run this amazing day

1. I had one of those "I can't sleep and I have no idea why" nights last night.  I drank my sleepy tea, I was in bed, allergy medicine taken, book read, and just....nothing.   2. So this post might make significantly less sense than usual. 3. I don't hoard running shoes anymore. 4.  I can't sleep on airplanes. 5. When I first met my husband, I made him a playlist of music called, "thom starter kit."  It's still on my phone. 6.  I'm kind of excited about the pile of hills I'm going to climb tomorrow. 7. The only reason I haven't purchased a new dishwasher is because the one I have is only three years old.  But I hate it with every fiber of my being. 8. I don't read or watch the news, I don't listen to the radio and I have no idea what is going on in politics. 9. I never make a list of things to pack before I go on vacation. 10. I found a huge knot in my calf last night and panicked and beat the crap out o...

1. I figure it's time for a SBR (that's swim-bike-run for all you non-abbreviating heathens) update since I haven't bored you with the idiosyncrasies of my training for a while, and what is this blog for if not self-absorbed yammering about my life?  Swimming is going quite splashingly.  I'm going to be racing the 1000 yards in a few weeks, which will be the first time that I have ever been in a swim meet possibly in my life to date.  I have a very hazy memory of doing the one-arm backstroke as a tiny little Katie, but I'm fairly sure no coach would have actually put me in a real meet due to my refusal to use both arms to swim instead of just one while the other held my nose.  I've been seeing slow but steady progress in the pool, most of which I attribute to having some fast feet to chase on the weekend recently.  My victory this week was finally breaking 1:20 for 100 yards (as part of a larger set) after swimming a very frustrating 482 1:21s in a row last wee...

Puppy: Ass (excerpted from more gait analysis): And the best of both worlds, puppy ass: That's my life in a nutshell, folks.  Happy Wednesday!

And I love it. I'm in the middle of a few mellow weeks of training before it gets hot and heavy on the downhill ride to CdA.  Every day last week, I had only one workout to do and most of them were under an hour.  And it was enough.  Not tapering into the half marathon had me running very close to an empty tank post-race, and I soaked up the easy light days.  This weekend things started to go back to normal.  On Friday, I finally got my bike back, with the old crank on it.  I did my 765th quick fit of the season and things seemed good to go. I actually went back and looked at the pictures of all the fits I've had, and to me - someone who loves bicycles but does not know a whole lot about them - they look identical.  Initial fit: Fit after crankset replacement: Fit after crankset un-replacement: Bike nerds, what do you think?  Other than I should maybe own a second pair of tri shorts.  And I got kinda fat in January. Saturday morni...

1. My calf behaved better than I expected last weekend at the half - I didn't even notice it during the race.  Afterwards, once I got blood moving again and then sat down for a while, it stiffened up and felt really sore in the area of the tear.  I knew it was possible that running would open up the tear again, so I wasn't too worried.  I don't like taking advil/ibuproufen after a race, so I spent the first couple of days alternating ice baths and epsom salt baths, doing some light stretching, and just in general trying to treat my legs with sparkly kid gloves.  Once I got through my post-race Oreo-and-BBQ-quesidilla bender, I hopped right back on the recovery food train, and I've been sleeping 9-10 hours every night.  So there's some serious healing going on over here.  I saw my "doesn't hurt me" PT on Tuesday morning, and she said that there's a lot of scar tissue and inflammation and adhesions just floating around in the calf right now.  She dug...

This morning on my ride I blew through a smell that reminded me of Sofie.  Probably the closest I will ever come to feeling like a mama.

The Marathon is an emotional distance, and I am an emotional guy. The only problem with this match made in heaven is that you (or at least I) can't sustain the level of intensity needed to run for four plus hours. I learned this in Philly last November. At that race I high-fived everyone. I noticed every sign. I road every downhill and fought every uphill with my intensity. I fed off the crowds and the start and the thousands of runners all oozing good energy and good vibes. I was the perfect empath, and for it, I had a great half. Then we split. The cheering crowds, the good feelings, the Rocky music. And for the second half of Philly I felt all alone - at best, surrounded by people in bad shape - at worst, the perfect little empath. For National I had a different plan. My first goal was to run my own race. And that meant turning down some very kind offers from very cool people who were willing to do some, all or any of the course with me. It is not in my nature to turn down he...

Race morning is my favorite. It's better than Christmas, it's better than vacation, it's better than the day I got to pick up my new bike and ride it.  On most race mornings, I've spent the better part of the preceding days being crabby and stapled to my couch, and I finally get to let all that energy explode out of me.  I blast music, I bounce off the inside of the windshield, and my shoes appear to have been overnight loaded with springs.  It usually hangs around until I get into my corral and then I try to suck it all back inside me and save it for mile 11. Saturday morning went perfectly.  I ate and drank the things I needed to eat and drink, I had not one but two successful deliveries to the porta-potty wizard, I mixed up my race fuel and even managed to spray the poet with sunscreen a few times when he wasn't paying attention.   For the first time in a long time, the entire mafia was going to be out there racing, all of us with different goals but a...

1. I don't have any idea what "TMI" means.  I mean, I know what it's short for, but it's an alien concept to me. 2. I actually left my watch at home this morning while I ran.  It was bizarre.  I will never know what my HR was for those 30ish minutes.  No one will ever know. 3.  I think red peppers taste better than green peppers. 4. I talk.  A lot.  All the time, but when I'm in pain, it's a lot faster and all jumbled together and you can't make it stop.  Just ask anyone in my farm of physical therapists.  Or the crazy woman that does my bikini wax. 5.  I am 5lbs lighter than the last time I raced.  I do not think it matters. 6. I sleep on my stomach with one leg bent out to the side like the tree pose in yoga.   7. A tiny space opened up in the past year behind one of my side teeth.  The dentist calls it a "food trap" but I call it "the thing that makes me actually floss." 8. I've blocked out time thi...

1. A month or so ago, I put a compact crank on my bike.  It also had shorter crank arms.  The first day I had the new crankset, I went out for a spin and pretty immediately felt stabbing pain in my right adductor.  I thought it was my fit, and when I bumped into Darrin a few minutes later, he did a side-of-the-road adjustment for me. But I was still having problems, so I went into Bonzai for a complete re-fit.  And then another one.  And then stopped by during a ride for another one.  And I'm still having the exact same problem.  Stabbing pain and tightness in my adductor.  When I go see my PT, he loosens it up, and it feels like a million bucks until I get on the bike, and then BAM, pain and tightness.  It's actually quite amusing, because I'll try to swing my leg over the bike seat to get off, and it's so tight that I can't get my leg clear of the seat and end up just kicking myself in the wheel until I lay the bike down on the ground and ...

My love affair with running?  Not going so well these days.

I've had some good workouts scattered throughout the past few weeks, ones that keep me going through not being able to run and then returning to running only to see that I still have to run at the same slow paces I was running at before (two weeks off didn't make me faster at low HR?  Rude).  I don't really ever talk about my workouts here anymore, not because they aren't interesting, but there are only so many ways I can talk about trying to keep my HR under 145 while still making running motions with my body.  But a few have stuck with me. A week or two ago, I hit my target HRs on the trainer for an entire 2.5 hour workout.  (Dramatic pause for effect).  ME, who can never get my HR over 130 on the trainer and when I do it's for 5 seconds and my heart feels like it's going to explode and I look down and see - 131?  Are you kidding me with this?  But I hit all those little windows for an entire workout, and I walked around cocky, strutting my big ga...