Getting a Jump on the Day

Like any sane person I hate the early-morning workout. Until it's done. Then it's the best god-damned thing in the world. There's nothing like being all showered and shaved and sitting down to a fine fresh cup of coffee in the sunroom at 7:30 a.m. with a workout in the books. That's what I tell myself when NPR cozies up to me at 5 a.m. with the headlines. I tell myself, "Do it for that precious moment at 7:30, Pete. With the coffee. You know what I'm talking about." By the way—and this morning I told this to my friend Dan, who works for the public radio operation in the Bay Area, and it pains me to repeat it—but it might be time for Carl Kasell to hang it up. There's just something too unsettling about an old guy (Carl turns 75 on Thursday this week) flubbing up the newscast. An old guy doesn't glide through an error; he becomes engulfed by confusion and desperation. Listeners pick up on this. I do, and it degrades my morning. Why do I want to keep listening to a broadcast that is painful? Sure, if I were a better person I'd embrace Carl's age-encouraged imperfection, but I'm not, there you go. I say give us Shay Stevens in the morning. That's a voice a guy can get up to.

Now, the workout: 25 miles on the bike in the morning, a nice steady climb, nothing too taxing, a good sweat, done. Then later in the day, it was to the pool I went. First I did 10x100, with each 100 coming in around 1:40 and the next one starting on the 2:15. Yes, that's a lot of rest. Then I swam a straight 1000, followed by a couple of hundred yards to cool down.

Mmm, a Race in the Offing

I'm getting excited about doing the Race for the Roses half marathon this coming Sunday. I like this race because it all happens just a couple of public-transit miles from my house, so I can easily pick up my packet the day before, then on race morning zip on over on Max, arriving a half-hour before the start, warm up, and run. Also, the course through and around downtown PDX is interesting enough, with a long gentle climb in the early going, then a long gentle decline, followed by lots of flats with a ridiculously steep 50-foot gain to get onto the Steel Bridge and over the Willamette right before the finish. Last year I ran this race in 1:31:49, a PR. I wonder if I can beat that this year? I'd like to try. I'm not going to taper for it—there will still be long rides and runs, and hard rides and swims this week—but I will rearrange things a bit to try to be a little fresher come Sunday morning. Which is what led me to doing my high-intensity run—Yasso 800s—tonight instead of Thursday. Now I'll do my long bike ride Thursday evening instead of Saturday morning.

Yasso 800s? Oh, the runners out there know all about these. Bart Yasso is the guy they're named after. He noticed that the hours and minutes of his marathon time consistently coincided with the minutes and seconds of his 10x800 intervals. That is to say, he knew he could run a 2:40 marathon if he could run 800 meters in 2 minutes and 40 seconds 10 times with 2:40 seconds of restful jogging between each 800. Now, the part about this tidy story that a lot of people don't want to think about so much is that Yasso himself emphasizes the relationship only holds if you do all the other customary marathon prep—especially those weekly long runs (working into the 18-22 mile range).

Anyway, I did eight 800s at 3:12, on grass, with some very tight turns and a couple of tiny but vicious little climbs. I probably could have gutted out two more, but it would have taken more out of me at this point than needs to be taken out. Still nearly three months until the real race.

All Wet

Today I did my every-other-week 2000-yard time trial, not all-out, but looking to maintain a steady pace. My 100s were all in the 1:53-1:55 range, which is pretty good for me. I felt like I was getting decent extension on the left side, where I tend to shorten up. Elbows seemed to be staying high, too. Of course, it's difficult to say with certainty what was going on, although I did have Coach Niko in the house. For a dollar he timed my splits and afterward offered feedback: (1) "Hmm, I don't know if your kick was weak, because I don't know what a kick is supposed to look like, but you definitely had a lot less turbulence than other people; (2) "No, your butt wasn't up above the water. Maybe a tiny, tiny bit a few times, but mostly it was underneath the water. But not very far. Just, like, maybe an inch." I had asked him about my kick because it's always sucked. I really have no idea how to kick, when to kick, or even if I need to kick. I've heard a few triathlon expert-types say your swim kick is the last thing you need to worry about, yet at the pool I see lots of swimmers kicking back and forth endlessly, often with flippers. And as for the butt, this is a key to better swimming, of course, reducing drag, and it's a challenge for me. I work hard at it but fear that in part I'm fighting nature. The great swimmers I knew in college had, like, no hips, very little ass and skinny legs. Me, I'm thickly muscled in the thighs and buttocks (well, I am, it's just true). I don't think my stuff floats so well.

Lastly, a fellow CDA blogger had asked about lane etiquette awhile back and I offered my two cents. My main point was that I'm not fond of the practice of asking to share a lane but I believe strongly that when you jump in a lane you are obliged to inform the present occupant(s) of your presence—and why not do so with a pleasant greeting, to set a friendly tone? So a couple of days ago I'm swimming alone in a lane, down the middle, and suddenly my left hand whacks into something. I stop and look up and it's this, like, 40-pound tyke of a girl in white-rimmed goggles and a pink bathing suit. I ask the kid if she's all right and she says, "Uh-huh." And off she went, butterflying. She was maybe 8 years old, so I didn't lecture her. Plus, she did take a whack to the noggin from me, so that was probably enough. Then today, I'm the first one in the pool, me in my lane and five empty ones around me. Gradually I notice swimmers in the lanes around me. Then suddenly, as I turn to breathe, a tsunami washes over me, sending a pint of Dishman's best down my windpipe, and some oil tanker of a dude continues by in my lane. He hadn't announced himself. So I guess anything goes, in fact.

Familiar Terrain

With Niko home for spring break and Portland’s typically crappy springtime weather and my wimpiness in the face of it, it’s been all trainer recently (all year, really). But as I’ve said before, thanks to the Computrainer this is OK and, indeed, I'm confident I'm in better biking shape than ever at this point in the season. The big difference between the Computrainer and a mere trainer is in using the machine to motivate me to put in good work. There have been very few empty hours on the trainer for me this year. Today, I drafted off Robo Rider for the first couple of miles, then busted ahead of him and went at the course at a steady 80 RPM and 200+ watts. For the last 10 of the 30 miles, I cranked it up, staying around 240 watts and higher. I stayed focused on spinning smooth, powerful, fast circles. I was intent on finishing a mile ahead of Robo Rider. My legs were very tired toward the end, and there was a big pool of sweat on the mat beneath me, but I had indeed humiliated RR. That was a well-spent 90 minutes. (And no, you are not invited to critique my position. This isn’t Slowtwitch!)

A Spring Break Day

Took the day off from work today, so I had to go big, with two workouts. That is, two movies with the Lad on Spring Break. Started off with 90 minutes of Monsters vs. Aliens, and even though it was 3D and there were explosions, wreckage and mayhem, this movie did not elevate my heart rate. Niko seemed pretty calm, too, as did most of the kids in the theater. (It was a competently done movie, no real complaints, but it seemed kind of paint-by-numbers and emotionally distant. Our Oregonian reviewer who (quite reasonably) hates everything mainstream gave it a B+, a rave by his standards, but it was nowhere near in the same league as recent animated greats like Wall-E or Ratatouille.) Later, we took on Madagascar 2. I might have gotten to Z2 here; it had more fun than Monsters vs. Aliens, which wanted to have fun but didn't. Niko, meanwhile, was in an uproar frequently, especially at the plane scenes. Those wacky penguins. In between the movies, there was some yard work—finally pruned the roses and cleaned up some plants that never got cut back during the winter. Daffodils are out in force in the front yard, suggesting spring. And indeed, it is spring in Portland: the forecast is for low- to mid-50s and showers for much of the weekend. I'll probably hit the trainer for a few hours—which is what I did today, somewhere in the cracks between all the aforementioned—and also get in a swim. There might be more movies, too, I suspect.

Back Story: Part II

See yesterday's post for Part I

We weren't triathletes, we were a couple of gung-ho guys turning 40. If we were going to do a triathlon, of course we'd set out to do an Ironman. As with most non-triathletes, Ironman and triathlon were virtually interchangeable to us. Anyway, we had more than six months to prepare for the race—in the mountains of eastern France, in late June 2002—which seemed to be plenty of time.

I had a couple of mountain bikes and all those years' experience riding them—years ago. I had done a few 10Ks (slowly). I knew how to swim only in the sense that I would not drown soon if thrown overboard. I didn't consider these facts strong indicators of likely success, but neither was I fazed by them. The mindset was that we weren't exactly going to get into shape to do Ironman, we were simply going to get into good enough shape to gut out a brutal, just under the 17-hour wire, heroic race.

I started running, mostly—doing the thing I was already OK at, a common triathlete's predilection. Eventually I began riding my mountain bike, then got a trainer, then my Lemond Buenos Aires, a delightful steel bike that I continue to enjoy riding on "non-training" excursions. Swimming was my biggest challenge. Not only did I suck at it, but there was all manner of bureaucracy attached to it: finding a decent pool, getting there several times a week, being slower than 7-year-old girls. As I wrote in passing earlier this year, a Christmas gift certificate to the gym from my then-wife made all the difference. It was for a massage at the gym, but I needed to swim more than I needed to get a massage, and I needed to use the gift certificate—it would have been ungracious not to, and I wanted to—so off to the gym I went. I could barely swim a 50-yard lap. It took a few weeks to get to 500 yards.

I was fortunate to be working for a prince of a boss, Paul Wagner at Balzac Communications, and the then-wife was consistently gracious about me taking time to get in my workouts. Mostly, though, I did them apart from family time: swims were at lunch, runs were in the morning while everyone was still asleep and bike rides most often were on the trainer, in the garage, after everyone had gone to bed. (I wasn't sleeping much.)

But I was really enjoying triathlon. After a few months of running, biking and swimming my body was different and that was great. What I was especially fascinated by, however, was the vast world of triathlon knowledge and experience of which I had none. As many hours as I spent training I matched reading triathlon forums and blogs, as well as books and magazines. I remember reading Gordo, Gordon Byrn, who, among other things, said it takes years to develop a training base for going long. Well, yeah, I thought: If you want to live some kind of triathlon lifestyle, sure, that makes sense. But that wasn't what we were about. We were just on a crazy, one-time, "We're 40!" adventure. Right?

Part III in a couple of days.

Today's workouts: Spring break week and the pool was a zoo. At one point, there were five people in my lane swimming circle. I lasted 45 minutes, swimming a bit over 2000 yards. This came right after a one-hour, easy hill run at Tabor. I'll be complaining about Portland's crappy cloudy moldy spring weather before long no doubt, so I better give the city props for today's nice day. Nice by Portland standards, of course: A little sun, some clouds, calm, temps in the mid- to high-50s.

The Back Story: Part I

The first thought of doing a triathlon came in an email dialog with a friend of mine, Steve, who was living overseas. It was late in 2001 and in the following year both of us would turn 40. We weren't exactly looking for a way to mark this passage; rather, turning 40 was both motivator and excuse to think about something big or meaningful—or both. This was a compulsion that ran deep in Steve. I shared it, I guess, though prudence or maybe fear tended to temper my pursuits and I usually went along with the craziness rather than led it. For example, in college, Steve was in charge and I was a key player as a small cadre of us righteously dedicated to an immature but not unimpressive idea of journalism unsullied by politics broke away from the campus daily to start a competing newspaper.

Well, as we nudged 40, that glorious short-lived failure was well faded, of course, and many less ancient thrusts at Good Work That Mattered—this was what we really cherished—had likewise come and gone in the way they do in most lives.

We were both athletically inclined guys—Steve was a swimmer in high school, still swam from time to time, and loved to play pickup basketball, and I had spent much of my free time during the dozen years preceding my son's birth in 1999 mountain biking trails all over the West. Yes, that is how old I am: I began mountain biking in the days when no-suspension wasn't retro, it's just what was. Heavy steal frames, toe clips ... Ned Overend, you are still my hero! I raced a lot, in the NORBA Sport class, always cross-country, usually finishing in the upper half of my age group. There were some freaking epic rides and races along the way and I was ridiculously casual about taking on danger. I remember clocking 50 mph down a hard, deeply rutted dirt road in Riverside. Honestly, I doubt I'd crack 35 down it now. And often I'd go off into the backcountry by myself, deep into the woods, utterly unprepared for mechanical failure, injury or losing my bearings. I saw a grizzly bear in British Columbia. I came an inch or two from bouncing down a canyon wall and into the great beyond while riding a trail on a sheer precipice outside Moab. That was one of many pilgrimages to Moab. I did a hut-to-hut ride from Telluride to Moab solo. For a while, that experience loosened my grip on sanity. There were also a few 10ks and off-road duathlons along the way. I loved it all, loved challenging myself, loved competition, and being outside and feeling and appearing fit.

In September 1999, Niko was born. Looking back, it seems it should have been possible to work some exercise into the world-upending reality of having a newborn, but it didn't happen. Then three months after the blessed event we moved 400 miles and I started a new job. Having reached new heights of frazzlement, fitness disappeared. In your 20s you can get away with the Homer lifestyle, but not when you creep toward 40. I grew … not fat, exactly, but definitely soft. Instead of 172, I was 185. I couldn't fit into 33 jeans anymore. Once in a while I'd get out and run, like, three miles really slowly, which was just enough to remind me of how out of shape I was. And that was how things stood when this talk of triathlon came up.

More tomorrow.

Today's workout: Brutal intervals on the bike. Thirty seconds as hard as I could go—cranking it up toward 600 watts—followed by a minute of restful spinning. Times 15. They really weren't that bad until, like, the last … 12 of them.