her life.  I don’t get that at all.  And then, too, GI Joe is supposed to be “A Real American Hero”—and not an international super-team—but for whatever reason, the script has these guys based in the middle of the Sahara, and half the characters seem to be recruits out of the French Foreign Legion.  Which is annoying on a couple of levels, not the least of which is that no one in NATO actually wants to fight anymore, even when the fight itself is their idea.  I mean, come on.  The French Foreign Legion?  When was the last time those guys did anything?  Everyone on Earth knows that if NATO were to put together a team of super-commandoes, it would be fitted out entirely with American soldiers and American gear along with a tiny smattering of British SAS troopers and a single, rock hard Canadian with adamatium claws.

So, bottom line, I liked GI Joe okay, both because of and in spite of its ridiculousness, and against all odds I find myself hoping that they make a sequel.  I particularly liked the action sequences through the movie’s second act as well as the way that they made Rachel Nichols’s boobs into almost their own separate character.  Inch thick Kevlar vest?  No problem—as long as it’s covered with skintight rubber that shows off Rachel’s rather substantial rack.  Additionally, I thought they did a nice job on the Baroness and Stormshadow and a couple of the other major supporting characters despite the nigh-unforgivable absence of Leatherneck.  In summary, GI Joe is a fine way to spend your TV watching evenings until Burn Notice and Royal Pains start back up.

***

By the way, while we’re discussing Rachel Nichols’s rack, let me go ahead and point out that Ms. Nichols is playing the female lead in this summer’s Conan re-boot, which is yet another reason to be excited about the new Conan movie.  God willing, they’ll be true to the original Robert E. Howard short stories, and she’ll be naked for at least three-quarters of the movie’s total running time.

***

Last note: I’ve been sitting at this fucking computer screen for so long today that I feel like my head is about to explode.  After my long run on Sunday, I took Monday off, and then it rained Tuesday, and then last night the Life Insurance Salesman came by, so that instead of swimming, biking, or running, I got to talk about death and saving for my kids’ college funds (yippee!).  Never mind that Sally and I both put ourselves through both our undergrad and graduate degrees, apparently folks actually pay tuition for their kids, and we’re probably gonna have to do it, too.  Ugh.  I personally do not believe in paying tuition—at all—but against the possibility that I cannot convince our daughters to fly helicopters for the Coast Guard for a few years, we’ve started talking about how we might pay in the hopefully unlikely event that we actually do wind up having to foot at least some part of some bill for some education.  In any event, all that talking was a lot less fun than it probably sounds, and I’m getting antsy anyway since all I’ve done workout-wise this week is my regular commute riding.  So.  I’m very much looking forward to my short run tonight, but even with that, if tomorrow weren’t Friday, I’m not sure I’d be able to face it.

Awesome Long Run This Morning

I did Podrunner's latest interval mix this morning, 165 BPM - “BASS TEN - 10:1 INTERVALS #2”, and it was totally awesome.  The mix is already something of a driving trance, and when I got to the third interval, I got in this kind of groovy zone that I haven't hit in years.  Amazing.  Seriously, what a runner's high!  And then the workout ended with this upbeat, ringing cathedral bell thing just as the sun was breaking through the clouds here in Connecticut.  Wow...


People all the time tell me how crazy they think I am for getting up early on the weekends and working out or whatever, but those people just don't know the joy of sacrifice, dedication, and achievement.  It's not to be missed.  Honestly, I feel sorry for folks who just don't have enough on the ball to get their asses out of bed and experience what life can be when you work at it.