Open water

I drove out to Lake Lauderdale County Park in Cambridge, NY, this afternoon with my husband and a friend visiting from Hawai’i to check out the site where the Fronhofer Tool Triathlon would take place. The temperatures were in the high 80s and it was muggy, so I was delighted to see a sign that the beach was open. We drove into the park, and at the entry gate, I asked the patrol guard if she knew anything about the triathlon. She smiled happily and told me that I was at the right place, and described how the swim course would make a triangle of the lake. She encouraged me to check out the public beach and get a feel for the water. The lifeguard at the beach was equally friendly and helpful. She pointed out the part of the lake where the swimming would take place, and gave me a tip (perhaps unofficial) of how I could practice open water swimming outside of the public roped-off area.

Both guards helped boost both my enthusiasm and confidence for the upcoming race. Weather in upstate New York has been erratic, and it’s only been the past day or two that outdoor swimming has been possible.

Aside from that obstacle, I’ve been pondering possibilities of where to swim outdoors. I know that my swimming workouts in the indoor pool at the Saratoga Springs YMCa have been strong, but swimming outdoors is a different animal in a variety of ways.
First, the lane markers that guide indoor lap swimming are absent. Second, any air and temperature control that exists both in and out of the water of an indoor pool completely disappears when you’re outdoors. Third, the ground is no longer solid and concrete but rather a variety of stones, mud, and muck or a constantly changing combination of all three. Fourth, the water is no longer clear and free of debris but filled with sudden encounters with lake grass, algae, and other vegetation, not to mention the possibility of fish or other water-borne creatures. And, fifth, swimming ceases to be a simple matter of back-and-forth laps across a pool and back and turns into a sort of open free-for-all where almost anything goes.

The challenges of the lake are also its joys, once you acclimate yourself to your new environment.

I began my process of acclimation by sliding out of my sandals, removing and carefully folding my t-shirt and shorts, and leaving them in a neatly stacked pile by the edge of the public area where I had decided to enter the water. I put my glasses on top of the heap and immediately counted my blessings for having worn a bright orange t-shirt that literally gleamed in the sunlight. If I got completely lost in the lake, I knew I would be able to spot the shirt.

One doesn’t really jump or dive into a lake from the lake, so carefully I walked in. The mud squished between my toes, letting me know immediately that I was in for an experience different from the everyday pool. I began swimming, and within about five strokes, found myself in a thicket of grass. It slid over and under my arms and my waist, creating a momentary question of whether the thicket also contained a snake. I willed the thought out of my mind, reminding myself that a friend and former colleague from my college had vehemently declared that she had been swimming in lakes in our region for half of her life and had yet to encounter a snake.

Once past these obstacles, I found myself enjoying the clean purity of open water. The crowds and beach balls and life rafts thinned out as I swam toward the deeper end of the roped off area, and the water went from quite warm to pleasantly cool as its depth varied and as the sun and clouds reflected onto different areas.

I was swimming along happily when I remembered that being in open water meant I didn’t have a pool wall ahead of me. I needed to spot. I stuck my head out of the water like a turtle and started to laugh. Oops. I was not swimming in a straight line at all but rather in a jagged formation that had brought me almost back to the shallow shore. I stopped to readjust my body and was amazed to discover that I felt out of breath. Water is water, and I am not scientist, but somehow the consistency of this water felt heavy and thick.
I swam what I estimated to be about 400 meters, then went to a picnic table where my husband and visiting friend were sitting. I mentioned the “unofficial” area that the lifeguard had suggested as a place where triathletes could practice open water swimming and suggested we walk over. It looked clear and inviting, but it also looked as if swimmers might have to share space with small boats, some of which had motors.

“Do you want to go in for a dip?” I asked my husband.

“No,” he said, “and you’re not going in either. You’re not getting your body chopped up into small pieces by one of those boats.”

That logic made a bit of sense.

The lake, however, was beautiful, and it felt user-friendly. We decided to come back on a weekday when it might be less crowded for a longer swim, and perhaps a bike ride in the area.

So, with six weeks to go, I find myself facing a new challenge. Doing the sports I’ve been practicing with a fair amount of diligence in the actual environment where the triathlon itself will take place.

Slimming down

The work trip was unusually productive this time. In addition to reading an unusually high number of government and politics exams for the Educational Testing Service, I managed to work my way through one and a half books, and rough out ideas for a long-overdue book chapter contribution that hopefully will finally put that project to bed. I credit the rapid reading of high school exams in adherence with a fairly straightforward rubric for bringing some clarity to my own thoughts on the latter. So, in the spirit of hip-hop, or at least the ways in which I understand hip-hop, I once again can credit students for helping me understand things I feel in my heart but cannot always easily articulate.

 

            I also moved my body. My distances for cycling and running were a bit lower than I had hoped, but the quantities and qualities of workouts were really high. The experience showed me that there is as much to be gained from two short workouts a day as there is from one longer one.

 

            I also spent some time this week pondering the on-going household budget situation, creatively trying to figure out how my husband and I could continue to meet our personal and professional goals while living on a paycheck that seems to be slimming down at the same rate that I am.

 

            The conjoining of a smaller paycheck with a slimmer physical body was not intended. But coincidences are co-incidents, which leads me to suspect that the two might be related.

 

            As monthly expenses, mortgage payments, and rising costs of food, gasoline and things like air travel consistently outpaced my regular bi-weekly income, both my husband and I found ourselves contemplating what we valued most in life. We were trying to figure out what we could cut in order to continue to make ends meet. Our discussions on this topic were often difficult, and they’re even more difficult to discuss because our decisions ultimately went against the grain of so many of our peers. One option was for him to find work, wage-earning work instead of the hard labor he performs daily on our backyard farm and the household upkeep for which he takes sole responsibility. The logic of this argument seemed crystal clear: Even 20 hours a week at a minimum wage job would bring in at least an extra $500 to $1,000 a month, and he would become, in the eyes of some, more of a “contributor” than housecleaning wood chopping, raising hens, growing food, and creating art apparently is.

 

            A second option was for me to seek more work, as an adjunct instructor for a community college or as a freelance copywriter for advertising agencies, public relations companies, or corporate firms. I have the skills, so why not? I could do the work at night or on weekends or during vacations from my regular job. Again, the logic seemed crystal clear.

 

            Ultimately we dropped both of these options from the list of possibilities. I am going to go out on a great big limb and risk offending a whole lot of people by stating that both of us came to conclude that scarcity thinking led us to even consider these possibilities and an effort to embrace what we understand as abundance led us to reject them.

 

            Money helps. But what it came down to was a question of whether we valued money more than our health, our relationship, and our overall happiness. When we reached that conclusion, the answer was a no-brainer:

 

            If my husband took a part-time job, our home life would go to hell. We would be doing less farming, and less eating out of our backyard. If I took on extra work, similarly our lives would go to hell. Down time would not be devoted to exercise or to writing or pulling weeds because I would be working even more. In short, less of our lives would belong to us and more of our time and energy would be given over to the interests of those whom we were laboring for.

 

            As our paychecks would get fatter, we concluded so would we.

 

            So we have opted for a new approach. As we have watched our bodies slim down and our income decrease, we also have slimmed down our expenses as much as possible. I’ve chosen to get books from the library instead of buying them on Amazon. I’ve skipped out of lunch invitations and meetings at cafes or restaurants that would have required me to buy food. And both of us have given up on eating out at restaurants as our “dates” in favor of dinners on our deck or before our warm fire. And, just now, I opted to give up a seat on a flight in order to receive a $400 travel credit, which I know will help out with travel in the future.

 

            At times, these tactics have challenged me because they have made me feel cheap, and I have felt embarrassed or ashamed when I have said to peers that I would prefer to meet in my office instead of “doing lunch”. They also have left me questioning our choices, because as we have given up gifts, pleasure trips, new clothes, restaurant meals, and other kinds of indulgences, we have kept things that some people judge to be extravagant expenses. One of these things has been our membership at our local YMCA, which has an amazingly high level of premium fitness equipment, a varied array of classes, a multi-lane swimming pool, and a wonderful spa area that includes a hot tub, sauna, and steam room. A second of these things has been our Smart Phones, which cost quite a bit for two people on a single income but offer us, among other things, instant access to cameras, our friends on Facebook, and GPS tracking devices like MapMyRun.com that allow us to run, walk, or bike almost anywhere without worrying about whether we’ll get lost. It’s not that these indulgences never surfaced in our discussions of what to give up. It’s just that every time that they did, we shook our heads and said no. They were vital to our commitment to creating healthy bodies and healthy relationships with family members and friends all over the world. We could find other ways to cut back.

 

            Once again, with the phrase “cutting back”, I am conscious of an inadvertent choice of language. I am realizing that new language is needed if we are to think about choices to live simply and for our own selves in terms of not scarcity but of abundance. Slimming down seems to be an appropriate alternative choice. It’s a code word perhaps for voting to use one’s money to expand one’s world view and one’s longevity instead of being on a persistent search for more money, which does not simplify but instead adds complexity to daily life.

 

            So, if you don’t see me eating lunch in a restaurant or carrying a bag full of goodies home from a recent work trip, chalk it up to the fact that I am simply continuing to live slim and trim.

Working vacation discoveries

I love traveling for work. These days, it’s almost the only kind of travel I do, and I do have to admit that I don’t like being gone from my home for more than 10 days or so. But the short trips of three to nine days are absolutely pleasurable for a variety of reasons:

* I usually don’t have to spend very much money. When the travel is related to work, many expenses are already covered such as accommodations, meals, and transport from, say, the airport to work venue.

* The hotel is usually of a Marriott, Hilton, or Sheraton quality. It’s quiet, clean, and pleasant.

* Because I am traveling for work-related purposes, my free time is fairly restricted. This means that I get to use every minute of my free time in a way that I would prefer most.

So what do I do with my free time when I travel for work?

For starters, I wake up super-early. My normal rise time at home is sometime between 7 and 8 a.m., depending on what time I finished with dinner, clean-up, and my evening stint of writing. My work-away-from-home rise time is about 5 a.m.

In my current locale, a downtown Salt Lake City Marriott, the sky begins to lighten a little before the alarm in my cellphone goes off at 5 a.m. I rise and make a cup of coffee in the machine, turn on the reading light over the bed, grab either a notebook or a book, and begin to read and write. This is pretty much the same routine I maintain at home, but away from home, the ritual is more grounding and more centering for me. I’m in a different space, a quiet space. I know that once I dress and leave my room, I probably will not return until 8 or 9 p.m. I also know that the first two hours of rise-time are write time, time that belongs exclusively to me.

After the write time, I shower and prepare for the day. In the case of this particular trip, I am out the door by 7:15 a.m., so that I can make it to breakfast and be at my work site by 8 a.m. on the dot. At home, I am chronically late for meetings — a habit I am trying to break. When I work away from home, I am a model of punctuality.

Moving my body — at home or away from home — is an important aspect of my day. What I particularly enjoy about moving my body away from home is strategizing how to sandwich exercise times into breaks for lunch or down times between the end of the work day and dinner. During breaks, I often walk or do yoga. At lunch, I can rush back to the hotel for a quick twenty-minute workout on the exercise cycles or I can run gently through downtown streets. My work usually does not require a lot of dress-up attire so I simply wear what I think I will need during the day for the opportunities of moving my body that I think may arise.

Yesterday, for instance, I decided to run during lunch, and do some bicycling between the end of the work day and dinner.

Today, I had thought I would do yoga during lunch and swim after the work day was done, but by mid-morning, I was feeling a strong desire for something more active so I decided to try dashing back to the hotel for a twenty-minute workout on the exercise cycle. The workout reinvigorated me and kept me energized throughout the day. After the day was done, I went straight to the fitness room so I could swim laps in the pool.

Only, small correction, I actually did not go straight to the fitness room.

During one of the our breaks, another cyclist had told me about Salt Lake City’s rent-a-bike program. Essentially, a set of bicycles are available (like luggage carts at airports) for a relatively small fee: $5 for 24 hours, plus an additional $2 for a ride of 31-60 minutes. If the bike is returned within 30 minutes, there is no extra fee. Essentially, then, one can ride from bike rack to bike rack, switching out bikes and touring the city at the same time.

I live on a tight budget, and this week has been particularly tight, but $5 to $7 seemed affordable even for me.

On my way to the hotel fitness room, I walked past the Utah Museum of Art. I noticed that it was open until 9 p.m. on Fridays. I decided to stop in and check on the admissions fee.

“It’s free,” the woman at the reception desk told me.

I was delighted. I was even more delighted when I spotted right next to the museum one of the bike racks housing the rent-a-bikes. I sat on one to gauge its comfort level for my relatively small body frame. It fit very well.

A few minutes later, I was upstairs, warming my skin — which had gotten chilled in the work area’s air-conditioned space — under a gentle late-afternoon sun. As I prepared to start swimming laps, two other swimmers joined me.

“Did you know the Olympic pool was about 25 minutes away?” one of them told me.

“By car, or by foot?”

“By foot, but you can take the transit, too.”

Further queries revealed that the pool also charges a $5 admission, and features a 50-meter outdoor pool and a 25-yard indoor pool. My swim in the hotel pool was smooth and comfortable today, and might be enough. However, the prospect of swimming in an Olympic pool — not just an “Olympic-sized” pool — is a tempting sensation.

This work trip doesn’t end until I fly out on Monday morning. If the dollars stretch, I might just check the pool out.

Acclimating

Yesterday, I wrote about how the high altitude and heat in Salt Lake City had put a dent into my triathlon training goals, and had forced me to readjust some plans. After a fitful but full night of sleep, I awoke at 5 a.m. today, and brewed some coffee in the hotel Krups maker. Somehow, that early shot of coffee and an Advil with breakfast about two and a half hours later seemed to work some sort of healing magic. Around mid-morning, all of my aches eased and I found myself looking forward to doing a gentle run during the our lunch break.

Lunch came, and I programmed the MapMyRun.com app in my iPhone so that it would log my mileage for 25 minutes. Not having to follow a pre-set route actually freed the running up considerably. I ran gently but steadily through downtown Salt Lake City for about two miles without stopping, simply turning in the direction of a walk sign every time I hit a red light.

The run cleared my head and boosted my confidence. By 5:30 p.m., when our day had ended, I found myself looking forward to trying a ride on one of the hotel’s exercise cycles again. I made my way up to the fitness center and open-air pool and found that the air was considerably cooler and the sun not quite as intense as it had been on the day that I arrived. I rode about 8.25 miles on cycle in about 35 minutes, which allowed me to log a day of training that included two of the three triathlon sports and an hour of pretty intense aerobic activity that didn’t feel so intense.

The workout reinforced for me the importance of bricks. While I technically did not complete a brick today because several hours separated the two workouts, the fact that I was doing two workouts, each comprising approximately one-third of the total triathlon distance, made it a brick in my mind.

In planning my workouts for the rest of June and July, I had planned to focus on bricks. I was a little nervous about doing so, however, because the workouts in the more-intense training plan I had consulted emphasized longer and longer distances that I wasn’t sure I would have the stamina or the time to pull off.

Today’s workout reminded me that quality training doesn’t have to be measured in quantities of time and distance. One brick of 500 meters swimming, 8.25 miles bicycling, and 2 miles running would take me about one hour and 15 minutes to complete, including the transitions between each discipline. If I were to do three of these bricks in one week, and then concentrate on going distances in each of the individual disciplines on the other three workout days of the week, I would be able to give each sport more individualized time than I have been able to do so to date while also increasing my comfort level with transitioning from sport to sport.

It’s nearly 9:30 p.m. Salt Lake City time. In a few minutes, I’ll call it a night, and rise again at 5 a.m. I still plan to play the training by ear, and take things on a day-to-day basis, but I am looking forward to a lunch-break session of yoga, a post-work day swim and possibly a walk.

Not to get obsessive, but I also measured today the distance I walk from the hotel to the site where we eat our meals and to the area where we score the AP exams, and back. By my estimates, I walk one and three-quarters of a mile daily just traversing those distances. Two years ago, when I first began exhorting friends and colleagues on Facebook to move their bodies, I noted that every yard counts. I still think every yard counts.

Heating up the Heart Rate at High Altitudes

When I signed up to do a triathlon back in February, I knew that one challenge to my training would come in mid-June, when I was scheduled to travel to Salt Lake City, Utah, for nine days to participate in the annual AP reading of high school students’ U.S. Government and Politics exams. The work trip, organized by the Educational Testing Service, has been a ritual in my life for the past six years. It’s a marathon seven days of reading hundreds of hand-written exams that produces a little bit of extra income and an otherwise enjoyable getaway from my daily routine.

This year, however, I began considering how I would keep up with my training during the reading, almost as soon as I received my invitation to participate. Training at this stage had seemed as if it would be especially crucial because the triathlon would be seven weeks away.

Both time and the availability of equipment were factors. The reading begins at 8 a.m., with breakfast running from 6:30 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. It ends at 5:30 p.m., with dinner running from 5:30-7:45 p.m. There were two 15-minute breaks and a one-hour break for lunch. In past years, I’ve managed to squeeze in 30-minute walks before breakfast, quick runs, swims, or yoga routines during lunch, and long walks or swims before and/or after dinner. Could I do the same with the triathlon?

Running, I decided, would not be a problem. Even downtown Salt Lake City is an easy place to begin and end runs, and the streets are not only well-equipped with sidewalks and shade trees but offer options for flat, rolling, and steep hill runs. Bicycling would be possible if the hotel’s fitness room had exercise cycles. Swimming, I figured, would be challenging because few hotel pools are more than 25 to 30 feet long.

I figured I could do a series of bike-run workouts, and just relax in the hotel pool after.
What I didn’t count on were two factors: blazing heat and an altitude of 4,780 feet — much higher than anything I had lived at, much less trained at.

My plane landed in Salt Lake on Sunday afternoon. By 1 p.m., I was checked into my hotel and had unpacked. I had some lunch and decided to explore the hotel’s fitness room. I was tired from the long flight and from getting up at 3 a.m. to catch my 6 a.m. flight out of Albany but eager to take advantage of the available time to squeeze in some training.
The heat hit me as soon as I hit the fitness room. I stared at the hot sun pouring over the pool, and began to think that the pool looked incredibly inviting. I dove in and counted my strokes for one length of the pool. The count — based on the number of strokes it takes me to get across the 25-yard pool where I usually work out — helped me estimate the pool’s length at 10 to 12 yards. I figured I could swim 100 lengths and get in a 1,000-1,200 yard workout, then hop on a bike and do a run later.

Piece of cake.

Only, then the altitude kicked in. I found myself stopping every 10 lengths (every 100 to 120 yards) to catch my breath and to bring my heart rate back to a less than high-aerobic pace. About two-thirds of the way through the workout, I began to feel body aches. With effort, I finished the swim and pantingly climbed out of the pool to lie down on one of the deck chairs to recover.

Amazed that 1,000 to 1,200 yards of swimming could take that much out of me, I decided to give one of the fitness cycles a try. I started pedaling, and within about 15 minutes, I found myself wondering how I would be able to last more than 20 minutes, let alone the hour I had envisioned. I stopped cycling at 6 miles (about 28 minutes), and headed back to the deck chair to relax.

Somewhere in the midst of this regime, I remembered some things that us exam readers had been told last year about the altitude in Salt Lake City. If you’re not used to altitude, you need to know that the oxygen is thinner. This makes breathing more difficult until your body acclimates, and heavy exertion could result in some serious sickness. Symptoms often were dehydration, dizziness, headaches, and nausea.

I reached for my water bottle and began sipping water copiously. It has not been far from my side for the past 36 hours. The advice that we were given during the reading today is to drink water so that our urine is “clear, copious, and continuous.” Mine so far has fit this bill.

Aside from a slight headache, I don’t think I experienced any of the symptoms of altitude sickness. However, the fatigue and aches were enough to encourage me to revise my hopes for a week of serious training and to take it easy.

I slept nine hours on my first night, and woke up Monday morning — the first official start day of the reading at 5 a.m. I did a little yoga during the breaks as well as a short walk, and went for a good 3-mile walk after the reading ended at 5:30 p.m. Tomorrow is Tuesday, the second day of the reading. I am looking forward to trying a slightly more strenuous workout, but I will play it by ear.

It struck me that serious training also involves serious re-evaluation so that the hard work and effort that one has put in previously is not jeopardized when factors like high heat and high altitude and the resulting effect both have on one’s heart rate interfere with the plans.
The goal is to complete the triathlon. The training is the process that enables one to get to the goal. The process is not fixed and unyielding. Ideally, it is pliable and open to change.

 

Vacations right at home

A former Honolulu Advertiser co-worker just posted the following words on Facebook: “Wherever you live, pretend you’re always on vacation. That’s what I do.”
Okay, the co-worker lives in Honolulu. When I lived in the Islands for 11 blessed years, I would wake up to sunrises over lush green tropical mountains and often begin my mornings with a jog down to the beach and a dip in the ocean. I would bring books to the beach and alternate between swimming and reading. And at sunset I would do tai chi or yoga in the sand as scores of people gathered to catch a glimpse of the green flash that would occur as the sinking orange orb would meet the sea.

It didn’t feel like vacation. It was life. A life that was often chaotic and difficult, much like real life is everywhere, regardless of where you live. But I tried to soak in as much of Hawai’i as I could. Even though I lived there for quite awhile, I knew deep down that it probably wouldn’t be forever. I wanted to do as my tai chi teacher said, and remember the feeling as best as I could.

The Hawai’i days were preceded and followed by the Seattle days. The first round of Seattle days, lasting for seven years, were much like the Hawai’i days — in the summer, at least. Seattle’s famous grey would turn fabulously blue when the sun cleared away the clouds, and snow-clad crystal mountain ranges would appear against the skies. You had the Olympics to the west, the Cascades to the east, Mount Rainier (part of the Cascades) to the south, and Mount Baker and Mount Adams (also part of the Cascades) to the north.

Could it be any better?

Only if you got so stressed and worn down by work and life’s daily worries that you forget the beauty all around you. That happened to me somewhat in the second round of Seattle days when financial difficulties and emotional attachments made it difficult for me to appreciate the area’s natural beauty. I found myself grumbling quite a bit: What was the point of all the beauty if you couldn’t afford a lift ticket to go skiing? Who cared if the mountains were within a couple hours driving distance if you were in your car commuting the busy I-5 thoroughfare all week? When a job offer came in late 2009 to leave supremely special Seattle for a rural area in upstate New York, I accepted with ecstasy. I couldn’t get away from the Pacific Northwest fast enough.
I’ve been living in a rural town just outside Saratoga Springs for about three years. There is no ocean beach, no lush green rainforest, no spectacularly breath-taking snow-clad range. There are farm fields, farm smells, and the wheez of tractors, log splitters, and sometimes hunting rifles all around me. Unlike Seattle and Honolulu, the hills do not climb; they merely roll. Slowly, I am beginning to call this land — so different from any other place I’ve lived — my home.

My husband and I have made some lifestyle choices that put vacations — in the tourist getaway sense — out of reach. Which is ironic because the lifestyle choices in some ways give us both more vacation time than either of us has probably ever had in our lives. He is starting a family farm on the three acres of land on which our 1840s house, barn, and chicken coop stand. I am a faculty member at a non-traditional college for adult learners with an unusual twelve-month academic calendar. Because I work on a twelve-month schedule, “summers off” translate into a four-week reading period for scholarship and vacation days that accrue at a regular monthly rate. Because I am developing scholarship, I have taken very little time off and have accumulated more than 40 vacation days — about 10 weeks — in the three years that I have worked here. I continue to accrue more vacation time at a steady monthly rate.

This year, I decided that I needed to take a vacation, for my personal sanity, if nothing else. I travel a fair amount for work related purposes, usually with funding provided by either the college or a fellowship or grant awarded through an external source. Work-related travel often takes me to nice places where I do what I did in Hawai’i — sandwich time at the beach in between work tasks. For my own vacation, I decided to stay home.

It’s time to put tomatoes in the ground, along with peppers, eggplants, corn, beans, squash and cucumbers. Over the past four days, I planted more than 100 tomato starts, all grown from seeds ourselves. When I wasn’t planting, I went swimming, cycling, and running, and relaxed in a hot tub at the local YMCA. I also snipped fresh peas from our vines and the first rhubarb, bok choy, Swiss chard, and kale of the season. My husband and I enjoyed these fresh gifts from the garden with meats and other produce from the local farmers market as well as our own homemade bread, tomato sauce, salsa, and eggs, freshly laid by hens who reside in our back yard. I also wrote a series of short stories, submitted poems to a writer’s conference, and began revisions to a book. And, I did check my work e-mail periodically — but not too often.

“Pretend you’re always on vacation,” my former co-worker writes. These words seem like a good philosophy to follow in a world where it’s possible to always be at work.

Guidelines, not rules

Seventeen weeks to marathon.

Ten weeks to triathlon.

Memorial Day week started with those notations in a small diary I keep.

After completing two runs without jaw pain the previous week and having survived the National Bike to Work Day without excessive soreness or fatigue, I decided it was time to put the training for the two events I had committed to doing back on track.

Getting back on track both daunted and perplexed me, for the triathlon particularly. The marathon was a little logistically difficult to figure out, too. I have completed triathlons in the past, then gone on to train for marathons that took place some four to five months later. Only seven weeks separates the Freihofer Tool Triathlon and the Adirondack Marathon, however, which means some overlap is necessary. Even though I have read that the multi-sport training that one does for triathlons produces a strong base for marathon running, I also have heard that one should try and “train specific” as much as possible. In addition, an emotionally sad memory weighs on my brain. A five-hour marathoner died of a heart attack at the finish line of the Honolulu Marathon in 2002. One of his relatives — also a runner — was quoted as saying — speculating, really — that the family member might have been spending too much time on the bicycle and not enough time logging run miles.

Whether there’s merit in the memory is beside the point. Having completed several marathons and realizing that while I am currently in the best shape I’ve been since I first started running marathons thirteen years ago, I know that logging the miles and completing a successive series of long runs is important to a strong training regime. Even though the run for an Olympic distance triathlon is only a 10K (6.2 miles), it’s important — in my mind — to do several runs of 10-14 miles before the seven-week period opens when the triathlon has finished and the marathon awaits.

Which brings me to the daunting and perplexing experience of figuring out how to get triathlon training back on track.

I looked up two “free” triathlon training programs earlier in the year: One was an 18-week program for experienced triathletes who wanted to be competitive; the other was a 10-week program for beginners who just wanted to finish a first triathlon and feel good about themselves. Much of my heart belongs to the latter group, but when I looked at the ten-week program, it seemed, well, a little too easy. In addition, I wanted to train for more than ten weeks because the larger goal of being fit for life has got me believing that a short-term training program needs to be integrated into a more holistic life.

So, I had decided to give the 18-week program a try. It seemed ambitious, but I liked the format of six days of workouts each week, with a certain amount of training three times each week in each of the three disciplines. I figured that even if I couldn’t run the 10-minute mile that it recommended as a baseline for doing the program, I could do the workouts and make modifications if I came up a little short.

Week 1 of this program was April 1. The wisdom teeth surgery and unusually slow recovery that I had experienced from it came in Week 2. Despite the setback from the surgery, I felt fairly confident. Before the surgery, my swim distances were strong. My winter of indoor cycling on exercise bikes had strengthened my quads and lower back muscles, making my first outdoor bike rides feel vibrant and strong. Furthermore, I was happy to find myself able to sustain a pace of 11-12 minutes per mile running distances up to seven miles, and in late March, had completed a 5K fun run in just over 31 minutes. I was pretty immobile for about two weeks following the surgery but by early May was logging three swims and three bike rides a week as well as some fairly regular walks. The 53 miles that I ended up logging on National Bike to Work Day in mid-May further boosted my confidence.

I had decided, as well, that aiming for a weekly average of 4,500 yards of swimming, 60 miles of cycling, and 20 to 25 miles of running would prepare me well for the triathlon and give me enough of a base to do one 18-mile and one 21-mile training run in the seven weeks between the triathlon and marathon.

Then, I consulted the 18-week triathlon program, and got a shock.

The weekly swim distances for the remaining eight weeks were around 5,000 to 7,000 yards; the bike distances 85 to 120 miles; and the run distances 10 to 16 miles.
I felt suddenly ill-prepared to follow such an ambitious plan and quickly jumped back to the 10-week beginners plan.

It too was perplexing: 800 to 2,750 yards of weekly swimming; 18 to 65 miles of weekly bicycling; and eight to 16 miles of weekly running.

Studying the two plans provoked three questions:

1. How could anyone be ready to do a triathlon that involved a 1,500 meter swim (roughly 1,650 yards); a 24.9 mile bicycle ride; and a 10k (6.2 miles) run with as little yardage and mileage that the beginners plan recommended?

2. How could anyone actually follow the more competitive plan and not burn out. Did one need to swim 7,000 yards and bicycle 120 miles in order to be competitive at distances that were considerably shorter than that?

3. What could be my happy medium?

As I pondered the possibilities, I remembered some words I had shared with Empire State College students who had attended my talk at the Fitness and Wellness Conference: Guidelines, not rules. This philosophy works for degree-planning at the college, where students who are usually quite a bit older than the traditional 18-22 year-old crowd design majors and plans of study that combine their past learning experiences inside and outside the classroom, personal interests, and long-term professional goals. The college itself has few set requirements beyond attainment of a certain number of credits and satisfaction of a set of state-wide general education requirements that demonstrate that a student has acquired foundational knowledge in such areas as mathematics, basic communications, history, social sciences, and various fields in the humanities. However, the college has established what it calls area of study guidelines that are designed to help students consider ways to map their study plans and put them on the path toward earning bachelor’s degrees. We live in a rules-based society, and as a result, these area of study guidelines sometimes come to be regarded as rules. Instead of being points to consider, they turn into “musts” and “must nots”. But they don’t have to be rules if the rules don’t apply to a student’s particular interests and goals. Similarly, I suggested to students at the fitness conference, training plans can be adapted to fit busy schedules, unplanned injuries, travel, and other routine occurrences in life.

So, could I treat both plans as a guide, and let my body determine the rules?

Looking back at the other marathons I’d completed, I decided that such a philosophy was not only possible but also essential to the process of building a long-term schedule of fitness for life. I also decided that guidelines could work only if one established a few ground rules.

So, my ground rules are two:

1. Aim for three workouts in each sport a week, and try to add one to three walks to the running regime as preparation for the marathon.

2. Plan one full day of rest.

3. Try to follow each bike ride with a short run, as a way of preparing the body to ease out of a hunched over seated position on a bicycle and into a standing position for the run.

4. Stick to the goal of 4,500 yards swimming, 60 miles of cycling, and 20 to 25 miles of running but prioritize the number of workouts over the distances completed.

The guides went into place on Memorial Day. I bicycled Monday, Thursday, and Saturday; ran Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday; and swam on each of the three days that I ran. I tried to do a run after my Thursday bike ride but found myself hurting so much that I quickly instituted a new guideline of listening to my body and knowing when to ease up.

The distances for the week came to 4,000 yards for the swim, 38 miles on the bicycle, and 16.5 miles of running. Despite the shortfalls, I felt pleased by an eight miler I was able to complete on Sunday in one hour and forty minutes, and a 2,100 yard swim I achieved on Tuesday. My long bike ride of 15 miles was strong and smooth, and the fact that my cycling mileage was lower than the targets I’d set suggests to me a need to put more emphasis on that area this coming week.

More challenges lie ahead: I’ll be traveling for work June 9-17 and will be without both a bicycle and easy access to a lap swim pool. The week I return is one where the pool where I normally swim is slated for closure for maintenance. And, I’ve got two more out-of-state trips before the triathlon itself.

“Once you’ve made your commitment to train, don’t let anything or anyone stand in your way.”
That advice both heartens and frightens me. Life’s curve balls are going to throw wrenches into the best plans. If you stick to the plan as if it’s a golden rule, chances are you’ll be unable to deal with those wrenches. But if you think of the plan as a guide, chances are that you’ll find a way around the curve balls. I’ll update my own progress on both the curve balls and the wrenches as the next eight weeks of training commence.

(A brief note on the image. It accompanied an interesting and informative blog article about systematic approaches to triathlon training. Both are available at http://triathlons.thefuntimesguide.com/2008/09/systematic_training.php