July 1st is the perfect time to begin something new. Half of the year is over, so even the most committed and focused people have long since lost their enthusiasm for the resolutions born on January 1. Looking back through the posts on this blog, I am reminded that my inner fire was squelched on January 5. Perhaps this is why of the five goals I laid out for the year, only one has been accomplished. As for the remaining goals, one is not now, nor was it ever, realistic. The other three I suppose are still possible but they seem pretty unlikely, plus, I am feeling distracted and unsettled so it seems like now would be a good time to start something new. Otherwise, I’m going to lose my freakin’ mind.

Idea
July to June

Objective
Keep a log of 4 different activities in my life for one year (July 1, 2010- June 30, 2011)

Trackables

1. Miles pedaled on my bike

2. Beers consumed
3. Words written
4. Miles run on my own two feet

Point
None

Well, maybe there’s a point. I either currently spend or would like to spend a lot of my time doing the four things listed above. These are things, I believe, that make me happy. So why not see how much I really get to do them in a given year? Seems like it could be a tool to give me some perspective on just what I am doing with this life of mine. And right now, perspective seems like a very good thing.

I’ll be keeping track of my totals on a separate blog. Because if there’s one thing the internet has taught me, it’s that you can never have too many half-ass, poorly designed, self-indulgent blogs floating around cyber space. If you want to follow along, you can view the results here, or access the site in the right sidebar at any time.

Tags: july to june

It’s been about a month since I’ve written on this blog. Looking back at the title of the last post- “System Overload”- I can say that the same feeling of being overwhelmed continues to dominate my little world.

There are ways in which I have settled down at my job. Parts of what I do feel comfortable. Other parts feel way over my head, but the sickly feeling that accompanies having no idea what I am doing is consistent enough that now it just feels like part of my daily routine- walk dog, drink coffee, break out in cold sweat while reviewing to-do list at work, go to gym, and so on. Almost everyday I find out that something new has been added to my plate. Or maybe these things were always on my plate, but just safely hiding under the “and other duties as assigned” clause of my job description.

There are definitely some awesome things about the new job. For example, I seem to come home with a new work-related t-shirt almost every week. Since t-shirts are my favorite thing in the world, this makes me very happy. Kabluey, however, is not as impressed with the amount of swag that has entered the house during my first month of employment. Surely she will change her mind when the compliments start rolling in on the company-issued metal lunch box that I generously gave to her, and pack her sandwich in every day.

Enough about my job. It’s the Saturday of a 3-day weekend, so who wants to think about work?

As of today, it is 2 weeks until my half marathon. The farthest distance I have run is 8 miles. That was 3 weeks ago. I’m not great with numbers, but I am pretty sure that means I am screwed. I know it sounds like I have totally messed this up, but only part of it is my fault. And the part at fault is my hamstrings. Ever since my 8 mile run, I’ve had problems with my hamstrings that have manifested themselves through pain in my lower back. This is probably due to one of two things. It could be the horrific running form that I have mentioned before. Or it could be because I am getting old. Both reasons make me mad so who really cares which one it is. Kabluey has been giving me stretching exercises and if I can get up to 10 miles before the race, I may try to pull out the whole distance. I’ll have to make sure I bring work home with me that weekend, as it’s unlikely I’ll be able to walk for a while after the race.

One form of exercise that does not give me pain is bike riding. This is great because once I get past this ill-fated half marathon thing, I think it will be fun to ride my bike a bit more. Or at least ride it in the great outdoors, as opposed to on a stand in my basement, which is where I usually ride. I had already been thinking it would be a good idea to get my bike out of the house, but my recent bit of good luck solidified this idea. Kabluey and I were at Hopworks (our home away from home) attending one of their Mug Club parties. Neither one of us even knew there was a raffle, until they started pulling names for prizes like t-shirts and 22oz bottled beer. Imagine how excited we were when I won the grand prize, which was a $500 gift certificate to Bike n Hike!

I think it would be cool to get a city/commuter bike, and start riding to my office in Clackamas. I’ve only spent a little time looking at their bikes online, but so far these two are looking pretty sweet:

All this typing about Hopworks has got me craving a Rise Up Red. Off I go…

Tags: bike buying, half marathon training, Hopworks

I, along with 20,999 of my fellow Portlanders, participated in the city’s annual Shamrock Run yesterday. I thought the 8k run would serve as a good check point for my 1/2 marathon training.

These are the take-aways that should have come from the event:

1. I need to run more than 1 day a week if I plan to make it through a half marathon
2. Running on a track does nothing to prepare me for uneven surfaces, large crowds of people, or even the tiniest of inclines
3. One should stretch before a race, and maybe drink a glass of water or two in the days leading up to a run

These are the actual take-aways:

1. My new running hat is ok, but the one Riley ate was way better
2. I don’t want to do a half marathon

Hopefully I’ll get over point #2. Once the race was over and I was back home in my warm house drinking coffee in bed, I was happy that I did the Shamrock run. And my time was about 3.5 minutes faster than last year, which is encouraging. At the end of the day, though, I am probably just not cut out to be a runner. Ms O’Rourke, my elementary school principal, always told me I walked like duck. Which probably means I run like a duck. Which probably explains why I think this sport, in general, kind of sucks. But that is ok. It’s just a few short months of misery and then when it’s over, if I pull it off, I can gloat. And gloating rules.

Tags: shamrock run

I had been making progress with my half marathon training. At least it felt like I was making progress. Kabluey is playing in an outdoor soccer tournament near PGE Park, so I have been going to her weekly games and running at the track. As of Sunday, I am up to five miles. I’m happy about this because it’s about two miles more than I typically run at any one time, and it also puts me in good shape to do the 8k course at the Shamrock Run in two weeks (which I am doing primarily because the t-shirt is cool).

On Monday, however, my sense of satisfaction took a couple of hits. During a routinely boring morning meeting I asked my co-worker, who is doing her first half marathon around the same time as me, how far she has been running. She told me that she is up to nine miles. Fine. She is an over-achiever. I, quite possibly, am not. I can accept this. But then she said that according the training schedule, I should be up to seven miles for my long run.

A couple things jumped out at me in that statement, starting with “training schedule”. I know that there are a ton of training schedules out there, but I consciously decided I didn’t need one since it seems to be pretty obvious that in order to finish the race I just need to keep running more and more each week. It’s not exactly rocket science. But if I did have a training schedule, evidently I would know about things like “long runs”. Notice the use of the plural form of “run”. This implies that I should be running more than one day a week. Hmmm. As of right now, I execute one lone run a week. This got me thinking that I need to retool my regimen. Maybe there is something to these training schedules after all.

Unfortunately, any new-found enthusiasm for an increase in weekly running was immediately squashed upon entering the house on Monday night. I opened the front door and instantly my eyes were drawn to the living room floor, where I found this:

My sister gave me that hat not long after I moved to Oregon. It’s a great hat- nice long bill to keep the sun off my skin-cancer-prone face, mesh back so my head doesn’t get too hot, and it’s made up of my favorite orange and gray color combination. I’ve left that hat lying around for years, and never once has Riley even noticed it (I know it was Riley that did this. He of course has a long history of destroying my personal belongings. Plus, had Sigh done it, she would have meticulously chewed the hat into identically sized symmetrical pieces, then placed them all in a neat pile on my side of the bed with a handwritten note next to them that said “Give me back my mom or there will be others”). I can only assume that the reason Riley went for the hat on this particular day is because he overheard me the night before going on at some length about how much I loved wearing that hat while I run, and he thought to himself, if my mom loves it so much, it must be delicious.

So to sum up my Monday, I learned that I need to run longer, and more often, and with a sub-standard hat. This may be more than I can bear, but I will do my best to soldier on.

Tags: bad dog, half marathon

I’m doing a sprint triathlon in the beginning of May, and I really need to get back on a swimming schedule. I can half-ass the bike and run parts of a triathlon, but if I don’t reach a certain performance level on the swim, there’s a fairly good chance I’ll drown. The problem is that the pool at 24 Hour Fitness is pretty crowded in the early morning and after work. Because of this, I hadn’t been swimming in quite some time. I decided today to pack my gym bag and swim some laps at lunch time.

Amazingly, I actually went.

Predictably, my swim was a disaster.

I have a love/hate relationship with swimming. At this precise moment, I am firmly planted on the “hate” end of that. When I am swimming routinely, and not training for a specific event (which seems to send me into a panic), swimming is my favorite form of exercise. It relaxes me and, because I cannot see myself when I’m in the pool, I can trick myself into thinking I am fluid and smooth in the water. When I am not swimming regularly, I flail and gasp and wonder why no one around me seems concerned at all for my well being or the fact that at any moment I could sink permanently below the surface of the water.

I know it will feel better once I get back into the swing of things. I remind myself that two years ago I was so fast and focused in the swimming portion of my race that I actually lost track of my distance and swam an extra lap. A volunteer had to reach into the pool, grab me, and fling me onto the concrete pool deck like a beached whale. That may not sound like a good memory, but I was really fast that year!

I also know that as bad as my form was in the pool today, it could be worse. The last time I went to the pool the man in the lane next to me was wearing a t-shirt, cargo shorts and a baseball hat. It goes without saying that he dragged a little in the water. Then there’s Kabluey. Several months back I was trying to give her some pointers on the freestyle stroke. I had watched a video of Australian Olympian Ian Thorpe (”The Thorpedo”), and decided the knowledge gained from that YouTube video, plus a handful of novice triathlons, qualified me to give her instruction in the pool. Even after extensive schooling from me, she swims with her body in an “L” shape, with her torso parallel to the surface of the water and her legs perpendicular. A Thorpedo, she is not.

Rather than simply dwell on my poor performance in the pool, I like to diversify my feelings of inadequacy, so it was perfect that I had a soccer game tonight. I did lots of running and kicking (by kicking I mean swinging my leg in the general direction of the ball, and by no means am I implying that I regularly made contact) and at the end I was tired and sweaty and wondering how many seasons I have to play before my soccer skills make themselves known.

Now, before I call it a day, I’m thinking I should attempt to do a few more things I am bad at. Like math problems. Or piano scales. Or writing in cursive.

Tags: soccer, triathlon training

Looking back over my list of goals for the year, the item that I labeled easiest to accomplish is actually the thing I have made the least amount of progress on- running a half marathon.

Running is inherently evil. It’s hard on the body, a slow way to get around (if you are me) and super irritating to do in the rain, or cold, or wind, or scorching sun. Additionally, I run weird. If I run for more than a few minutes I get a bruise on the inside of my left ankle. I do not believe this indicates optimal form. But I am pretty good about working out, generally speaking, so training for a longer race seemed like a perfectly attainable goal. For whatever reason (chronic fatigue? pesky cold? deep-seated laziness?) I have not been good about consistently running. I have also not been good about biking or swimming, which should make my annual triathlon super fun.

But back to the running. I was having breakfast with my mom over the weekend and I casually mentioned that I was thinking of doing a half marathon. Her response, to my horror, was: “I was thinking of doing one too”. So now I HAVE to do it. My mom is 65-years-old. I cannot be outdone by her. She is strong, determined, and in good shape, but still it would be humiliating to fail at this while she succeeds.

This wouldn’t be the first time I have done something just to keep up with my mom. She is the reason I did my first sprint triathlon. She decided it would be fun and took the liberty of signing us up for a race. When I pointed out that I didn’t know how to swim, she defensively told me about all the money she and my dad wasted on swimming lessons when I was little, and how it wasn’t her fault that some kids just aren’t natural in the water. Then she told me I had 12 weeks to figure it out before race day. So I did.

And now, I must run. Not because I want to. Not even because I announced it on this silly blog and feel compelled to keep my fake internet promise. But because if there is even the tiniest chance that my mom will follow through and complete a half marathon, I want to be there by her side when she crosses the finish line. (Ok, technically, I want to be 2 steps ahead of her).

Tags: half marathon, training