Records Comma Breaking Them

Um, guys? I had a great run today. I just got back, the sweating has slowed to a trickle, and I'm plotting my path on mapmyrun.com like a kid before Christmas. How far how far how far how far ? ? ? ?

Okay, I was at 5.74 miles at 1 hour, which is a little less than I was hoping, but still further than I've done before....continuing mapping...okay!

So 10.2! That's officially the furthest I've ever run. Good, right? I reckon even if my mistaken optimism was certain I'd hit 12 miles, its probably better to be excited and under-running than angry and barely moving. Or. What? I'm still too fresh from the run, my brain word maker isn't the best.

But! 10.2. Remember?

HA HA! Dave Horwitz just kissed the top of my head-hat and started crying because it was all sweaty! 10.2 DAVE! REMEMBER??

Bad Times! My Times!

What's up, internet? Somehow, on day bajillion of not being a good blogger, I'm finding myself becoming one.

TODAY's deal is: this morning's run sucked. Bad boy looked like this:

40 minute run at 10k pace, this was supposed to be. So I got up, did some stretching for the benefit of IT band, left the house feeling fine, and couldn't make my legs more effective than logs dangling from my hips. I have no idea what the deal was - I've run for two hours with less mental energy than this took. And with less stretching beforehand!
I ended up doing 3.58 miles in 38 minutes, which is lame, but around what I had guessed I'd done as I hobbled up the steps to my house.
I've been so full of positively surprising myself lately, I guess its good to remember the tough surprises too. And once I checked my email, the theme only got more robust.

This is an excerpt an email from Danielle, my mentor / the one that convinced me I should do this - she just completed Ironman New Zealand, but apparently had some difficulty on her run:

SO here I am running like a champ and then like a light switch, it all changes. A dark cloud enters my body and everything shuts down. I see stars and I am on the verge of passing out. I had to stop and walk. I was teetering and barely conscious. I had no idea what to do as this was new territory. At the next aid station, I walked up to a medic all cross-eyed and asked her what I could do/eat to stay conscious. She grabbed my elbows and looked in my eyes which were googling all over the place. As soon as I stopped moving (first time in about 13hours at this point), my entire body cramped up on me. She basically told me, I just had to keep moving. So that is exactly what I did. I had to make a tough judgment call and had to walk the remaining 8 miles. I felt like if I ran, I would have used too much energy and I was having these awful visions of me collapsing a mile from the finish line. I knew I could just walk and look straight ahead. These 8 miles were the most insane of my life. I went to a place that I didn't know existed. I keep calling it my vision quest. I stepped out of my body completely. It was no longer mine anyway, there was nothing left. I still don't know entirely how I was moving. I lost my mind a bit and started talking to people that weren't there...I started singing to myself...I'm pretty sure they were all original songs, can't really remember. I kept repeating the mantra "keep moving forward" at least 200 times. Walking 8 miles in the dark, all by yourself, in a foreign country when you have nothing left in you is absolutely otherworldly. I could never accurately articulate that feeling, you would just have to experience it for yourself. (which I know many of you are perfectly fine not knowing) Let's just say, I know I could get through anything now. I went to depths that I didn't know were there.

AND THE THING IS, when I read that, all I want to do is this crazy race! What is it about me / her / all the stupid endurance athletes in the world that wants to push to that point? Before I muse more, the grossest video of all time:


GROOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSS. I'm positive that video was in my databank before signing up for Ironman, and I'm almost as positive that it flashed in my mind as my lips curled up into a crummy smile when I signed my paperwork to get into this mess. So that's today's question - why does watching that video at my desk at work make my legs and arms twitch, my LUNGS get eager, my brain start buzzing to get that close to nuts, or to not get that close to nuts, or to fall, or crawl, or walk or run or ..................................- that stutter is the point.
I have no idea how its going to go for me. I've seen the course; I've begun to approach some of the distances I'll be covering; I've even gotten a glimmer, here and there, of really how difficult what I'm attempting will be. But ultimately, I can't imagine how its going to be or how I'll do until I'm doing it. It sounds SO HARD! I don't think there's anything else in my life that's that hard that just comes down to me going out and doing it - all this Hollywood business depends so heavily on other people, lucky gears turning, timing and opportunity; other career worries depend on time and inscrutably small momentum over years to see turn out. This is just.........I will or I won't. Totally humbling / exciting / daunting / thrilling. Want it.

All Systems Go

Arright arright arright.
Yeah yeah yeah.
I haven't blogged in a week. OKAY. But guess why? Becaaaaause....I've been busy...training! I work out twice a day now! Yay! Ugh! Awesome!

Let's start again, with a *little* less vernacular.
I think, for all intents and purposes, its not wrong to say that this week has been my first full week of training. I only had one day I didn't work out, I had two team practices, and I now own - at least some version of - all the equipment I will need.
Quick run down of the week's workouts, should you be curious:

Saturday
Ran in San Francisco. This was supposed to be a 40 minute easy run, which became an hour and a half-long odyssey, punctuated by walking backwards (cross-training!) up hills that were just not happening. I got lost deep in Upper Noe Valley, and spent literally 45 minutes running into & back out of streets that turned out to be dead ends. Whatever happened to "No Outlet" signs, SF? "Not a Thru Street," Gavin Newsom? Hmm?? The extra fun in this was that it was mostly on a hill overlooking the street I wanted to be on, and could have been, if I'd just committed to a sharp, steep tumble.

Sunday
nothing! ha!

Monday
Oh wait, nothing again. I lied before when I said there was only one day off. The curious thing about this rest day was when my body started to hurt. Around noon, I got growing pains. They throbbed gently until I went to bed. Interesting?


Tuesday
Morning - Swim, 45 minutes. LA Fitness Radio has some shockingly bad tunes. It's really stunning. Glad when I swim I only hear it while I'm in the locker room.

Wednesday
Morning - Bike, 1 hour. At the stupid gym again, but I did the recumbent bike this time. I'm not sure if this "counts", but I had sweat on my face and no bruises on my butt, so I think it was the right choice.

Thursday
TEAM SWIM PRACTICE!!!!! I don't really think of myself as an athletic person, but I do consider myself an athletic childhood person; I was ECSTATIC, in my own way, to be in the pool with 40 other people, to be circular swimming (!!!) after years of feeling bad for chasing down grandmas and loquacious Russians at the Y, and to smell grass from the nearby soccer field on the walk from and to the car.
It stuns me, occasionally, to realize how busy I was as a kid - swim practice twice a day, soccer a couple times a week, ballet once or twice a week, piano lessons - and to see how "busy" I feel now, without being as diversely developed as that. Mike (Rizzi, my training buddy) and I have talked about this a few times, but especially on Thursday. I also asked my Mom recently whether having us in activities was partially done so that Mom & Dad could have a little extra work time without having us be abandoned, and she said that was about half of it, the personal development being the other half. Trick! Good parent trick!

Friday
Morning - Run, 40 minutes. Beautiful morning in the neighborhood. Got further up Echo Park Avenue than I've been before. My first workout that felt slightly taxed the entire time; consequently, my first workout where I started to realize I'm pretty proud of myself.

Evening - Swim, 45 minutes. Again, felt a bit tired, but loved it.

Saturday
TEAM RUN!!! The run was haaaaaaaard, I was tiiiiiiired, but it also felt gooooood. At the end, some of us did stem cel donor test kits - 4 cotton swabs in the inside of your cheeks, then S.W.A.K. - for a teammate's friend. They'll keep my results on file until I'm 60. This was something my uncle Randy and his donor, Uncle Boo, went through....what an organization Team in Training is. It's easy to forget.

OMG I bought a bike after practice! It deserves its own long, impassioned post!

Sunday
Swam, 45 minutes. Can feel myself improving, though far and away the best part of the workout was the warm down, when I just splashed around for awhile. Water! So strange! People can't float on land, you know? It's COOL.

I have a lot of thoughts surrounding all this working out - I'm HUNGRY all the time - but for now I think they are the beginnings of larger thoughts developing. The really remarkable thing is the improvement in my mood generally. I don't really know where I stand on the kinesiological-psychological connection - where what my body does plugs into what my brain does, and vice versa, and how much I think they are interdependent - but there is definitely some mental garbage being expunged through movement. That's most of what I'm thinking about right now, how much I'm thinking right now, and more at peace with it being my own quiet process, rather than running at the mouth as much as I am wont to.

Casual Friday

I was all set today to write a bit of a retro-active report about my general haplessness, because I completely forgot to go to the Kick Off last Saturday. Err...I didn't forget, but I thought it was at noon. It was at 9. That + getting bike stolen + birds pooping on me (see three entries back) seemed like good enough evidence, and I had a whole charming thesis about being a romantic comedienne-type triathlete.
However, that has all been eclipsed.

I went to the gym this morning, and after a good mile swim and two mile run, I showered and found I had forgotten to bring my work clothes. I sit typing this, waiting for my boss, the Executive Producer of one of America's top commercial & music video production companies, to come and find me in sweatpants that say "Wolf Pack" on the butt.

In other news, first big training meeting tomorrow!
Bike fittings tomorrow!
Then bike searching on eBay!
First swim practice next Thursday!
Fundraising letters going out tomoorrrrowwww ek eeek eeek!

Ah, and in the spirit of tracking my costs:
new Masterlock = $4.99
LA Fitness membership = $29.99/mo. (I would NOT get this were it not for the pool....necessary cost)

Need to find a good gas costs tracking widget.

Decision, Tragedy & a Stupid/Great Run

What a weekend for training.

Thursday.
I made the decision to go full Ironman, and not a half.
I'm not really sure why, but I think its a combination of Danielle (the one that got me into this mess) pointing out that I'd be training alongside those doing the full, and remembering that at the end of my last race I felt disappointed, knowing I could have trained and raced harder/longer.
That's sort of depressing sounding and I hope doesn't say too much about me.
But.
I just feel like doing the half would hang over my head for the 8 months of training, knowing that I was selling myself and what I know I can do short.

Saturday.
MY BIKE GOT STOLEN OUT OF MY GARAGE.

My lovely Surly Steamroller that made me realize what biking could be, and quite literally were the wheels that got me in motion to make my entire life more what I wanted it to be - moving to a neighborhood I love, biking instead of driving, starting work on some scripts and editing, eating the way I want, gardening a bit, changing routines to habits I am more comfortable with for myself and the environment. The bike was the machine that I could feel myself being a part of, and something about that was the visceral realization I needed that life is easily lived the way you want it, and that its just a small hump to get over to make it that way.
And now its gone.

We have renter's insurance, but there's a $500 deductible, so the silver lining of using the coverage to buy a good tri bike is considerably tarnished.
Sigh.

Sunday.
Since the pool was closed and I DONT HAVE A BIKE ANYMORE, I went for a run.
and you know what?
JUST UNDER FOUR MILES!!! Route:

Small potatoes that will be down the line, but for not having run, for real, in years, I was really pleased.
Except for three things.
1. I put arch supports, needlessly, into my running shoes. I don't really have problems with my running shoes. But I put them in anyway. And got blisters on the entirety of the arches of both feet. It took three days for it to heal, and tonight will be my first run since Sunday.
2. A bird crapped on me on the run.
3. I rubbed my arm on the grass to get the bird poo off, and got hives up and down my entire left arm.


Well.
At least I ran.
BIIIIIIKEEEEE :( :( :( :(