Imagining Hawai’i

Two years ago, when I first started this blog, I wrote a piece about swimming in January. I described how I could lower myself into the pool, pull my goggles over my eyes, and start swimming laps. Before long, I would find myself in synch with the rhythmic motion of my arm strokes and the small waves my body would produce. A meditative feel would take over, and mentally I would find myself back in Hawai’i, where I used to swim throughout the winter in the ocean and at the University of Hawai’i’s outdoor Olympic sized swimming pool.

I remembered that blog the other night when at 7:50 p.m. I finally left my office and headed to the Saratoga YMCA. My hope had been to leave quite a bit earlier, but being the first day of classes and my first day back at teaching since a small sabbatical last fall, that didn’t quite work out. The outside temperature was hovering between about 3 degrees Fahrenheit and zero. A chill wind was blowing. My body ached from the cold and from sitting all day. It was so very tempting to call it a night and to head home. But then I thought of my imaginative Hawai’i, and my motivation perked. The pool was nearly empty, which felt marvelous in and of itself. The cool drafty breeze that seemed to pervade the locker room and the walkway to the pool area was replaced as soon as I entered with a warm steamy feel. It was like being in the tropics, almost.

I have developed a fondness for a brief soak in the whirlpool before diving into the pool. On this particular night, the water in the whirlpool was especially warm and seemed to thaw every cold ache that had besieged me. I couldn’t be happier. After a few minutes, I headed for the pool. I climbed into an empty lane and began swimming. Within a few strokes, I found my rhythm. For the first time in months, I swam a full 1,000 yards without interruption. I kept track of the laps by measuring them with breaths: every three strokes for the first 300 yards, every four strokes for 300 to 400 years, and then combinations of two, three, and four strokes up to 1,000. And, as I swam, I waited for the moment where I would meditatively be in Hawai’i. It never came.

What did this mean? A failure in the powers of imagination? A sign that Hawai’i no longer called to me as it once did? I would hope none of the above. I think it simply means that a fairly continual regime of moving one’s body eliminates the need for escape. It allows to feel satisfaction for life in the immediate moment.

Our world of social media erodes the walls of privacy that many people cherish, even as it puts us in touch with people all over the world — some of whose real names and real faces we never will know. Many of my friends and colleagues deal with this erosion of privacy by constructing imaginative images of themselves for their social media worlds. They have avatars for Second Life; special handles for Twitter; and profile photos on their Facebook page that are more representations than realistic images of themselves. I find this masking of self rather intriguing, because I don’t particularly indulge in it myself. In hip-hop circles, I am Himanee. On Twitter, I am hguptacarlson. On Facebook, my profile is a photo of one of my cats; sometimes it is an inanimate object like a gelly roll pen. Most often, it is a photo of myself.

“We need to get you an avatar,” one of my friends told me when she was trying to convince me to get involved with a space she had created in Second Life.

“I don’t want an avatar,” I protested. “Can’t I just go in as myself?”

Apparently, in Second Life, that’s not how it’s done. 

The desire to just be myself didn’t always exist. I grew up in the Midwest in the 1960s with a hard-to-pronounce name. I felt embarrassed by the constant mispronunciations and the inability to come up with an easy shorthand, and vowed that as soon as I was able to, I would get my name legally changed. Around age seventeen, I decided that I would become H.G. Snow. The initials would preserve my name, and Snow was part of the meaning of my actual name. I decided that I would put it on a license plate as soon as I had a chance to do so.

That chance materialized in 1988. I had just moved to Seattle and was in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles to get Washington state plates for my newly purchased car, a white Honda Civic. The plates featured an image of a snowy laden Mt. Rainier. H.G. Snow seemed like the perfect complement. But I got to the front of the line and I couldn’t do it. This was the first car I had purchased myself. I wanted it to represent me. Not some fiction of me.  I drove that car until 2004 when it died on the North Shore of O’ahu. I had just met the man who would propose to me five months later, and only then did I change my name, hyphenating it with my husband’s birth name at the end. 

The years of my marriage have been marked by immense transformation. I have moved from Hawai’i to Seattle to New York. I have remade my body and my life — not through cosmetics or surgery — but through gradual changes in my diet, exercise, and prioritization of values. One could argue that the changes have created a new self. Or, perhaps, more accurately created a new space for the true self to emerge. I thought of this as I climbed out of the pool, feeling alert and awake and immensely satisfied with the swim I had just completed. I headed back to the whirlpool to heat my body for a few more minutes before heading out into the cold. I was no longer in Hawai’i — and I no longer needed to imagine myself there.

I will gladly accept a plane ticket for a visit, however.

Walking and Being With the World

A postscript to the post from last week. I was at the Saratoga Y on the Monday night of this week working out. I cycled for a fairly intense 40 minutes, then headed upstairs for a gentler job on the track. I was just finishing the two miles that I had planned to do, and was walking to cool down when a woman caught up to me.

“Every time that I’ve been here, I see you run,” she said. “You run and run, and you don’t stop. Today, for the first time, I’m seeing you walk.”

I laughed. “Oh, I walk all the time.”

“This is the first time I’ve seen you walk.”

She looked a little familiar, and then I remembered who she was. She was the newcomer who had joined the YMCA at the start of January as part of the New Year’s resolution crowd, who expressed a hope that she would be among the resolute who stuck around after the surge of good intentions had worn off. We started talking, and she asked me about my workouts. I told her I was trying to do a better job of conditioning myself for triathlons so I was coming to the Y about five days a week and doing a mix of cycling, swimming, and running. She told me that her primary activity was to walk.

“I can walk forever,” she said. “I walked all the way across New York.”

Now, I was impressed.

“Really? I’ve walked 25 miles in one shot, but never more than that.”

She went on to explain that she did the walk — about 224 miles — over the course of 22 days. It wasn’t an organized, planned event or even a group effort. She walked by herself. Her husband followed her in the car and sometimes cycled as she walked. They would stay in hotels or sometimes with friends and family members as they crossed the state. She said she was grateful for doing the bulk of the walking alone. She experienced things she never would have experienced had she done it in a group.

She was curious about my training, as well, so I tried to explain it a bit. I told her about the marathons I’d run in years past, and how I’d gotten injured in 2004 and had had a very challenging time with weight gain, life stresses, and big trans-Pacific and cross-country moves but how the past year had given me new hope especially after finishing my first marathon in five years.

Talking with her added an additional mile to my workout, which made me feel quite happy. Even more satisfying was the lingering respect that I had for walking after our conversation ended. I talked about how running reminds me to drink water, an important aspect of long-term health that I often ignore when caught up in work at my office or when sipping coffee instead because I’m feeling cold. She responded that walking reminded her to breathe deeply and to see the breath as integral to life.

For whatever reasons, I’ve been walking more this week — and I’ve been thinking about the enriching value of this very simple exercise.

The sub-zero temperatures that characterized the weather in northeastern New York in the first few days of January have warmed up to what almost feels like balmy early spring weather, with highs in the 40s and lows not dipping below the 20s. It is still quite snowy outdoors, and wet and slushy. But the warm-up to what I’ll call “more manageable cold weather” has made walking outdoors a possibility, and I’ve found that the opportunity to exercise in the fresh outdoor air to be enormously satisfying. I walked four and a half miles yesterday from my office to the local seafood shop and back, and an additional one and a half miles today around the Saratoga Springs downtown. I also walked outdoors last Saturday and Sunday. These walks when accompanied by harder, more vigorous gym workouts on the fitness cycles and in the swimming pool seem to add an extra element of energy. I find myself wondering: is it the fresh air or is it something else?

Writers across generations — and other artists — have often blended their daily writing habit with long, decompressing daily walks. Brenda Ueland, author of the highly acclaimed book for writers If You Want to Write, in fact recommends that one write for eight hours and then go for a six-mile walk. That is one goal that I have often set for myself but have not been able yet to accomplish with any consistency.

Still, as we think about the power of being resolute, and of the merits of taking it slow, moving one step at a time, the habit of a daily walk seems to make more and more sense. Six miles is a lot, but what about one mile each day? Or two? That kind of distance can blend easily with both a busy life and a more vigorous workout schedule. It might be a way of moving your body for life, of making exercise less of a task and more of a habit that, like breathing and drinking water, is integral to being a part of this world.

Taking it slow

I went to my local YMCA to work out on Monday, January 6. I’ve been going to this Y for nearly four years, so when I saw that the parking lot was completely packed, I wasn’t surprised. The first several weeks of a new year are always like this. People rushing to fulfill New Year’s resolutions fill up fitness centers and gyms.
“I couldn’t believe how crowded the parking lot was,” remarked one woman in the locker room, someone who was new to the Y.
Several others, including myself, laughed.

“Give it a week,” one woman said. “It’ll thin out.”

“Monday nights are always like this at the start of the year,” I said. “It tapers off around mid-April.”

“Mid-February, I’d say,” added another.

The newcomer looked at her new fitness partners in crime with amazement. “You all sound like troopers.”

“The strong stick around,” one woman remarked. “The strong and the resolute.”

“I sincerely hope to be one of you by this time next year,” the newcomer said.

“Just take it slow,” I said. “Don’t try to do it all, all at once.”

I directed that advice to a newcomer, but in reality I’ve been repeating it to myself several times as 2014 has gotten underway. I love the rush of energy and spirit that comes with the start-of-year resolutions, but with that rush often comes chaos. In the first couple of days of January, I was invited to join a Facebook group on monthly challenges, to try out a Pilates studio, and to join what has evolved into an international fitness group Team David that supports one individual’s effort to reshape his eating and exercise habits for life through self-discipline practices that build on Dave’s own efforts. I also began reading Joe Friel’s Triathlete’s Training Bible and scouring the Internet for winter triathlon training programs.

With all that enthusiasm came a sense of overwhelm. The monthly challenge page urged me to follow a high-paced cardio regime aimed at burning fat fast. Team David invited me to keep a nutrition diary, and to do 15 minutes of daily strength training. A website organized by Joe Friel created a virtual workout plan for me that de-emphasized swimming and focused on short, fast timed intervals. Just reading the differing bits of advice and training tips tired me out, and made my body ache. Moving my body suddenly seemed less like fun and relaxation and more like “no-pain-no-gain” style work.

Was this what I really wanted to do?

The question, of course, is largely rhetorical because I already knew the answer was no, deep down. But I realized that in order to silence the resolution roars around me I needed to remind myself of what was important for me to accomplish and to realize that full-speed-ahead wasn’t the philosophy that would work for me.

By Monday, Jan. 6, I felt re-centered. I was ready to return to taking it slow. And as I slowed down and listened to my body, the workouts started to feel less like work and more once again like fun. With a return of fun came a new sense of energy. I ran faster and cycled more consistently. It was as if I had set an intention to be stronger and faster, and intentionality manifested itself in relaxed movement.

My doctoral advisor in graduate school once noted that people always seemed to be in a hurry. He thought we should slow down and take time to try and really understand a particular situation instead of trying to solve it all at once. I often think of this suggestion as I struggle with balancing the multiple demands that life activities impose upon me. Lately, though, I have started to come to think of this struggle with balance less as a challenge of multiple demands and more as a sorting of priorities. What really matters the most in life? If you want your being-ness to reflect a certain way of life two decades from now, what are you doing right now that puts you on that track? What is detracting you?

I still remember an uncomfortable conversation I had in 2011 soon after my journey through moving your body began. I was losing weight, in ounces and quarter-ounces. A friend — my same age — was losing pounds every week. I asked her via Facebook what she was doing. She responded that she was following a weight-loss program that required an appetite suppression pill at regular intervals. She waxed enthusiastically about its wonders. She urged me to be brave, to re-take control of my destiny, and to try it. I declined, saying that I wanted to see what I could accomplish through daily weighings, attention to portion control, and regular exercise first. She was supportive but disappointed, and in her disappointment implied that I was among the un-brave. Three years later, I am not sure where the friend is with her weight loss. I do know, however, where I am, and I do know that I got to the point where I’m at by taking it slow.
Many studies and media reports depict obesity as a societal disease. Perhaps, however, the answer is not to race for a cure but to heal the disease, slowly, steadily, one step, one day at a time.

Dreams and goals

Today was one of those days. The snow was falling when we woke up and the outdoor thermometer’s hand gauge was firmly positioned at zero degrees Fahrenheit. The snow never stopped fallen and the temperature didn’t rise above nine.

I counted myself fortunate for not having to go anywhere. I spent most of the day wrapped up in what my husband Jim calls my “blanket pod”, sitting on the sofa next to the fire and reading. I got through a few more of the academic articles I had downloaded as holiday reading before turning my energy to The Triathletes Training Bible by Joe Friel.

Friel’s book is a bit of a classic in the triathlon training realm. I had stumbled upon the title a couple of weeks ago while searching for information that might help me determine whether I was ready to start training for a half-Ironman as well as some better advice on devising individualized training plans.

Friel’s book offers a lot of good advice on both of these fronts. It did help me decide that even while I probably am in good enough physical condition to train for and complete a half-Ironman, I want to complete at least one more Olympic Distance triathlon and a few more similar events before making the half-Ironman my goal. It also helped me gain a stronger sense of how to assess my fitness strengths and weaknesses and offered some suggestions that I think I can follow for improvement.

One weakness of the book is an issue that I have had with many “standard” books for those who are physically fit and are eager to improve their performance in particular events. The charts and other helpful graphics generally do not include finishing times or interval splits that would encompass athletes like me. Friel, for instance, provides several useful drills that one can use in the swimming pool, on a bicycle or fitness cycle, and on a treadmill or running track to gauge one’s current level of fitness and practice at periodic intervals as a way of tracking improvements. He describes one of them as doing a warm-up run at a very slow pace, such as 6 miles per hour. I laughed out loud when I read his definition of very slow pace. A pace of 6 mph is a 10-minute mile. I’m lucky if I can run a mile at that pace in a fast race; a very slow pace for me would be closer to 4.5 miles per hour — and that’s a big improvement over three years ago when I was happy to be logging 15-minute miles at a brisk pace!

Still, once I got past my laughter, I realized that the drills could still be useful. I could just adapt them to my level.

A most useful aspect of Friel’s book was his emphasis on differentiating dreams from goals. While he explains that we all need to have dreams — qualifying for the Boston Marathon, completing an Ironman — we need to be realistic in setting our goals for a particular year. Goals, in his words, should be measurable and while they should stretch and challenge you, they should be attainable.

It’s this logic that helped me decide that a half-Ironman should remain a dream for 2014, though it could become a goal for 2015. So the next step was to fine-tune the goals.

Friel recommends a primary goal, a secondary goal and a possible third goal. He thinks three is enough for one year. I’ve already established that I want to improve my times in the Olympic Distance Triathlon and the marathon. I’d like to do so by entering the same races that I did in 2014, partly because these races are local and more affordable and partly because I’d like to compare my performances two years in a row on the same course. I’ve also established as a goal a desire to add more consistency into my training.

These goals are good ones, but in Friel’s logic, they need a more tangible shape. How much would I like to improve? What do I mean by more consistency? And, to a certain extent, which goal would I want to prioritize: the marathon or the triathlon?

In puzzling these questions, I have come up with some tentative answers. I completed last year’s marathon at a 12:33 mile pace. I’d like to improve that this year to a 12-minute mile pace, or better. This would give me a finishing time of approximately 5 hours and 14 minutes, a 15-minute improvement over my finish from last year. While this is fairly ambitious, I feel that it is attainable if I train for a marathon with more consistency. Last year’s marathon was a secondary goal. The marathon came seven weeks after the triathlon and prior to the triathlon the longest run I had completed was a single 10-miler. This year, there is the advantage of a little more time. The Fronhofer Tool Triathlon is schedule for August 2 (instead of August 3) and the Adirondack Marathon is set for September 28 (instead of September 23). This bit of scheduling adds an additional week between the events, which I think will enable me to develop a plan that works in a more solid post-triathlon recovery and a less haphazard build-up and pre-marathon taper.

As for the triathlon, I completed it in 4 hours and 2 minutes. The swim took 33 minutes; the bike ride took about two hours, and the run took one hour and twenty-six minutes. I already know that my running fitness has improved greatly and am looking as a result to finish that leg at the same 12-minute mile pace (or better) that I am setting for the marathon. That alone would shave 14 minutes off my finish time. I also know that my performance on cycling leg was hindered by getting a flat tire. The fact that I didn’t have a spare tube, didn’t know how to change a flat tire, and had to ride backwards on the course and thus go over completed terrain twice in order to get help all added several minutes to my cycling time. I also know that my cycling fitness is likely to improve this year, so I am aiming to shave at least 15 minutes from that leg. While I am hoping that I can improve my swim time with more practice in open water, I don’t expect a great change in performance in that area unless I invest in a wetsuit — something that I probably won’t be able to afford in 2014. However, I do think I can reduce the time I spent in transition zones by two or three minutes. So, with these considerations in mind, my triathlon completion goal for 2014 is 3 hours and 32 minutes.

Which goal do I want to prioritize? And what do I mean by more consistent training? One of Friel’s guides for assessing strengths and weaknesses is to consider three areas: endurance, force (the ability to withstand challenging conditions like rough water and hills), and speed. As I examined each of the three triathlon events, endurance consistently came out on top, with force and speed trailing well behind. Friel noted that endurance is more important for events like a marathon, while force and speed will be more significant factors in shorter, faster events like sprint-distance triathlons. He also noted that longer triathlons — meaning half-Ironman and Ironman events — rely more on endurance than force and speed but that events like the Olympic Distance triathlon benefit from strengths in force and speed. While he cautions that some of these strengths and weakness areas are dependent on the physical makeup of one’s body, training can do much to overcome weaknesses. With those ideas in mind, I feel that it does make sense to capitalize on strengths while simultaneously working on weaknesses. With that in mind, I see the marathon as 2014’s primary goal and the triathlon as a secondary goal — though not too secondary. I also see consistent training as devising and following a plan that will help me strengthen my weaker areas.

Friel devotes two full chapters to developing an annual training plan and to creating a weekly workout plan. I look forward to delving into them over the next couple of days.

Stories to start a new year

A new tradition for my new years is emerging: Make sure to do a final workout on December 31 before the YMCA closes at 2 p.m. and make sure to do the first workout of the new year on January 1 before the YMCA closes, once again, at 2 p.m. The Saratoga Y so rarely closes its doors early for holidays that I have come to honor and appreciate the abbreviated hours that the staff keep on the rare days that it has deemed a holiday. Plus, it’s fun to scramble to squeeze in the last miles and the first ones on such a schedule.

I ended the year with a 10.1-mile ride on one of the fitness cycles and a quick 12-minute run on a treadmill, logging 1.1 miles. I began 2014 with 5.06 miles running on the indoor track and 1,000 yards swimming in the pool. I was scrambling to get dressed when the facilities manager announced over the loudspeaker that the Y was officially closed.

“What were your resolutions?” my husband quipped, as I rushed into the foyer at 2:05 p.m.

“They were to get to places on time,” I responded. “I didn’t say anything about leaving on time.”

Part of the reason for the delay was a slightly longer run than I had planned on doing. I was thinking about running three miles, but soon after I began my laps, a woman who is approximately the same age as me and was running at more or less my pace made a comment about my stride and we ended up conversing for a full five miles. We had a great chat about running, training for marathons and triathlons, work and life. It reminded me of how pleasant it is to run with a companion, and because her pace was just a hair faster than mine, I was pleased that I had an opportunity to push myself without leaving the boundaries of comfort.

With the start of a new year, resolutions are flying thick and fast. I have kept mine relatively modest. Besides trying not to gain weight, I want to improve my triathlon and marathon times, break a decades-old behavioral pattern of arriving at meetings and other appointments late, and be more focused and deliberate in my writing. On the sporting events, many fitness sites, motivational coaches, and health advisors recommend finding a coach or training with a group. I have trained with groups in the past, and generally have not enjoyed the experience. I often find it difficult to match my pace and my capabilities with that of a group, and sometimes feel as if members of groups emit a self-disparaging negative speak that deflates my own energy. I also have found that trying to keep up with a group generates a fair amount of anxiety in me, and leads me to question my own goals and abilities. Those issues, coupled with the costs that are often associated with joining a group as well as issues of having to be at a particular meeting place at a given time, have caused me in recent years to step away and simply train on my own.

Yet, experiences like the chance meeting with a runner whose pace is compatible with mine are quite invigorating and rewarding. They leave me wondering if perhaps there’s a way to balance self-training with some partnership and maybe some group participation.

I had a similar experience at the Y about a month ago. I was upstairs running on the indoor track when a man who seemed to be running just a hair slower than me asked me how far I was planning to go. Like me, he was running some laps and walking others. (The indoor track requires nine loops to complete a mile so the run-walk approach works particularly well.)

“I’m not sure yet,” I answered honestly. “Maybe five?”

A lap or two later, he had caught up to me. “Are you Chinese?” he asked.

My hackles went up. “No,” I replied.

“Are you Irish?” he asked next.

Remembering a “race game” that I used to use in teaching Political Science to highlight the changing definition of the term “white” in America’s history, I decided to have a little fun with this gentleman. “I am Irish,” I replied.

“Oh good,” he said. “So am I.”

For the next two miles, he then started telling me the most interesting stories of his parents’ emigration from Ireland in the early twentieth century and their initial arrivals in two different neighborhoods in New York City. Because I teach immigration history and encourage students to engage in the writing of personal immigrant genealogies, I listened and I asked questions. One of his parents had come from a rich background, while the other was poor. I was curious how they had met, and he mentioned that they met at an Irish social. That led me to wonder where the Irish socialized in New York City in the early decades of the twentieth century and how economic lines blurred in lieu of ethnic commonality. I am not sure why he decided to catch up to me and start regaling me with such interesting stories, but I certainly enjoyed the experience and the miles went by fairly quickly.

He stopped just as I was completing my third mile, saying he was done. “Thank you for sharing your stories,” I said. “And, by the way, I am not Irish.”

“Oh, I knew that,” he said.

He then asked me if I was Japanese. I said, “Indian.” He wished me a good night and took his leave, and I found that my last two miles were much smoother than I’d anticipated.

The moral of this story? I’m not sure. Mostly, I hope that I have more random meetings with runners whose paces match mine and who don’t mind running and engaging in conversation.

And, perhaps, since I brought up the “race game”, I should explain it. Both the Irish and Indians were colonized subjects of Britain. Both were despised by their oppressors and both were caricatured as being “not white.” When the Irish first arrived in the U.S., they were regarded are slovenly, loathsome people by those from elsewhere in Europe who saw themselves as more superior. Many editorial cartoons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depicted the Irish as “black.” Indians arrived in the U.S. in small numbers in the early through mid-nineteenth centuries and often integrated for purposes of personal safety into African American or Latino communities. A handful, however, used geographic and linguistic referents that traced some peoples of India to Caucasians (peoples of the Caucasus region and/or peoples of an Aryan language genealogy) to claim whiteness, as whiteness had been established in 1792 as the prime criteria for naturalized citizenship. The growing economic mobility and political clout of the Irish over time erased their status as “non-whites” while the racial hostilities of the early twentieth century against Indians resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that de-linked the definition of white from Caucasian and tied it to the color of one’s skin. The point that I tried to make in teaching political science was that race was not a fixed, biological signifier, and that in this sense persons of Irish and Indian ancestry held something in common.

But perhaps there is more to be shared, in the exchange of stories, stories that crop up in surprising places and in unexpected moments.

May 2014 bring more such surprises.