Blogger Beta makes me happy

Today is the first day of my new training plan -- on my way to half-ironman glory, starting with one swim early this morning. Now that I'm in full on workout mode again, I figured this would be a great time to start a TriFuel account and start logging my workouts. There appear to be some cool features here and it makes it easy for me to share my workouts.

In the midst of trying to find my "public" domain, I found out that the site automatically creates an RSS feed of your log when you enable sharing. While I found this quite cool, I was a little hesitant to launch into adding the feed to my blog, but I decided to give it a whirl. I'm not a super technical person -- setting up that list of races you see down the side of my blog took me at least a half hour with Blogger. With Blogger Beta, adding the beautiful feed of my workouts that you now see under my profile took -- drum roll please -- 2 minutes!

I love you blogger beta. You and I are going to have a great relationship. I can tell. If only everything was this easy.

You want how much of my money??

Now that half the races I was considering doing next summer are already sold out, I decided to look through my remaining options last night. I have a few criteria that are turning out to be mighty restrictive: (1) a half-ironman race relatively close by, (2) an olympic and maybe a sprint that I don't need to rent a car and get a hotel room to race, (3) all races take place in May and June.

Each year, I've done one triathlon (two Olympic distance races). The more I've read up on triathlon, the more I realize, this is not what other people do. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket. One thing goes wrong and you feel utterly deflated. All that training only to get a flat tire or just get too nervous and not pull through. I figured this summer, I'd be smart, I'd do a few races. That possibility, however, is getting decidedly slimmer all the time and it's making me a little depressed.

First of all, who knows their schedule this far in advance?? My girlfriend is graduating this coming May but her college hasn't even scheduled their commencement ceremony yet. I know roughly when it is, but two of the races I'm considering fall in the "danger zone". Her sister in CA is also going to be getting married some time this spring -- likely May or June. That's not scheduled yet either.

Secondly, who can afford all these races?? After all the other gear costs of triathlon and race entries you have travelling to and from races, shipping equipment and finding lodging. That's why the races I've done in the past have been close enough to my home to avoid having to get a hotel. I love this sport, but I refuse to spend all my money on it. Where's the poor, aspiring triathlete scholarship?!

Now that I'm done griping, here are the races I'm looking at: The Mooseman Half Ironman, Harriman State Park Tri (half or olympic), the New Jersey Devilman, and the Tupper Lake Tinman. All but the Harriman race would require overnight lodging and rental cars, most likely. What a bummer. The New York City Tri is a great race precisely because it's smack dab in the city -- why are there not more urban landscape races? Why, oh why?

The Evolution of a Workout

1o:00 p.m. yesterday Decide I'm going to swim in the morning. Set the alarm clock and go to bed

6:15 a.m. today Alarm goes off. I tell the girlfriend to hit the snooze.

6:25 a.m. Alarm goes off again. I tell the girlfriend I'm tired. She puts up a big fight by yawning and saying "okay" as she resets the alarm for 7:00 a.m.

7:00 a.m. Alarm goes off again. Girlfriend turns it off and promptly wiggles further under the covers.

7:23 a.m. I realize we are still in bed and force myself to get up and into the shower. While in the shower I rationalize my missed workout by deciding to go to the gym or for a run after work. I decide I need the cardio exercise more than the lifting and tell myself I'll run.

8:15 a.m. Pack a bag with running clothes for the gym in case the weather is bad. This way, I won't find myself looking out the window of my office at 5 p.m. and deciding that it's too awful out to run when I get home and too late to go home, get clothes and go back to the gym.

6:00 p.m. Decide the weather is good enough to run outside, but man, it's dark out. Am I really sure about going for a run tonight??

6:45 p.m. I go for a run! Given that it's dark out, and I believe in taking every precaution when running in the dark - especially since I live in the north end of Manhattan, I run over to Riverbank State Park where there's a track with tons of stadium lighting, lots of people and security guards. On my way over this evening, I happen to notice a lot of police milling about and a few squad cars pull into the park as I'm making my way over from Riverside Drive. More and more officers everywhere and I start to get worried that something has happened at the park. As I walk by the lit up gymnasium I peek inside to see the band warming up for the Police Academy graduation! I think this run will be quite safe, thank you.

8:00 p.m. Fully exercised and stretched out, I sit and tap away at the laptop as the best girlfriend in the world cooks my dinner.

Thank god every workout isn't this hard!

On another note, I revisited my training plan recently. I haven't paid it much mind since I'm not actually on it till Nov 27, but when taking a peak, I noticed that I promised I'd write at least two positive things about my training each week in my blog. Since I'm training for training in all my other sports, I'll get some practice in on this front as well.

Positive statement: I used to be plagued with side cramps during my runs. I'd have to stop and walk it off probably 1 out of every 3 runs. I've had positively no stomach/side discomfort on a single run since I started back up. I have my physical therapist to thank for this new miracle!

Out of town guests and marathons

The girlfriend and I had out of town guests visiting for nearly a week recently, meaning my workout schedule has been light to nonexistant. Despite no workouts, each night they were here I dragged myself into bed, thoroughly exhausted. Why is it that ushering around out of town visitors doesn't count toward my training?!

Aside from pure exhaustion, other symptoms included an insatiable appetite. We managed to eat our way through the entire city, from Brooklyn pizza to Chinatown dim sum. At the very least, this must have been Zone 1 endurance work, right? (Note: This is a rhetorical question not intended to illicit an actual response.)

We checked out part of the New York Marathon while our visitors were here...one of my favorite NYC events. There's nothing quite like the thousands upon thousands of bobbing heads pounding down the pavement in an unending sea.

Every year, I feel completely inspired watching that race. This year I'm under the delusion that I'll join NYRR and do enough races to get into the 2008 marathon. For training, I'll follow a regular regiment of out of town guests and overeating. I'm already on the path to marathon glory!

Revelations of the triathlon variety

As I try to avoid obsessively checking cnn.com for election results, I turn to my beleaguered blog. Time has been tight with some out of town guests visiting, but I assure you that I return refreshed!

For tonight's post I've tapped a guest blogger. Initially I hoped that inviting a guest would mean loads of praise for my superb guidance, sage advice and exemplary status as a role model. Those hopes were sadly crushed, but the entertainment value of this advice from first-timer "B to the Wizzo" is quite high.

In taking on my first triathlon last month - a sprint at Lake Anna in Virginia - there were indeed many lessons I learned the hard way. Certainly you can train, study, solicit the advice of erudite triathlon elders, but until you actually compete in one, it's all just theory, right? Ever the sympathizer, Rocinante Always Wins requisitioned a guest blog entry detailing the harsh realities facing the rookie triathlete (and there are many):

1. At least buy me a drink first
Was it wrong for me to feel strangely violated and used by the curt volunteer in charge of inking my race number onto my arms and legs? Here it is, 7 o'clock in the morning, I've stood in line to strip in front of this woman and all I get is "Number? ... Age group? ... Turn around. ... Done." I think that's how they run triathlons in prison.

2. You know you're a little too serious when...
As I was sitting in my car before the race, rocking out to AC/DC, I watched some dude with OCD take for-ev-er making the tiniest, most inconsequential adjustments to his and his (apparent) girlfriend's bikes. Does it really take 20 minutes to get your race number in ex-act-ly the right spot? Do you really require four water bottles each (measured and filled with an ultra-precise mix of Gatorade and water, probably Perrier) for a sprint? How many times do you need to check the brakes and wheels on your $3,000 tri bikes, seriously?

Watching him throughout this excruciating process, my girlfriend Jessica asked me, "How come you're not doing all that?"

"My bike's going to work the same as it did yesterday," I said, then got an eye roll as I turned up the volume on "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution".

3. Wetsuits: Friends of the modest
Look, I swam for many years as a youngster, so I am well familiar with the concept and workings of a Speedo. I can appreciate its hydrodynamic fit and, in a triathlon, the advantages wearing one must offer when it comes to making a quick transition to the bike. What I don't need is to find myself at the starting line right behind some "plumber butt". Drawstrings, my wide-bottomed friend, drawstrings!

I also tracked down Jessica so I could tell her to check out the voluptuous "moobs" on a nearby Clydesdale-class competitor. Another eye roll: "Grow up."

4. Full-contact freestyle
I was confident of (or, resigned to) the fact that the swim would be the best leg of my race by far and was even prepared for some gentle nudging and jostling at the start.

Not quite. The first 300 meters was like a nature video on Amazonian piranha. All I could see were whirlpools of churning water between the violent bludgeoning of kicks and elbows. In vain did I search for my plumber-butted guide amidst it all. Worse, I expended so much energy trying to fight through the pack that when I found myself swimming alone at the halfway point, I couldn't really get a strong pace going, and my time was ultimately more than three minutes slower than it was in the pool. So fine, I'll trade a little extra distance for calm water: Next time, I'll be way out there on the right, next to the guys with inflatable water wings."

5. Should have ridden my Big Wheel
It would have been just as fast as my biking performance, and more comfortable. I'd read somewhere that if there was any leg of the race that could withstand some neglect during the training program, it was the bike. Why? Bike training, this article reasoned, requires a disproportionately large commitment in order to realize any significant improvement, and in a sprint tri, you're not going to benefit much from what will ultimately be a negligible time difference.

I don't recall the author of said article, but when I do, that dangerously unqualified dispenser of crappy advice will be on my hit list. My little Trek road bike and its platform pedals certainly wasn't to blame as men - and yes, women - with thighs bigger than my head zoomed past me on their whirring flying-saucer wheels. No, I was feeling the burn and cursing the day I found that stupid article. From now on, Mistress Bicycle shall command equal time.

6. Can I get a crazy straw with that?
Perhaps partly as a result of my negligence vis-a-vis an embarrassing lack of bike preparation, it took me a good half-mile to get a decent pace going on the run, but that wasn't the most disappointing part. I learned it requires an acrobatic feat of dexterity to grab a cup of water and drink it while running. After three failures in three attempts (splashing my face, shirt and an increasingly irritated competitor five feet behind me), I made the executive decision to just carry a sippy cup with me in my next race.

7. The perfect meal
With apologies to everyone across the northern swath of the U.S. who doesn't have the privilege of living within striking distance of a Waffle House, I declare this chain of sublimely greased breakfast food is a post-race destination beyond compare. I even ran into one of my fellow racers there - perhaps in his early 50s - who had a bit of introspective wisdom to impart before turning his attention to a plateful of hash browns.

"How'd you do this morning?" I asked him.

"Well," he said, "I didn't win, and I didn't puke."

The man was a philosopher. I reciprocated by acknowledging that I too had neither won nor puked, and perhaps, in that moment, truly became a triathlete.

Well said, B to the Wizzo, well said.

My Halloween costume

Last night, as little ghosts and ghouls hit up the stores in my neighborhood for sweets, I was rocking my fab Halloween costume in the gym. Okay, so maybe I can't really call my workout clothes a costume. I can't help but wonder if my dedication has reached some new obsessive level. Recently I've also been trying to convince the girlfriend that we should do a 5k in Central Park at midnight on New Year's, which incidentally, is also my birthday.

Before I started getting too worried about my addiction to triathlon last night, I looked around the gym at all the other obsessives. I was working out at the Columbia University gym, so I definitely expected it to be totally empty. Instead, it was packed! Well, not as packed as I've seen it before, but I had to wait to get on almost every machine.

On another note, for anyone worried about my inability to get out of bed, have no fear, I've risen to the challenge! I've been yanking myself out of bed early a few times a week now -- and I'm not even on my training plan yet.