run this amazing day

Checking in with July goals: August Diligently follow whatever crazy regimen of medicine is handed down from the breathing doctor.  Do not neglect the nasal spray just because it’s weird and gross.   I have been a picture of nasal spray perfection. It’s time to do some more cooking experiments.   Lots of these this month, with sweet potato burritos a new favorite in our house. Do not get sucked into end-of-summer swimsuit sales.   Not a single swimsuit was purchased! Do not become addicted to expensive running shorts.   This is only going mediumly well. Spend more time with the 3D people in your life and less time worrying about the 2D people that live inside the laptop.   I am a work-in-progress. Do not buy any more nutrition until the cabinet is EMPTY.   I bought more powder, but only after the other powder was gone, and nothing else!  We're still working through the pile of freebie EFS liquid shots. Life is returning to normal. ...

1. I've been on the wild round of breathing meds for about three weeks now, and I think it's safe to say they have made a pretty significant difference in my life.  As my body adjusted, my heart rates as related to pace in training balanced out to numbers that look familiar.  The long run I did the week before I started on the regimen was averaging in the 12 minute/mile area, which I'm not sure I've ever seen.  The one I did three days after starting the drugs averaged in the low 11s, net uphill out the W&OD trail to work, and the one I did last weekend was well into the 10s.  My associated heart rate averages also dropped with these runs.  Numbers = science = drugs are good.  I'M NOT DOPING I SWEAR TO GOD. The only symptom that is still lingering is a decent amount of congestion, but I've got my follow-up appointment next week so hopefully my doctor can slightly adjust a drug that will help me dry out.  There's a decent chan...

I cleaned my own drive train yesterday (even though my mom told me I'd someday go blind). I ride the crap out of my bike and clean/lube it sooooort of regularly, but I was still a little amazed at how much funk was up in there.  The word "ouch" showed up again in today's workouts and I'm pumped to go out and ride my squeaky clean sex machine.  Please ignore the fact that my pants are three sizes too big, I didn't realize that until I was putting them on at the gym post-swim. In other news, Sofie's hair is in the in-between stage of growing it out and she isn't handling it all that well. A hat might be a good answer for a while, Sof. Happy Wednesday, friends!  Have you ever taken your bike apart and then let someone else much more knowledgeable put it back together?

After I wrote my post last week about how I was in a giant hole, I got a couple of mildly concerned notes.  Nothing dramatic, just an, "are you sure you're ok?" kind of check-in.  And I was okay, but I was also a little worried about how fragile my legs felt.  Along the same lines, Sonja became weary of listening to me whine about how tired and trashed I was, and she went in and slightly adjusted my schedule so I could find something else to complain about.   Wednesday I had a mildly long ride which I rode pretty far into the range of "all easy."  Thursday I was actually able to put a little bit of spring in my swimming step and by Friday everything was starting to really calm down.  I'm sure I was in a similar hole during ironman training, but I appear to have erased it from my memory and was pretty startled and not at all amused when it came crashing back. By Saturday I was starting to get a pretty serious case of the antsy-pants.  I had my las...

1. I almost never answer the phone. 2. I haven't eaten meat for about three weeks now (thanks to the poet for correcting my grammar). 3.  ....but still haven't managed to start the dairy-free experiment.  Is vegan cheese any good or is it just pretentious like the little seeds?  Does it defeat the purpose of the experiment?  Lie to me, please. 4. I've changed my mind about one of my fall races.  Don't worry, it didn't cost anything. 5. I think my resume sucks, and I'm terrible about writing cover letters.  You know what I'd be good at?  Let me tell you everything I am bad at, professionally. 6. I can burp on command. 7. We go through quite a bit of Powerade Zero in this house. 8. I have never done an olympic-distance triathlon all at once.  I've raced each of the legs. 9. I finally picked up my new contacts this week.  My right eye is a million times happier. 10. The muscle on the outside of your upper arm?  Mine is rea...

I know a lot of things (not everything, trust me, just go with me here for a minute). I know that taking a month off after CdA was important for me to do.  I was afraid of getting burned out with only half the season behind me (and the rest of my life in front of me).  I spent a lot of time in May on a bike looking forward to sleeping in and having Oreos for breakfast and I reveled in it .  But a month was a long time, and by the end of it I was itching to get back in the swing of training.  I know that is true. I know that no matter how gently I eased back into training, my body was going to be pretty crabby about it for a while.  Going from minimal activity - 30-60 minutes, if any, per day - back into what I would consider a fairly normal training schedule was always going to be a bit of a shock.  That isn't making me less pissy about not being able to hit a lot of my workouts right now, but deep inside, I know it's going to be okay.  And my bod...

1. I love oranges, but I almost never eat them because I hate my fingernails being orange all day from peeling. 2. I don't like soft-serve ice cream all that much. 3. I only learned recently that riding with people that have poor cycling manners makes me really nervous. 4. There are always bananas in our house.   5. I must be starving due to all the random food facts. 6. I've had the part of the "Some Nights" song stuck in my head the past few days...the part that goes, "What do I stand for/what do I stand for/Most nights I don't know." 7. I'm reading the Stephanie Plum books for the 10th time.  Team Morelli. 8. The major difference between half-IM and IM training is the amount of times per week I want to throw my bike in the bushes.   9. I'm getting ready to kick off my dairy-free experiment, and by "getting ready," I mean every day I declare, "I'm starting tomorrow!" 10. I have Yuengling porter and Bud ...

1. One of the things that I'm trying to do better is get out of the cycling-route rut I've been floating in all summer.  So when a monster long ride showed up on my schedule for Monday, instead of riding out to Poolesville for the 200th time, I packed up my car and made the trip out to Purcellville to do some of my favorite climbing loops. There aren't any really sustained climbs, but there's a lot of short steep stuff mixed in with long gradual rollers.  I did two loops plus another small half loop and my climbing legs were shot.  But I had a perfect day.  I bumped into a friend and we rode together for about 45 minutes, and I got to spend a lot of time in the scary dark places in my head, and then I put on some James Taylor and sang away the miles.  Going long on the bike just plain old makes me happy (especially when I don't have hard intervals to hit, word). 2. Stalking of the official race photos from the sprint brought this gem to light: Hopefully ...

A sprint tri is fun. This was my big revelation for the day. I had fun walking lane to lane and cheering Katie on in the swim and watching her run up the stairs of an Egyptian pyramid towards transition. I had fun chatting with the people around me in line for the pool as we watched perfect swim form and muscular bodies devolve into oddly flapping jellyfish, knowing our bad form was yet to come. I had fun swimming to the left of people, to the right of people, making a hole in the middle and going for it. I had a great time having my friend Brian (race photographer for a day) cheering me on as I came out of the water. God bless those who will wake up at the crack of dawn to watch the salmon spawn. In T1 I received a compliment. The woman who started just in front of me, who was not a jellyfish, who had a kit on and told me about her last 70.3 and used all the right words, said I was fast in the water. Tee hee. Me. Who trained all of two days in the pool. Silly but fun.  In T1 ...

So, if you had asked me on Saturday morning if I was racing this weekend, I would have said no. After the bike leg was canceled on his debut race, the poet signed up for a sprint this weekend in Baltimore i n an effort to complete a triathlon with all three legs .  Which would make the ninth consecutive day that I had set my alarm for a number starting with a 4 or 5, so I was a bit grumpy about it, but not too grumpy, because come on, now, he stood around in Idaho for almost 14 hours while I repeatedly tried to pee on myself .   But then it turned out that I didn't have to work on Sunday and then it turned out that we had access to a 50% off race entry situation and then it turned out that the poet thought that maybe I would be less grouchy about getting up in the middle of the night to watch him race for less than an hour if I was also racing (spoiler: NO).  So I texted Sonja and she let me know that if I couldn't get through a sprint right now I was basically a m...