run this amazing day

I'm not exactly sure that this even qualifies as a race, but I paid money and someone wrote on me with sharpie so here we go. This open water swim was on the schedule for the group I'm coaching with in Boulder.  I had a long series of training days with lots of early wake-ups leading up to the weekend, so when I went to bed Saturday night, I told myself if I get up early enough to make it, I'll do it; if not, I'll go to masters instead.   And the sun popped up early and so did I, and I felt okay so I threw the freak in the car and headed over to the reservoir. I got checked in pretty quickly and sat on the grass breaking not one or two but three sets of goggles, finally managing to arts-and-crafts together a single frankenstein version just in time to miss most of the warm-up.  At the reservoir, they open up a closed-in area for warm-ups and everyone swims in a tiny whirlpool circle, and it always makes me laugh to watch.  I was able to get in two quic...

It took me a while to work out what on earth the universe was trying to tell me when it flung me at the pavement last month. Or rather, I figured out right away that the message was,  slow the fuck down , but it took a bit longer to work out how to actually do that in my life.  Because suddenly realizing that I am spreading myself too thin doesn't remove any of the responsibilities that are holding me hostage to stress.  I still have a family, both including all the ones that sleep in my bed and the ones that are scattered throughout the world; I still have a job, one that I love but have thrown myself into around the clock; I  am  still training for my own season as an athlete, my next ironman, not to mention the one after that; I still have friends that I'd like to spend time with when none of us are sweating in spandex.  And the answer is not to quit training, or working, or having a family, or friends, or getting enough sleep, but something needed to ...

On the plane to Atlanta last month, I started reading Ariana Huffington's book, Thrive. I'm not an avid HuffPost person, I knew very little about her and had the idea that it would be another snotty memoir on how easy it was to climb the ladder, and I was delighted to be wrong.  One of the first big sections of the book talks about meditation.  And I will freely admit, I don't have a meditation practice.  The poet does, he reminds me all the time that if you don't have time to meditate for twenty minutes a day, you should meditate for an hour.   I always reply, swimming and biking and running, that is how I meditate  and I believe in that, most particularly when I'm in the water.  It is a place of zen for me, I can escape from the world, I can disappear in the water, I just bought a dorky Michael Phelps sweatshirt that says so but it's the truth.   But in the book, she addresses exactly that, the people that say, X is my medit...

There is only one possible way to begin a race report that includes a 10K PR and that is with the picture of the last time I PR'd my 10K back in 2010 (I did buy the photo but can't find it to scan in so here's the stolen version I posted on the blog). I ran a 10K this past January.  It was a less than spectacular race, I spent the two days before it skiing in Vail and the last mile was straight up the side of a mountain, I finished somewhere around 57 minutes if I remember correctly.  There was a yeti, and there were race pictures of me looking like this: Now, I don't think I have a distorted view of my body, so everybody hang onto their judgey britches, but for whatever reason, flipping through those race photos that day made me want to say, enough.  Enough is enough with being slightly unhappy about the way I look in spandex, not to mention the way I race, it's time for a change.  My knee hurt, quite a bit, in that race, it was a situation that I had be...