Swim time trial

I'm glad I went to bed early last night. Slept like a rock. Feeling much better today.

Last time I tried a 1000m swim time trial I think I choked or something. That was Friday April 4, 2008, when I swam 19 minutes almost exactly and it damn near killed me. A couple days later, almost without intending to, I swam 18:38. Since then I've broken one arm and pulled or strained some muscles in the other arm. You can imagine that I've been fairly cautious about pulling hard.

I had no idea what to expect today, given the week I've had so far. It didn't help that with one thing and another I had to do it at Canyon Meadows. The initial signs were not good. I walked into the locker room to see that all the big lockers we could put our own locks on have had the locking mechanism removed. I got lucky to find one of the few remaining coin operated ones. I found out later that a couple days ago someone snuck in with a bolt cutter and got 3 wallets.

This pool has had the next door high school kids in pretty often, and the lifeguard confirmed they'd be starting at 7am. It was 6:30 so I hustled my butt over to an empty lane and got started. I didn't have time to do the full warm up, swim, and cool down, but I did warm up 300 m. Then, should I be like Jenna and tease you all by saying I had a good swim? No, I'll share the number. 18:44, which I'm pretty darn pleased with. Pacing was fairly even, though I started a bit strong, and ended strong. In control of my breathing and my stroke, and nowhere near puking at the end. I didn't look at my watch at 500 m so I don't know if the second half was faster or not. I was at the top end of my steady pace, and could have gone on, though I'm not sure for how much further.

I did some cool down before the kids showed up, and stretched my legs a bit. I also snuck into the dive tank for some water running, maybe 5 minutes, and a bit of stretching, before the kids took it over. Went upstairs for that number. 228 again. I sure seem to be consistent. Walked 35 minutes home, changed, and headed out for my run.

Walked briskly, then broke into a reallyreallyeasy jog 10 minutes to get to the Anderson crosswalk. From there I ran 25 and some seconds north, almost to the reservoir, and back. There's some small hills along the way. Oddly enough, coming back into a strong wind was a bit faster, maybe 30 seconds or so, than going out. This was about 7K in 50:30, running easy on tired legs. This is about the same pace as the Wed run, but it felt harder. I didn't really care about pace or heart rate. I let my lungs and legs negotiate a pace that felt comfortable. Walked easy a little over 10 minutes back.

I'm glad Susi wasn't with me, though. It was a doggie convention out there today. I ignore dogs when I'm running, unless they bark at me, or I think they're going to bite me. It was a nice morning for a run, cool and clear. I spent part of it thinking about running stuff, posture, how my feet were landing, keeping my shoulders relaxed, trying to find my core, and that sort of stuff. The other part was almost mindless happiness. I was happy to be out running, enjoying the scenery, enjoying the feel of my body moving and the wind on my face. I didn't have a big foolish grin or anything, so maybe it was more contentment than happiness. Snack, stretched and rollered when I got home. Showered, ate a real lunch, and had a quiet early afternoon. Now for some errands and stuff.

Thursday night

This has been quite the week so far. Better than not having a week at all, I suppose, but I'd rather not do this again any time soon.

For Wed morning, I doubled checked my gear, and did what was supposed to have happened on Monday. I parked under 8th St again, for the first time since July this year. Back then, it took 27 minutes easy to get to 32nd St, today was 25 and a few seconds, taking it really, really easy. Walked 10 minutes to warm up, then started with an easy run, trying for light feet and a quick turnover. It was pretty cold, maybe -5C, and I'd wondered if I'd under dressed. But I warmed up soon and settled into a nice pace. There were bits of micro-climate; for a while I was almost warm, then going past the golf dome the temperature dropped quite a bit. Coming back I was beginning to get tired, but was firm about keeping the pace till the 16th Ave bridges, then I settled back into a slow jog back to the car. 49 minutes up and back. Walked another 5 minutes to cool down, and stretched a bit. My legs are a bit tired, but I'm really happy with this run.

Then to FOMC. Started off sharing a lane with Backstrokegirl. I see her lots. She does about half and half front crawl and backstroke. Though she swims a bit slower than I usually do, she's really good about sharing. There was a really fast guy in the next lane, and I didn't feel like trying to keep up. He left part way through, and she moved over. Then it gets complicated. A couple really slow swimmers joined my lane, so I moved over. Fast guy had disappeared, and there was another guy exactly as fast as I was, and someone else. We did circles happily. Then a couple other people joined us. By then me and the other fast guy had figured ourselves out, and he adopted my intervals, and we took turns leading. (I hope that's not cheating.) The rest of the lane had the wit to get out of the way, though the guy with fins was startled that we caught up to him. Only thing of note is that I cramped my hams really bad doing breaststroke during cool down. Ouch. Otherwise the 45 minutes of swim was good. Another 15 minutes of careful core.

From that good start the day descended into shite. I was still considering trying to catch up on the core I missed on Tues. Did some rollering and gentle stretches in between fighting with my computer. I think the stress of the computer issues wasn't helping me to relax. By booting from the original disks I managed to repair some issues with the hard drive, and some permissions problems. I managed to get it up again, but I knew things weren't totally right. I started to change for the core, then realized I was really cranky, my legs were tired, my arms still hurt, and I simply wasn't in the mood. Napped a little, but it didn't help. Started trying to install a software update.

Yoga was a horror show. I'd like to know what sick sadist decided that tree posed needed a bend. I can barely do tree at the best of times. The bend is right out. I got a bit of a hamstring cramp trying. Nothing else went well. The teacher is really good, and I like her, but that was not my night for yoga.

Came home to the update still happening. Very slowly. Left it overnight. Can you believe it was STILL running in the morning, 97% complete and only 1 hr 43 minutes to go. Over breakfast it crept up to almost 2 hours. After dropping off Linda and then going back to bed for a snooze, it was over 3 hours. I pulled the plug on that, and went to reinstall the original OS, while archiving my old stuff. That failed after the first several attempts. Then I tried to scrub the whole hard drive, and the computer spat out the disk even before I could boot. I gave up and called Apple. They say there's a hardware problem, and of course I can't run the diagnostics anymore. I have to bring it in for them to look at so it's all packaged up. Computers are such fun. This is the first problem I've ever had with a Mac in more than 15 years of constant use. The astute among you are asking how I'm posting this. My faithful old cube is still running, 8 years on. It's what I use to display my workout plans, or play workout DVDs. Hooked it up to the internet again, and Bob's your uncle.

In the meantime I was supposed to do a spin and core session today. I napped after doing some errands instead. Linda thinks I'm fighting off a bug, since it's extremely rare for me to need this much sleep, and I'm dragging myself around like a horse on the way to the glue factory. You can bet I'm chowing down on the multi-vitamins, Echanicea, Vitamin D, with lots of orange juice. I'll be going to bed early tonight too.

A day so shite I went back to bed

Not today, Monday. I realized last thing Sunday night that if I got organized I could do my run first, then do my swim. Somewhere I once read that swimming after a run was a good thing. Then while driving downtown to drop Linda off, dressed ready to run, I realized I'd forgotten to put my swim shorts in the bag. Normally I wear them under my jeans. Grrr.

After dropping Linda off I went home, changed to go swimming and went to Canyon Meadows. Which was kid central again. Grrrrrrrrr. This time they had trusted some of the little hooligans with stopwatches, and they were timing each other for 25 m races. Guess how big the waves were. The pool staff screwed up, though. At 8 half the pool turns into a floatie class. So they put the kids in the other half, and they ended at 8. So us lap swimmers had to switch. First I knew of this was after the lane rope savagely attacked me, and obese people started getting into my lane. Grrrrrrrrrrr!

I popped up, and the kids were gone, so I moved over some lanes. Even before then I had been attacked by breast strokers. Other than me and the kids, every other person was doing breast stroke. Mr. 8foot wide, Mr. Prettybutslow, Ms. Friggingslow were all impacting (one literally) me. Yes, I ran into someone. He just swam up my lane assuming we would know he'd joined us, and switch to swimming in a circle. GRRRRRRRR!!!!!! I was polite. Just barely. Then when we switched lanes the breast strokers spaced themselves out over all the available lanes. I gave up. I hung out in the dive tank briefly, just long enough to let the kids get out of the locker room. What swimming I did was barely ok, but I'm not going to count it. What got done didn't even begin to resemble the plan. My inner shark is totally disgusted.

I got back home to computer problems, and while dealing with that had to cope with an urgent invoice email from work. More stress. Eventually I got those situations stable. While getting ready for a run I realized that not only wasn't I in the mood for a run, my legs were feeling very wishy washy, I was tired in spite of a good night's sleep, and in an overall generally shitty mood. Rather than potentially hurt myself by trying to push myself to run, I went back to bed.

My reasoning was that maybe starting the day over again would help me feel better. Three hours later I woke up again to deal with a scheduled phone call about a potential contract. I don't think I was incoherent, but you never know. The afternoon and early evening was spent struggling with a really, really slow computer. Something was eating CPU cycles, and I don't know what. Eventually I turned it off, and left it off overnight, and all was good this am. I still don't know why, so I'm going to have to poke around some more.

All in all, a very unhappy frustrating day, and I was thoroughly glad when I went to bed early. I even slept well, which is a nice surprise.

Tuesday was much better, even though I spent the day in the office. I managed to organize myself to take two lunches so I could hop on my bike as soon as I got home. Warmed up, one leg drill, some super fast cadence, then a main set of cadence work, then more super fast spin, then cool down. That was just over 90 minutes. The super fast was 2 minutes at over 120 rpm, no bouncing allowed. That got tough towards the end so I made sure to have some good tunes for that. The core workout has the dread plank and push ups in them, and being honest, I can't face them tonight. I'll do them tomorrow instead.

For some reason I'm finding evening workouts much tougher than I used to. I don't think I've made a single core session in the evening, except for the yoga classes. Maybe I'm spoiled by working out in the mornings.

This core stuff sure is hard on my arms

Missed blogging about Friday. I guess I'm getting old and senile, with entire days dropping out on me. I did the core work that was scheduled for Thursday, then did a very nice run around the neighbourhood. It was a perfect crisp fall day. This was supposed to be an easier run, and I timed the 5K loop at exactly 35 minutes, breathing easy, nice running stride. So it seems now that a 6 minute K is quite fast, and a 7 minute K is a nice relaxed pace. That's improvement, but doesn't leave much space for "progressive builds".

I was crushed by the pool staff when I tried to go in for a swim. They had a school group using the entire pool. Darn kids! How long can it take to tie a concrete block to their feet and throw them in?? Oh wait, I guess fishing them out again after takes more time. So I missed my swim, and I wasn't about to go on Saturday. The pool turns into a zoo shortly after opening. There's a couple Sat regulars I don't want to swim with.

I want to live in a house that has a 25 m pool in the basement. The only problem is that such homes are usually so big you need a GPS to find the fridge, and they usually come with a ride on vacuum cleaner. At the best of times I have trouble with normal sized vacuum cleaners and can only imagine what would happen with a bigger one. The cats would live in terror. But to be able to go for a swim any time? Without having to put up with the floaties that show up to the public pools? I'd guess in short order I'd be the most popular person in the triathlon community.

The spin with Katie today featured pumpkin muffins. The only problem is that the core session killed my arms so that I could barely get the muffins to my face. I seriously contemplated peeling it on the store counter, then eating it off the paper like a dog chowing down on breakfast. Then it occurred to me that the store staff might not want to use their counter after that, so I was good and ate it like a normal person, only I should count that time as additional core workout.

The spin was good, very good. Just a few minutes under 2 hours, with lots of cadence work. Lots. I sweated a puddle onto the dusty floor. The wind was howling, but most of us went for a run anyways. Heading west was tough, but coming home again was very nice. That was 29 minutes, since back was faster than out.

Then the dreaded core. We started with 50 pushups. That's right. Five Zero. At least they weren't all in a row. Let's see, I think it was sets of 5, 7, 8, 10, 8, 7, 5 and we could rest while our partner did theirs. My partner got lots of rest. Consider that my pushup record is 11 without stopping. So this morning probably tripled my lifetime push up count. Part way through the 8 set on the way up, I gave up and started doing them from my knees. Even so, on the last ones I had to rest in the middle, then finish. Yes, I felt like a weenie. Then there was an eternity of plank, in 3 sets. I'm told my butt is well on the way to downward dog, but that's because my arms were trashed. I kind of cheated through the last 75 second plank. So that was front plank. Just to keep us balanced, or to maintain her standing in coachland, Katie put us through some side plank, same times as the front. That did me in. Everybody else in class is doing side plank, AND waving their upper leg in the air. Some of them are ALSO touching their hips to the mat. I collapsed in a heap and whimpered to myself. I'm glad my partner didn't laugh at me. You think I'm kidding, but I was having difficulty getting my water bottle or muffin up to my mouth. Even now, hours later, I can still feel my arms complaining. I guess since I'm still alive it will only make me stronger.

Weekly Summary
Swim .75 hrs
Bike 5.0 hrs
Run 1.5 hrs
Walk 1.0 hrs
Core 2.0 hrs
Total 10.25 hrs.

The brutality

No, not of my coach. She's tough as nails and is helping me get that way too.

The brutal task today was removing wine labels. You see, when you make your own wine you end up investing in glass bottles. I've got about 450 bottles. Once you've drunk the wine, you need to make sure the bottle is clean, inside and out. After all, I like to give away some of my wine and it's just not the same if there is a new label stuck on top of an old label, or horrors, old labels.

The general rule is that the easier the label goes on, the harder it is to get off, though there are some exceptions. The nice ones are like the Australian Verdelho, a self adhesive plastic label that peels off nice. Most labels come off by soaking them in warm water for a little while. Some need a little bit of encouragement to peel off, but come reasonably clean.

Then there is the California Tempranillo. Soaking does nothing but maybe soften up the paper a little bit. I use a square toothed trowel normally used for cementing floor tile to get the worst of the paper off. That leaves the glue. I'm not sure what it is, but it could hold the world together come judgement day. Laundry detergent is good for most label glue residue, but it doesn't touch this. Bleach rolls off it. I have to dig out the Goo Gone and even that takes a bit of doing.

But even then I'm not done. At best it leaves a hazy greasy smear. That has to be scrubbed off with Comet or laundry detergent, or both. About half the time rinsing after that still leaves some faint residue where the water peels off first, leaving a faint indication of the diamond label. So scrub some more. Such is the downside of drinking wine.

That was the activity of my day. Coffee, the morning papers, and mentally cheering for buddies in the Clearwater 70.3 happened in the morning. This evening we're working our way through Rome, an HBO series that is really quite good, especially if you like lots of of people plotting against one another.

I had a Julie-ization

Wed was a beautiful day up here, sunny and cool. A perfect day for a run. Walked 10 minutes around the big green space across the road, and then started easy into my 5K loop. Started slow because it took a little while to find a stride. I never did get going as fast I was on the weekend, but that's ok, I think I pushed it just a bit too hard for a training run. 

My breathing was always good, and once I found a nice pace I relaxed into it for 10 minutes. Slowed down to an easy pace for the last 5 minutes, for a 30 minute run total. Walked another 10 minutes to cool down some more and almost ended up cooling down too much. The wind had picked up and the temperature dropped a bit.

No yoga in the evening. The class was cancelled for Remembrance Day. I always take some quiet time to think about just how good life is for most Canadians. If any country has won the lottery, it's Canada. We have one of the best places in the world to live. Yet in our short history, tens of thousands of people, most of them very young, have marched away and not come home. They are buried in cemeteries all around the world. We say they've served their country, but really, they've served us. And the people they liberated, or protected. The least we can do is recognize and appreciate what they did for us, and what the current crop of soldiers is doing right now. 

This evening after work I was really good about having a light snack, then heading downstairs for the bike. I ended up pouring a bucket of lube over the chain, or at least you'd think so given how much came off onto the newspaper I put down. But the chain is much quieter and the back gears don't sound like they're trying to change on me.

The ride was 1.75 hr tonight. Warm up, some cadence drills, then some one leg. The main set was some longer aerobic sets. There was a 5 minute set where I was to maintain 90+ rpm, and I decided to make sure by staying over 100 rpm on the small chainring mid cog. For a short while I was wondering if I'd picked too high a cadence or too hard a gear. Sweat was running into my eyes. I was starting to really work my lungs. My knees were beginning to complain as I was also trying to scrape the mud and stay smooth. At just the thought of going into one easier gear I realized I only had a few minutes to go, and I really could keep going at this pace. That if I didn't push myself I wouldn't improve. That if I never fail or risk failure, I'm not trying hard enough. That it's much better to have a bunch of training days where I push the envelop a bit further than I think I can, rather than trying to perform outside my envelop at IMC. The latter is a sure ticket to the med tent. I relaxed my legs, kept breathing, and found that my rpm actually picked up a bit more for the last minute.

Lots of my bike workouts over the last couple years have been all about hanging on and getting through it as best I could. There was lots of times I didn't hit the rpm targets, or the time targets, especially for one leg drill. Now my workouts are harder than ever and I can do them. In fact, I often feel like I could do more sets or go longer. Well, maybe not more of the one leg drill. So now that I know I can do them, I'm trying to do them better. When 120 rpm was way fast, it was all I could do to just do it. Now I can think about spinning smoothly, can feel the interplay of muscles in my legs, can feel the pressure of my heels in the shoes to know I'm scraping, can better control what my upper body is doing. I think I'm getting more out of the workouts. 

It's funny, when you start, 90 or 120 minutes seems like such a long time. But if you get on, and get going, it goes by really quick. Next thing you know it's cool down time. Life is good.

Back fat, sympathetic vibrations, and resonance revisted

Monday.

Swam at FOMC for the first time in a while. It was very quiet. I shared a lane with a girl swimming almost exactly the same speed I was. Life is good. Warmup, drill, intervals, cool down, for 45 minutes. Flipturn practice for 15 minutes. Deep water core and running for 15 minutes, and that nearly did me in. I haven't done my deep water core for a while now because the dive tank has always been full, and I can sure tell.

Walked gently to and from my massage. She found a muscle in the outside of my left calf that I had previously been unaware of. Ouch. Iced it several times during the afternoon.

Tuesday.

It took a bit of doing to get on my bike today. Lots of muscles are feeling really creaky after the massage yesterday, especially the left calf. Warmed up carefully. One leg drill, cadence drill, a pyramid aerobic set that had me wondering where time trial gear really is. Some really high speed spin while trying to keep the upper body still. It used to be that at about 120 rpm, everything started jiggling. Now the jiggle happens about 130 or so, but it's more selective. Mostly the fat at the top of my butt and lower back. However, once I'm past 140 rpm the resonance dies out and I'm smooth again. The only problem is that I can't maintain that for very long. If I'm not pedaling smoothly, at about 110 rpm, I get funny jiggles in my hams and calves. 90 minutes on the bike.

Core work, done carefully. Skipped the hamstring curls, since those muscles were feeling a bit crampish. 30 minutes. It's beautiful out, so once I run some errands I think I'll go for a nice walk.