jennblog

Like the Cavemen Did

In October I joined United Barbell, a new crossfit gym in SOMA that’s conveniently located in the same building as Kicker Studio. It’s run by two awesome women named Jenny & Olivia, and the people there genuinely rock. Shortly after I started they began a 30-day Paleo challenge, designed to get their athletes into the habit of eating like cavemen did: eliminating all grains, dairy, sugar and processed food in favor of lean meats, vegetables, eggs, seeds and nuts. Seemed like an impossibly strict regimen, but I always do better with elimination than moderation so I took the challenge, along with a dozen or so other gym members.

As advertised, eating Paleo wasn’t really as hard as it sounded. Apart from missing alcohol and occasional chocolate I managed to get used to a life of omelets, salads, and almonds and found myself cooking at home much more frequently, which was a necessary benefit of eating next to nothing commercially prepared. While it got monotonous in the middle and pretty tiresome by the end, I managed to go 30 days without cheating from the Paleo regime, and low and behold won the UB Challenge!

Six weeks later I’m still living like a caveman, apart from enjoying a meal a week that includes my long-lost carbs. If all goes well I’ll keep this up through the holidays and cement it as a general way of living in the new year. Turns out it’s not impossible, and nearly easy with enough planning. Proves that 30 days of anything can create a habit. I wonder how many more days it’ll take to turn into a lifestyle?

uhoh

looks like I’ve got plans for the next 6 months…

Bay to Breakers

Or, yet another reason for San Franciscans to don costumes.

Yesterday, Ben, Erika and I ran in San Francisco’s 98th annual Bay to Breakers race. B2B is a 12K (7.5 mile) run from the San Francisco Bay to Ocean Beach. It’s known for being a party disguised as a race.

Highlights include crazy costumes, a tortilla toss, a school of salmon who wear fish hats and run upstream from finish to start, centipede groups of 13 who compete in a connected line, giant floats lots and lots of naked runners. It’s unlike any other race I’ve ever done, and I’ve only seen the costumes that passed me on their way to the start.

I tried to get back to a suitable spectating location once I finished the race, but the roads were so packed (80,000 runners + crowds) that I couldn’t get close. Next year I’ll run in costume, I swear.

Erika brought flowers for Ben and I to carry since
we were under dressed (as runners).

Erika, on the other hand, was well dressed in her
Burning Man BumbleBee dress.

Token naked guy photo, because, well… there
are a lot of them. And they all carry bags.

There were a lot of Elvii at the race – this one
finished up just in front of me.

Slow Start to Cycling

I finally dug my road bike out from under its blanket this morning, and found it much worse for  wear after being exposed to the California air for 2 months. Since I moved to the Treehouse, I’ve kepy my bike on my front porch, covered by a Brookstone bike tarp that’s supposed to be weather proof. It’s not, however, rust, corrosion, or spider proof — my poor bike was covered in spiderwebs (and actual spiders)! Not to mention the front tire was out of true and the rear break was stuck. It was not a happy bike.

Took me the anticipated hour or so to run around and collect all the kit I’d packed away before I moved – cycling gloves, plastic sunglasses, sunscreen, cycling shoes, etc. I did some token bike maintenance before leaving the house – waxed the (dirty) bicycle chain, put air in the tires, and tried to right the wheel. I was an hour late to meet my cycling partner for the day. Luckily, she’s patient.

Soon after I arrived at her house I realized I forgot the most important accessory — the helmet. Sad to say, it’s not the first time (first time this year, though!). So we aborted plans for riding into Marin (no Golden Gate bridge for me) and instead made our way to Sports Basement at Crissy Field. The ride there was somewhat daunting, as I realized I was traveling wicked speed down hills with no break, no helmet, and a wheel that was all out of whack. Oh, and I couldn’t get my shoe to lock properly onto my pedals, to add to the fun. I ended up walking most of the humongous hill between us and the store, for fear of slipping out of the pedals or falling over without a helmet, but the downhills were scarier without proper brakes. Whee!

We made it to the store in one piece, and Rachel sat outside for 30 min or so while they trued my wheel and greased my brakes and I bought a new spare helmet (which she made me leave at her house for the next time I forget it!). We’d finally gotten back on the road and about 500 yards from the store when I realized my left cleat was actually crooked, explaining why I couldn’t get it to lock into the pedal at all anymore. Stopped in the grass to check it out — it was hanging on with one screw, and missing the lip that holds it in place. Good to know! So back to Sports Authority we went… (to be continued)

10 thoughts from my first week in the pool.

UCSF Pool

10 things I learned in the pool this week:

1. Swimming in a roof-top pool does not suck (per previous post,running along beach also does not suck)

2. I get some of my best thinking done in the water. managed to think through a self-imposed design challenge and craft an approach to a proposal while I was swimming. If only I could record the train of thought in my brain, I’d be so much better off.

3. If I did record my train of thought, there’d be a lot of “okay that was 3, or 4. shit, was it 3?  or 4? Ugh.” Because apparently I can’t count. Or I can’t hold onto a count, anyway. I try tricks like tracking sets of 5 laps (still get stuck between 2/3 and 3/4). Or sets of 10, where I tell myself “2 down, 8 to go,” thinking that combination of numbers will be harder to forget. But then I still manage to let fact that I’m heading into lap 3 seep into my brain before I touch the wall, which results in me starting that lap with “wait is this #3, or did I just finish #3?” It’s a tiresome game, but if nothing else it forces me to swim for longer — my rule is that if I can’t remember what lap I’m on I have to go with the lower number. In any case, the inner dialogue is pretty funny.

4. My form is much much better when I start out, and then it goes to shit once I get into a rhythm or get tired. This is normal I imagine, but I need to find a way past it. Today I tried 500 yards straight swim, 500 yards with training toys (250 w/paddles, w/250 fins), 500 yards isolated – half pull, half kick, and then a final 500-yard straight swim. That last 500 was much less effective than the first, but breaking it up in the middle helped a bit.

5. Swimming in zoomers is super fun. It’s been a while since I tried wearing fins in the water, and I only used them for 500 yards, but they do wonders for speed and power in the legs. I’m going to start doing kick training with them to see if I can build a stronger kick without them.

6. Conversly, the paddles are not so much fun. A necessary evil, as they force you to angle your hand correctly in the water, but when you’re off, you’re way off, and the big plastic paddle becomes a hindrance instead of an aid. (An obvious, point — they’re designed as such. But I was off as much as on target this morning).

7. Converting all my distances from yards to meters is depressing. 2000 yards becomes 1800 meters, and that’s just not as far.

8. The crosses at the end of each lane remind me of my dwell studio bathmat. Big blue plus signs lined up in a row.(Okay it’s a stretch, but it kept me distracted for a few laps.)

9. For the past week I’ve been walking through the lobby of the gym and up the main stairs to the pool, wondering how they keep the stairs from sopping with all the wet foot traffic they must get. Didn’t notice that no one else was sopping through the gym like I was, but finally figured out today that there’s an entrance from the locker room that leads directly to the pool.  Oops. At least I won’t have to flash the general public with my swimsuit look from now on.

10. I need to find some actual work outs with drills and such, or I’m going to get bored with my new found friend very quickly. Any suggestions?

The beauty of bad TV

One thing I love about my new gym is the fact that the treadmills and bikes have personal TVs. I know I should be thinking or reading or focusing on my form while listening to an optimized mix of speed inducing music, but really, when I’m going for  endurance, I just want tune out. And TV is great for that — the cheesier the better. Give me a 5 year-old episode of ER, a 10 year-old episode of Friends,  an E! countdown of some sort, and I’m good to go. Hell, a couple years ago I go saw all of Brett Michael’s first round of Rock of Love. (And probably saw a few episodes more than once!) Lucky for me, it’s pretty easy to find bad TV on basic cable, and thanks to MTV, early morning trash is just as easy to find as it is after work.

Yesterday’s 24 mile, 90-minute bike ride was made possible by, and if I’m honest actually only happened because of MTV’s Made. Anna from middle American wanted to be a model. And MTV was going to make her one. At about 20 minutes into my ride,  Anna was an awkward, self-conscious twig of a teen who was teased ecause of her height and felt like a big dork. I was sucked in by the idea that this waif-like creature in glasses could be so thin yet so uncomfortable with her body. I know, I know, it’s TV, and she’s all of 16. But still… it was fun to watch. One of the plotlines of the show was how the coach got her to be learn to be more confident. Apart from all the made-for-reality-TV training that went on, they also made her live in a uniform of form-fitting grey stretch pants and a matching tank top. For several weeks. Her first reaction, if I can believe MTV, was to not want to come out of the dressing room. Everything was too tight and too revealing, and she was embarassed to walk around. But forced to she was, and over the course of the next several weeks of living in a catsuit she became more and more comfortable in her skin, and started to look like a shell of her awkward self. Of course the haircuts and makeovers helped, as did the weeks of running aroumd manhattan playing dress up. But I thought the idea of stripping her down to just who she was and making her live in it for a while was an interesting approach. Watching the transformation of this girl (along with 2 other teens featured in the show) pulled me in enough that I kept adding minutes to my ride so I could see how it ended. By the time the show was over, and Anna hadd won the modelling contest and kissed the boy, I’d been on the bike for an hour and a half. And I call that bad TV?

just do it

So here I go. I started my spring training on Saturday, trying to to get myself back into some sort of shape for the Philadelphia Triathlon on June 28. The race is an olympic distance triathlon, which means it’s a mile swim, and 24 mile bike, and a 6 mile run. Not so far really — any one of those legs is manageable on its own. In combination they’re not so difficult, they just require some training to get used to doing all three together. I don’t do these things to win them, just to finish and finish well, meaning at a pace and comfort level indicative of a certain level of fitness. I’m no where near that level right now, so I have a lot of work to do.

I kicked off the festivities with a mini indoor tri at my new gym at UCSF. I started with an 800 yard lap swim, followed by a 10 mile bike (on a stationary bike) and a 3 mile run (on a treadmill). It wasn’t all that hard, given the fact that I hadn’t been in a pool in 6 months and hadn’t really done more than an hour of exercise consecutively in at least that long. But it did everything very slowly, which is what I really want to fix. I’m not sure how long the swim took, but the bike took 36 minutes, and the run another 35. Hopefully I’ll get faster over the next couple of month, and can try the same workout again with better results.

Running has been the hardest part so far. I want to be running a 9ish minute mile, and right now I’m at more like an 11:30. Big gap there. And it’s a depressing fact to deal with every time I try to run. On Sunday Ben and I went out to Crissy Field for 5.5 miles in the wind. I think it took close to an hour. in theory, running with someone who’s faster than I am, as Ben is, should help me speed up. But it more often makes me more aware of just how slowly I’m going, and doesn’t seem to make me any faster.

On Monday I did an hour of cycling on an indoor bike. I try to make the stationary bike somewhat challenging, using the hill profile on 8 or 10, but it’s not the same as riding a real bike. I need to start riding my hybrid bike to work (been talking about that for weeks now) and need to get out on my road bike an start training on hills. I’m scared of the hills here in San Francisco. They’re tall, and they’re long.

Yesterday I got back in the pool in the morning, and then ran in the evening. The lap swim wasn’t as much fun this time as on Sunday. Slow, slow going, I think I did 1200 yards. That’s probably only around 1000 meters, and probably took close to 30 minutes. I need a lot of work on my stroke efficiencies I think, and more than that I just need to get stronger. Which means lifting weights, which I haven’t done since December. For the evening run, Ben and I drove to Ocean Beach and ran along the water at sunset. And as he says, that really does not suck. I imagined myself as I was running enjoying it much more at a later date, when running comes easily to me instead of laboriously as it does now. The view was gorgeous, but not quite enough to distract me from the fact that I was huffing to manage a 1030/11 min/mile pace, and again ended up in the 11:30 range, taking close to 40 minutes for 3.5 miles. There was wind again, so we could blame the wind, but it’s also all the extra weight I’m carrying slowing me down. Which brings me to the other aspect of training – diet.

As of Saturday, I’m *trying* to keep to a 1,500 calories a day, so I can shed some of the XX lbs I’ve put on since I started doing triathlons in 2002. I keep blaming the bread and wine in Italy for the extra weight, but I’ve been back for 3 years now. Unfortunately, it’s not going to go away until I do something real about it, so here goes. Enough with the programs and the nutritionists, and the other routes I’ve tried for a few days at a time, this time I’m making up my own routine. I’m writing everything down (again). I’m upping the fruit and veg. I’m keeping my white flour and cheeses to a bare minimum. And I’m watching the alcohol. This doesn’t mean I’m not drinking at all — that’s just not realistic. But I’m trying to be judicious about it, and keep to my daily calorie count. It’s been all of 4 day so far, but so far so good.

Why am I documenting all this minutia you ask? Simply put, to keep myself on track. I’m hoping that recounting what I’m up to will add a smidge of extra obligation to my usual inner dialogue, and that once I get a bit further in I can start to report some progress.

The bottom line is that I needed to stop complaining about not being thinner/faster/stronger, and just get off my ass and do it.

So here I go.

warning…

Dear anyone who visits this site,

be warned, I’m going to start blogging about my triathlon training here. This will probably mean that I update more often, but I will most likely be sharing somewhat personal (and boring) information that anyone who doesn’t know me – and some of those who do – will find less than entertaining. Continue at your own risk. The race is in June.