A Mind Is A Terrible Thing

The aches and pains have again returned, twelve weeks into my quest to become a "runner" once again.

Our bodies can clearly communicate the message we've done more damage to ourselves than eight hours of prophylactic sleep is going to repair. Some days, it takes a couple hundred milligrams of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories to do the trick. And on the worst days, perhaps even a bike ride rather than a run.

Like I've mentioned in past posts, when something like the little aches and pains return, it's wise to look back and see where the plan has been not followed. In this particular case it seems to have come over the last two weeks, when I increased my run times from 46 minutes to 50, and from 50 minutes to 55, following that "ten percent" rule of thumb.

However, I was doing it all wrong. I wasn't following my own counsel, and planned as though I was stronger than I truly was. I wrote in the past about the ten-percent increase at three week intervals, but figured I could do it at one-week intervals.

It's the sort of hubris which can turn a person, if they are not careful, into a former runner. John L. Parker, Jr. writes eloquently in his second work of fiction, "Again To Carthage," about the process of slowing down. In one chapter, two former Olympians, coach and athlete, talk about the marathon after a twenty-mile run, and the coach directly mentions one particular race he considered the probable cause for his relative debility.

How frightening is it to be able to look at a training log and say: 'right there?' I spend more time crawling within the recesses of my own head than probably the average bear. To borrow partly from an old public service advertising campaign, "a mind is a terrible thing..." Slowing down any more than I have in the past year doesn't frighten me. Stopping altogether does.

It's the reason I tell my own athletes to err on the side of caution.

It's the reason most good training plans are exactly that, plans. If they were supposed to be rigid, without adaptation, and guaranteed to succeed we probably would have called them training itineraries.

It's the reason rest, recovery and rehabilitation are underrated.

And, it's probably the reason the best cure for a bad day is another day. And another. And another.

Mahatma On The Track

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” - Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi (1869-1948)

"...when they have to walk that 20-pound, flat-tired bike back to Quietwater. Oh, they had no water bottle?" - MSB (7/12/09)The challenge of coaching often comes as the result of collaboration with other coaches. I help coach a beginning triathlon group which meets every Sunday morning for three months leading up to a couple of mid-autumn sprint distance events. While everyone knows who the head coach is, sometimes it's not clearly communicated the advice of his well-meaning and highly-supportive assistants might be taken with, at the most, a single grain of salt.

I know my limitations quite well. When it comes to swimming I provide very little advice & counsel outside of body positioning & technique when it comes to breathing, because (so far) that's the only thing I have down pat. Yep, I know how to breathe...it's more by necessity than anything. Probably the first thing I got schooled on. I am the land-based, air-breathing aerobic animal, no doubt. Throw my leg over the top tube of a bicycle, or strap me into a pair of racing flats & I am in my element. I've had the perfect days & the not-so-perfect ones, & after this long, I know most of the root causes of the not-so-perfect days, too. But, the problem that presents itself is that of 'well, what the hell do you know' attitude which comes from (often) a female of the 25-35 year-old demographic, first-timer, who prefers to listen to the half-baked advice of her friend (who may have completed one event) rather than that of the collective wisdom of people who have raced more mileage in one year than they have trained. The bottle cage on that bike, honey, are not for your cell phone. That's for putting a water bottle. I don't care that you can't reach it while you're riding. You can stop, grab a drink, then start up again. You also have no flat kit. What happens if there's no sag wagon to help you put a new tube on your bike? What if you have to walk back to transition? That one-and-a-half-hour ride in 75-degree weather you planned just turned into a two-and-a-half hour ride/walk, in 85 degrees.

But, there's nothing like the hard lesson of walking five miles (or more) with a flat tire in 90/90 (degrees/humidity) conditions in Pensacola Beach on a big holiday weekend...with no water bottle in the cage...to teach perhaps either a little humility or a little preparation. Ah, but sometimes you have to pay the tuition before you learn the lesson.

Outside Looking In

When I mentioned my 2009 goal of completing an Ironman 70.3 & an Ironman event to my running friends, one of the first questions with which they responded came down to 'so, what time do you think it will take for you to complete the Ironman?' 'Frankly,' I told them, 'all I want to do is finish, but it would be nice to complete it in...'

At that point I stopped, partly because I was trying to calculate what would pass for a good day doing 140.6 miles by taking my crappy day of 70.3 & multiplying times two. But, remembering my hubris, I also told them I'd take the entire 17 hours if I had to, all that mattered was to finish & hear Mike Reilly bellow out the affirmation: "You Are An Ironman!" After that I can have a beer, take the time to determine which set of muscles hurt the least; those muscles will the ones over which tattoo number two will be placed. Hubris hurt me worse during my past two marathons than the tattoo I got to remind me to respect the distance. I'm not counting my first marathon; I knew nothing about running a marathon & it showed on race day. But I survived, & that's what was important on the day:

- I participated in my second marathon against the advice & counsel of my own coach. I spoke very lightly about my chances of qualifying for Boston, based on the (5K/10K racing-focused) training I accomplished that autumn. I did two long (16-mile) runs which left me susceptible to the worst case of flu I had ever experienced...two weeks out from race day. I ran (I think) a 7:00-15/mile pace for the first 13.1 miles, which put me 5-7 minutes ahead of Boston Marathon qualifying pace. The next five miles were where the wheels began to fall off, with the game over moment coming at mile 19. I screwed up the hydration plan & was passed by the 3:20 pace group six miles out from the finish. The 40-mile drive was painful, as well as the ilitibial band friction syndrome I suffered from over the next year. Brought a whole new meaning to the term walk of shame.

- My most recent marathon experience saw smarter training; I followed an adapted Brooks-Hanson's plan & focused on the hydration/nutrition necessary to make the marathon a good day. However, a poor choice of training shoes (when a running store owner/sub-3:00 marathoner tells you he wouldn't run a marathon in the shoes you chose, you made a poor choice) brought on overuse injuries which never really went away come race morning. I followed my heart rate monitor for the first 13.1 miles, hydrated religiously every 15-20 minutes, & had eight minutes to play with at that point, when the training injuries came back to haunt me. My achilles' tendon began to swell because I adjusted my stride to deal with bilateral calf cramps which hobbled me. I lost the eight-minute cushion bymile 20 & had to make a Hobson's Choice of three options:

- - Push the pace to make Boston qualifying time, & risk serious/permanent injury.

- - Walk the last ten kilometers to the finish, & live to fight another day.

- - Drop out, take the did not finish, & live to fight another day.

I say all that to write this Memo to Self: If the marathon is a humbling distance, then triathlon of nearly any distance is even more humbling due to the breadth of disciplines. Performance gains in one discipline often come at the expense of hard-earned gains of one or both of the other two. If the sprint distance hurts X much at the end, the intermediate distance do not hurt X-times-two; the half-iron distance do not hurt X-times-four, & the iron distance sure as hell does not hurt X-times-eight. It's probably more than that.

Multisports.com coaches Paul Huddle & Roch Frey said it best this month in their article in Triathlete magazine, from which I (shamelessly) quote (emphases are mine):

"...Madam Pele....hears & sees everything. She doesn't take kindly to overconfidence & disrespect....Ironman was born in Hawai'i &, therefore, the rules of aloha & kapu extend globally....we encourage all first-time Ironman athletes...to approach their first attempt at the distance with a healthy heaping of humility."

"...The No. 1 goal that every athlete should have when toeing the line for an Ironman is to finish. What are some other goals worth shooting for? Let's list a few: 2. Finish while still standing. 3. Finish while still standing & smiling. 4. Finish while still standing & smiling & in good enough physical condition to bypass the medical tent for food & a massage. 5. Finish while still standing, smiling, bypassing the medical tent & remaining gainfully employed. Finish while still standing, smiling, bypassing the medical tent, remaining gainfully employed & married."

"Look, we're already at No. 6 & there's been no mention of times and/or placing..."

Hardest part about the preparation for Ironman so far isn't so much the distances necessary to be accomplished in training, but partly of getting one's head wrapped around the big, honking numbers of distance & time that will be traversed. I have several friends (male & female) who are Ironmen; several provide sea stories about what they did/do in training, what worked & what failed. But, with very few exceptions, many Ironmen don't tell everyone they've done one. There might be a discreet M-Dot sticker on the back of their car, or they might wear a polo or fleece. Some have the M-Dot tattoo, which may or may not be revealed in the throes of tipping back a few adult beverages. (I still love the explanation to the kids, Jean. For the religious at heart, I would call it an outward manifestation of an inward process.)

At this point in time I feel like a kid in an orphanage or foster care who wants so badly to be accepted into the family. And family is so much a part of the training experience, from what my closest IM friends have said: they serve as domestiques, soigneurs, cheerleaders, psychologists...you name it. That explains the family member boogie down the last few hundred yards with the participant, which to me seems pretty cool. But, like every adoptive child, we're all unique, on the outside looking in. We want to know from the other kids what they did to get into the family.

I don't care how long it takes to get into the family. I just want to be a part.

Things Aren't Always As They Seem

"There's one guy we don't have to worry about." - Gordon McKenzie, American marathoner, thinking about Abebe Bikila (standing shoeless), before the Rome Olympic Marathon (1960)

The nice thing about sports is it's loaded with irony. The media are not the only ones who tend to get the predictions wrong more often than not (think Bode Miller in Torino rather than Michael Phelps in Beijing), coaches & individual athletes do so, too. While you can make an educated guess as to how well a person is going to perform from the exterior view it's much harder to tell what lies underneath the flesh, dwells within the muscle, bone & nerves of the individual. You cannot measure drive - heart - of an athlete by their physiological data.
One of my favorite training partners in the past five years, if you looked at him before a workout or a race, you would not be a bit impressed. In fact, he always looked more like a misplaced softball player than he did a road racer. I think nearly all my best workouts/races always had something to do with him...and many of his with me. Before a knee injury cut short his career about two years ago, he went on a tear...ended up winning a local half-marathon, ran some great trail ultra-distance races, and such. I miss not having him around to sharpen me up.

Not every athlete exudes what my father once desctibed as bad-ass in three easy lessons. A great case in point can be found in the realm of masters' swimming. A (relatively) slender, cardiovascularly efficient young(er) guy can be on the blocks at a masters' meet next to someone ten years older with a serious case of dunlap disease (the disorder where ones' midsection has done lapped over ones' belt line)...yet the paunchy, hoary one might be the one handing back the @$$ of the younger, relatively svelte, technically less-efficient swimmer at the end of the event. Trust me on this one. I've stood on the deck trying to find a way to graciously stuff my butt cheeks back down into my Speedo after having them handed to me by one of my adipose-enhanced training mates.
Our favorite local beer/bite hangout didn't quite go all-out last night for St. Patrick's Day; they did offer corned beef & cabbage, but we avoided it. It's not that I doubt the uniqueness or the genuine-ness of a place with the last name of O'Brady's, but I knew it would not sit well in my tummy either last night or this morning...especially this morning, in the pool... They did surprise us with some new appetizer items, one of which is a fried calamari, something we don't see much of unless we assault an Italian joint, a place I eat at only under extreme duress. My friend Paul doesn't do calamari, but Suzanne & I will try anything on the menu there at least once to make certain it's not bad. It wasn't the classic overly-chewy squid rings, though. A tad more on the crunchy side, as though they had been fried a little longer than the average bear. However, there was no overwhelming garlic smell/taste (and I like garlic!), nor serious grease...not bad with a side of marinara.
We're approaching the mid-term for our performance system, which means it is high time to do what is better known around here as brag sheets. Unfortunately, with this system, you might be in the walk on water, talk to God realm in all of your duties, but if your duties don't exactly line up with the standards, you are screwed. Yep, you can do all the good things for your fellow employees, your instructors, your courses & the service at large, but if you can't justify it, it's like you did nothing for the past six months but sit on your butt, drink coffee & write blog entries. Oops, I did it again, didn't I?

Is any one else as offended as I by the audacity of big corporations, ostensibly owned now by the federal government (& hence owned by the taxpayer), giving millions of dollars to executives for driving the business into the ground during the previous year? And then, my co-worker tells me some of the executive recipients are people who left the company. Well, I guess that blows the if we don't pay them their bonuses they might leave argument right out of the water, doesn't it?

Oh, & for those of you who don't know the rest of the story: Bikila destroyed the Olympic & world best times for the marathon; McKenzie finished 18th. As Chuck Berry sang: C'est la vie...most days you never can tell...