Wildflower: The Swim

I'm not one to waste an accidental wrap up, so I started a new post for this chunk of the race. BECAUSE I'M A WRITING / TALKING MACHINE and I WANT YOU TO KNOW EVERYTHING I EVER THOUGHT OR EXPIERENCED AT ALL ON THE DAY.

Okay, check it out: I love swimming. I have no issues with this part of the triathlon, and long for the day I can feel the same way about the others. Last night while doing my mile and a half in the pool, I spent a lot of time with this thought going around and around: "Man, this shit is so EASY! It's like walking. Seriously, I could do this forever. Seriously. It's like if this pool had a sidewalk, I'd be on it. On a Sunday afternoon." This might TECHNICALLY be referred to as hubris, but if it makes you feel better, the swimming is the shortest part of any tri, so my victory is practically defined by its brevity. Did that sentence make sense? I've had a beer.
The POINT is I'm actually on the fence about making a bike jersey that says "I'd rather be swimming."

Because I wasn't able to get to camp early on Friday, I wasn't able to check out the swim course (a big 1 mile rectangle in the water) with the rest of the team. This meant that when the pro men started at 8 am, I was up on a hill watching them to see where the first turn was - after that it would just be a matter of following the buoys.
Tri swim starts are the strangest thing - a combinaton of running, diving, clawing, swimming and churning that has almost nothing to do with your actual swimming ability. How does standing in a crush of 100 people and then swim-sparring with them 'til the pack thins out enough for you to actually just SWIM translate to "I'm better at this athletic skill than you?" Aberrant but I suppose a space shuttle of adrenalin.

My wave - Women 25 to 29, I think - wasn't until 9:15, so I still had another 45 minutes of truely aimless anxiety, and a good 30 minutes after that of directed anxiety, standing near the swim start with my teammates. We stood on the boat launch ramp and watched most of our guy teammates make their way out of the water, running up the ramp while stripping out of their wetsuit and over to their bikes. People looked ROUGH coming up that ramp, which was a nice icing on my jitters. But I should say, I loved standing with my wet suit half on, my goggles and cap tucked into the flap where the upper half of the suit hung from my stomach, recognizing what it feels like to be waiting for a whistle. I loved it the same way I love wearing a walkie on set, or a headset backstage - it's just the edge of pomp and the accoutrement of a culture that means you're part of something, and having an experience that not everyone gets to have. It's so fun.

I mentioned zipping up as a ritual before - I've taken too many dramaturgy and performance history courses not to consciously relish the costume changes of tri, most especially this first one. If endurance sport has a locus, it must be the body itself - through water and over roads, it's the one true & constant place where the phsyical runs into the mental, and you find how they are related, allowing each other their possibilities. Zipping up a full body wetsuit, in contact with all of yourself, is a tremendous feeling of being held in - everything that will make the day possible is in containment and waiting. Then you stand, covered in neoprene but with the most basic silhouette possible, a strange accessorized basic body, with your extremities and head au naturel. And then you get one more ritual! Putting on the cap and the goggles - and then fiddling with them. Now you look alien at best and goofy at worst, and you are and aren't your desk-sitting self.

My pack had green caps to distinguish us from the groups before (yellow, Men 50+) and after (lavender, Women 30 - 35). After the group ahead was signaled off, we wandered down to the water line, and were given five minutes to swim to the end of the dock, swim back, and stand back on shore. This is nice, the first phsyical activity you have had in 18 intense hours of thinking accutely about physical activity, and you get to doggy paddle a bit with the other laydeez. ALSO THIS IS THE BEST TIME TO PEE IN YOUR WETSUIT. What? Yes. You can do it in the race if you want, but this is my preferred time. It helps get a bit warmed up, it's weird enough to be a little distracting, and it's an immense relief. Dirty secrets of the tri community EXPOSED.

What does it mean that by the seventh paragraph I'm still not in the water? OKAY THEY MADE THE WHISTLE AND WE STARTED SWIMMING, all hundred or so of us. I could see the first giant triangle buoy where we were to turn right, and by the time I got there the crush had effectively thinned out - still got a few folks who couldn't orientate, and which I spent a lot of time trying to get on one side or the other of, but mostly it was an open and straight shot. Except that - oh man wow was that long lap out a long lap. I would raise my head to look ahead at the next five or so buoys and could only ever see about..maybe 200 yards out, and was sure I was looking at the next turn. About four times I thought I was coming up on the last buoy, and then I'd get there and find another four buoys peeking out from behind it - knowing not only was I not turning yet, but I'd have to do the same distance again on the lap back. The upside was how FRESH the water was - getting it in my mouth was like cracking open a new and nicely refridgerated bottle of water, it was so clean. I found myself drifting mentally a bit, just enjoying myself - I would start to think about the bike or run, and would have to pull myself back to the swim, and then I'd realize I was auto-swimming, and then I'd wonder if I wasn't pushing my pace as hard as I should. And then you know what? I'D GO EASY ON MYSELF - this is the only part where I have the luxury of it being easy enough that the insane thought I should be going faster (that it's a remote possibility) even occurs, so I try and let myself have a little FUN. It's great!

I passed a fair few yellow caps, which I have to say was encouraging, no matter what the means. By the time I rounded the last house boat to start heading to shore, there was a thin pack of about 8 other girls, and 3 of us got really bunched up and were gently jostling to get ahead for about the last 100 yards. When my fingers finally scraped mud and I got to follow down to bottom with my feet I was chuffed to feel like I still had energy, and plenty of it...the racers around me seemed like they'd had it taken out of them - I take my smarmy superiority where I can, thanks. The strongest memory I have is of my teammate Caroline calling my name from the dock as I was taking my cap off - I saw the camera and realized I needed to smile - I was having fun! And I do love the picture that resulted. I ran up the ramp, stripping my wet suit off, got to see James and Justin and get a weirdo picture snapped while they yelled "Take it off!", and head for my bike, maybe trying not to be sad that the best part was over.

In the end I did the swim in 35 minutes, which is respectable as hell and put me 25th in my age group (out of 80). I can deal with that! I dunno! That time is better than I thought! See the exclamation marks? Get ready for those to go away....bike time...

Wildflower Training Weekend

The first thing you need to know is that Wildflower is notorious for being a real asshole of a course. When I did my first tri in 2003, half of our team was training for Wildflower Olympic (3/4 mi swim - 24 mi bike - 6 mi run), and the coaches and mentors would talk about WILDFLOWER in the way that there was that joke on Pete & Pete or some show about your PERMANENT RECORD. That didn't make sense - their naked voices, when discussing it, took on the timbre reserved for ghost stories or penal sentencing. Point being, I've never really been a fan of Wildflower - going, doing, discussing, etc.

At the beginning of this season, I was initially signed up to train just for the half Ironman - Wildflower, in May - and not the full - Vineman, in August. Somewhere along the way I decided to do Vineman, with the added bonus of being able to totally jettison the idea of Wildflower. Let those other suckers deal with demon race. Then, in the course of my strikingly usual not paying attention, I realized there was something called...Wildflower Training Weekend....coming up. But! I could skip it! Because I was not doing Wildflower! My coach and mentor dashed both of those notions in one fell swoop, in one of the most acute, matter of fact shame sessions I've ever experienced, and let me know that I was, in fact, doing both the event and training weekend. What is a superacute shame session? They just give you one sidelong hyper-raised eyebrow, and say, "You're doing it." And you feel SO GROSS about their weird certainty that you do it.

Drove up to Monterey County after work on a Friday, got to camp at about 11 pm, pitched a tent in the dark, climbed into bed, and woke up at 6 am in the freezing. Breakfast cooked by other teammates for their fundraiser - a luxury that will not exist on race day. Drove down to the race start, pulled on a wet suit, and jumped into the lake at 7 am. As we treaded water in a clump at the end of the dock, our Coach Paul, also in the water, did this thing that he does occassionally, that's incredibly humbling. He reminds us of TNT's mission, the reason we are all fundraising, and ostensibly the reason we are all involved. He said, roughly, this, as we gently churned the water: "You guys. Look around you. The sun is still coming up over the hills. It's 7 am. Most of your friends aren't even up yet, and you're in a lake so that someday kids in hospitals can be in a lake. It's a really amazing thing that you're doing, and I feel lucky to be a part of it." He said a little more, but the point is the strange humility of being told you're doing something amazing, or even just genuinely helpful. It's the cartoon time traveler's surprise when his quantum shuttle randomly smashes a Lilliputian dictator, and he spends the rest of the episode posing for statues against his will. Right, not quite, but it's someone telling you this thing you are doing - for whatever jumble of motivations you have - is a truly inspiring thing to THEM, who is a major source of your inspiration. It just makes you pause. And then keep flapping your arms & legs to stay afloat.

The swim was actually surprisingly arduous - I haven't been in major open water in a couple years, and I had forgotten how much energy you expend just navigating, trying to head straight in a huge lake, and scanning awkwardly for the buoys. I felt myself just zone out and swim along, which I'm prone to, swimming being the only leg where I feel comfortable and distinctly understand my limits and abilities. We swam about a mile - half of what I'll need to do in Vineman - and I realized my challenge would be staying focused on keeping my speed up, rather than just doing Zen strokes. I've realized I'm afraid to push, and just do a lot of finding a comfortable speed and maintaining / surviving the course. I'm terrified I'll push and then deplete my reserves, though I have a growing fear I'll hold back and then be left with extra energy. AND then I have the growing realization that that is literally not possible, reminding myself I'm doing a Death Race. The Zen stroking sounds like not a bad idea, when we go full circle.

There is one other thing I forgot about tri swimming: Swim Starts. Meaning tons of people packed into a tiny chunk of water, getting the whistle and then beating the crap out of each other until the pack is thinned out enough to just swim. Here's a tri-community famous commercial thatz funny cuz its true:


I'll talk about the bike in a separate post, since I'm a man now, after that beast.

Pool Grumposaur, or, Why I Hate LA Fitness

I went swimming this morning. I was supposed to go last night, but late afternoon nap + gym changing their hours to close earlier, leaving me 30 minutes to swim + superfluity of fake boob girls and geriatric dudes just bobbing along in every lane = swim in the a.m.

Not surprisingly after yesterday's run, I was tired. I don't know if swimming yesterday would have been easier or impossible, but today's mile and a half swim was a plodder. I ended up clocking 25 minutes for the straight mile, but uh......I'm not super impressed with that at all.

What I really want to talk about is gym pool ethics. More specifically, who shouldn't be allowed to use the pool. More specifically, can I make people stop using the pool? Or ask them to adjust the way they use it? When I say this, I am talking right at the following:

1. Aforementioned Fake Boob Bobbers. Have you seen this? They like....walk up and down the pool, never getting their hair nor faces wet. They don't always have fake boobs. Sometimes just big ones. Most critically/mysteriously: I've done some pretty self delusional "exercising" before, but...sigh. It hurts to even repeat it. Pool walking? This has to be the most alimony-supported workout I've ever heard of.

2. Aforementioned Geriatrics. Sorry, world. This makes me too sad / angry to talk about more. They do, however, sometimes put their faces in. One rung above fake boobs.

3. Sprint Guys. These are dudes in board shorts who get in, usually with a buddy taking the lane next to them, and do one lane sprints, then rest for 30 seconds to a minute, then sprint again. They usually do 10 to 20 laps total over 15 ridiculous minutes and then get out. They almost always go in the hot tub after. Please, please just stick to 5-a-side hoops.

4. No Eye Contact People. They are usually slowish but not painfully so, and they won't let my line of sight cross with theirs so that I can ask them if we can do circular swim and fit three people in a lane instead of them and their slow lane partner taking up the whole lane. This is starting to get technical.

The point is I'm used to all of the above types. What I've never seen before today was two kids - maybe 9 and 11 - and their poolside Dad, coaching them for over an hour. Taking up a whole lane (a THIRD of the stupidly small pool) when they were doing the same 25 yard drills and could have gone one in the front of the other while four of us stood around the pool waiting to get in.
Although....they did give me a lot of speculating material while I swam. Their grandpa was perched on a chair near where their Dad paced, and stayed completely silent the entire time. The kids were pretty good, but not so good they shouldn't have been on a team; they didn't seem particulary resentful, but they mumbled to themselves and each other every time they stopped at the end of the lane. There was a slight Slavic feeling to the whole thing. Sometimes they'd be swimming beside me, and I was usually not able to keep up. Tired! Achy! Lithe little swim people!

Swim report FIN.

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.

Goggles Mostly

Signed up on Monday for a free Tuesday am trial swim with LA Masters, but couldn't go because I realized at 10 pm that I don't have swim cap and goggles...

Wednesday went to Sports Chalet, after frustrating, fruitless Google search for specialty swim shop.


Tyr Socket Rocket 2.0 Goggles = $6.99 (JESUS)

Tyr Team Sprint Goggles = $5.99 (RIDIC)

The biggest insult of all:



Speedo Silicone Long Hair Cap = $11.99!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wanted two buy like 3 $1.50 cheapies, and this was literally ALL they had.

Practice was good, though for some reason Fly Day on my first day. Horrible.
If I want to swim with them, I think it's like $55/mo. Hard choice.