Stimpy's House of Pain

2008-06-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

7 Weeks of Hell: May 7 to June 24, 2007

2008-05-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

Week 1 of 7

The week started with a whimper. I raced on Sunday and age and treachery did not overcome youth and ability. I thought I would sleep in on Monday (knowing what is coming for the rest of the week).

This week my wind trainer (not a magnetic or fluid trainer but one with fans) finally croaked. I have been rebuilding it about 20 years old with assorted old and new parts. I found one in a used sporting goods shop. I should note that one of the advantages of living in Canada's second fattest city is all the barely used fitness equipment you can buy here. I pulled it off the shelf. They wanted $100 for it and with as much drama as I could muster I took it up to the till, took a deep breath, blew a bunch of dust off of it, and said, "I'll give you $50 for it." He said, "$60?" I said, "OK."

Where was I? Oh yeah, indoor riding. Another personality quirk that I developed from years of doing this is a lot of grunting, groaning, and loud cursing at the end of a hard workout. I do this in the basement and the family is used to this. I like to think of it as my "mighty barbarian yop" but I know I just sound retarded.

Erik had a school track meet this and was third in shotput. This is not a reflection of Erik's ability as a shot putter as he is 5'10" and 110 pounds, but is more a reflection of the sorry state of athletics at his high school. Erik also came home looking like I guess it could be best described as Lobster Boy after his first afternoon in the sunshine without a shirt on. I told him that he would feel better if he put some Lakota on his skin and had a hot shower. He said "no" because he heard me screaming last week when I did it.

On Wednesday I caught the 6:30 a.m. flight to Hamilton. Once a year I go visit Dr. Bob to do what Dr. Bob calls the Annual Pain Weekend. This is the 9th annual. How can I describe Dr. Bob? Dr. Bob is a biblical scholar who likes to ride his bike, and run, and like me, does not like to swim but will put up with it to get on his bike. Once a year we meet to engage in a weekend of male bonding and like a twisted sadomasochistic relationship Dr. Bob and I alternatively beat each other up and we like it. But before you get too excited, keep in mind that these are two middle aged men in spandex. We ride our bikes up and down the Niagara escarpment until we puke, and drink a lot of scotch. Actually, we drink more than scotch. Dr. Bob has a tradition at his house where we have martinis at 5:00 p.m., wine with dinner, then scotch while we watch movies. This is all after the traditional post-workout beer in the hot tub.

I got into Hamilton at noon. Dr. Bob picked me up. We went back to his house. I had my bike assembled inside of 20 minutes and we were out on the road to ride some hills and be back for happy hour. Thursday was much the same but without the flight to Hamilton. Unlike the last couple of years where I was hanging on for dear life, I made Dr. Bob curse my very existence. I ran 4 miles off the bike and we were done relatively early. I took the opportunity in the afternoon to take the train downtown to do some shopping and after traveling 3,000 kilometers I finally was able to find some running shorts in size small. On a whim, I ate an Egyptian restaurant. I had something called the babaganoosh, and it was delicious.

On Friday, Dr. Bob did not want to ride with me unless I was tired first and strongly suggested that I go for a hard run. Strongly suggested is a bit of an understatement. I know he was toying with the idea of driving me 20 miles out into the countryside and dropping me off with a pair of runners and a water bottle ... and, hopefully, clothes.

On Saturday we rode with the Oakville Cycling Club. I like riding with the Oakville Cycling Club. We ride in a tightly regulated double pace line and it is highly civilized and courteous unlike the people I ride with at home where the most often heard comment is, "Pull my finger!" It was windy, and cold. The irony of leaving the icy prairies to get some warm weather riding in was not lost on me because it was a hell of a lot warmer at home. I ditched the post ride run because it would interfere with happy hour.

That evening Dr. Bob and I made the huge tactical error of watching Rocky Balboa and in a scotch-induced haze decided that Dr. Bob's Ironman retirement is coming to an end and we are registering for Ironman Wisconsin in 2008. Doh! Dr. Bob's wife, Pat, who has only recently been able to tolerate me, is now officially back to hating me.

Sunday is long run day. Sunday is always long run day ... even with a hangover and the vague memory of making a stupid decision the night before.

I suppose there should be some useful training information in here. I have found that what you eat or drink right after a long workout is just as important as what you eat or drink during to help recovery, especially when piling on miles and intensity as I do in these weeks leading up to a long race. I mix maltodextrin, orange Gatorade, and protein powder in a bike bottle and use this both during and immediately after a long workout or short one that really digs into my reserves. Anyways, after drinking gallons of this over the week, and my eagerness to have a beer in the hot tub before getting on the plane, I thought I could just put some maltodextrin in my mouth and wash it down with some water. As I gagged, I thought of how lame is my death notice going to look "Found in Washroom in Burlington, Ontario with Bag Full of White Powder" when "Gunned Down in a Hail of Police Bullets" would have sounded so much better.

Weekly damage:
Run 55 miles
Bike 245 miles
Swim - nothing

Week 2

I slept in on Monday morning because it was a late flight back. In other words, Stephen won, Stimpy lost. The downside of Stephen winning is that this week I am trying to cram a week of training into 5 days so I can go fishing on the weekend with my dad and Erik and Anders without any guilt. As a result, Monday to Thursday was a blur.

From what I recall, I returned to the Swim Fit class on Thursday and still refused to do a stroke other than free style. The good news was that I had a lane entirely to myself. Oh the joys of being incontinent! Total swim was a whole kilometer.

On Thursday I was doing one mile repeats (running). I know that this is the last thing I should be doing 12 hours before a long brick (combined long bike ride and run) but I do a lot of things I am not supposed to do. Since the weather was decent for May and I had spent the last five months in a parka I took off my shirt to run. I could tell that my circus sideshow weight loss program was working because a passing by truckload of slack-jawed yee-hawing rednecks yelled, "You disgust me!"

On Friday I took the day off work to combine my long bike ride and long run and then get into a car in the afternoon and drive 5 hours to my parents' cabin. I biked 80 miles and ran 20 miles including the 5 k threshold run/time trial. This marked a high point of this workout and the next 90 minutes were a death march back home. However, I did get out to the lake and got in two days of fishing as well as four miles of running on both Saturday and Sunday because Stimpy said so.

Weekly damage:
Run 59 miles
Bike 180 miles
Swim 1 kilometer

Week 3

Monday is a holiday in Canada, the Victoria Day long weekend so I wasn't at work. Instead I worked out ... just for a change of pace. I slept in a bit, lifted weights, went out for a solid bike ride and then I ran with Erik for 8 miles including 10 times a 300 meter hill, and holy crap, he is getting fast. We did the last two hills in 51 seconds and the last one in 49. The second last hill, I saw stars. On the last one I saw Jim Morrison.

On Tuesday, I felt like crap but like a junky looking for a bigger fix, I worked out anyways: biked in the morning, ran at lunch and again in the evening.

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy. I am the enemy. It is Wednesday and I am sick. Being sick means an easy 10 mile bike ride on the wind trainer followed by an easy 2 mile run. I wish I could be sick like other people and sleep.

On Thursday I felt better. I was up early to swim, ran hill repeats in the evening, lifted weights, and rode and another 10 miles easy bike on the wind trainer.

Today was the high school city championships where Marit ran the 3000, the 800, the 1500, the 400, and the 4x400 relay. Erik ran the 800, the 400, and the 1500. Being an ex-800 meter runner, and sometimes coach, I tried to offer Erik some fatherly advice. He said, "Don't worry, I have a plan." Erik's plan was to spend the first 400 meters in second-last place and then run everybody down except for the leader. I don't like Erik's plans - they're stressful. So Erik was second in the 800, the 400, and was less successful in the 1500 and 3000. But that's okay; he gets to go to provincials. Meanwhile Marit was 4th in the 3000, 5th in the 800, 3rd in the 1500, 6th in the 400, and 3rd in the 4x400 and made provincials but, sick of local track politics, declined.

By Friday I realized that the music I listen to during my morning bike rides is getting progressively worse. This morning it was Motley Crue and Judas Priest. I'm sure next week I'll be listening to polka covers of Black Oak Arkansas. I noticed at work today that my grip on reality is loosening and maybe I really am a masochist. I saw a poster in the staff cafeteria that said "PAIN" and it immediately got my interest. As I got closer, I was disappointed to see that it was "PAIN-T BALL."

On Saturday I slept in until 7:00 a.m. then rode for 45 minutes on my own and met Team JFT at 9:00 a.m. There were 11 of us. Sometimes I think I have created a monster, but more on this later. Dr. Bob was in town and I rode with him and Conway who I have foolishly provided a training program to. To make a long story short, Dr. Bob and Conway teamed up to make me suffer and for whatever reason, I loved it. Conway made me cry like a little girl, beat me like a red-headed step-child, or a rented mule, etc. Conway has a new bike and told me that he has been "fisted" by some guy in Saskatoon. I thought this sounded pretty weird but whatever turns him on. During the one of the several times I got dropped, Dr. Bob took no small amount of enjoyment in pulling up beside Conway, gritting his teeth, and saying, "Stephen got dropped!"

There was one moment of joy, however, when we stormed past the "Look at me, I'm training for Ironman Canada (IMC)" group. The leader was wearing the official IMC cycling jersey, IMC arm warmers, IMC shorts, IMC socks, and, I'm sure, the IMC thong. I remarked as we passed, "Hey, did you do Ironman Canada or something?" The total ride was 80 miles. Then I ran 2 miles off the bike. For a brief moment during the run, it happened. Catherine Wheel's "Heal" come over the iPod and I found myself smiling at a passing insect.

On Sunday I was up early and biked 24 miles on the wind trainer, easy. Then I ran 36 miles and felt good, very good. A couple of hours into the run, the famous Sask RV drove past and stopped and said, "Hi." We chatted for a moment and then I ran off and I was thinking, "Gee, that was nice," just as the Big Sugar's cover of Mr. Fantasy came on the IPod and it happened again, I smiled at another bug. Gee, I am getting soft in my old age. In a few weeks the police are going to find me running naked through the field chasing butterflies.

Weekly damage:
Run 69 miles
Bike 180 miles
Swim 3 kilometers

Week 4

This week, worried about the excessive amount of metal I was listening to and the impact it was having on my psyche, I switched my cycling music choice away from metal to industrial. Monday morning it was the Genitorturers. I'm sure this will keep me well-adjusted.

There is just no rationalizing some of these bike workouts. I can't start them and easy and ease into it. They just hurt all the time. This was not a good week for swimming. I had a window of opportunity to swim at lunch on Friday but went out for lunch instead. The "city that rhymes with fun" has very few Mexican restaurants. One of these is a biker bar owned by the Hell's Angels. This is where I went instead of swimming. Not only is the food great but the rather skanky waitresses call me "honey" and "sweetheart."

My Saturday bike was pretty much a carbon copy of the week before same as before: Conway and a whole lot of pain. Why is it always truckloads of unattractive men that insist on making sexual advances as they drive past me? Once, just once, can't it be a bus load of Victoria's Secret models, just once?

So Erik won the provincial high school championships in the 400m Erik. Erik. Erik who sleeps 19 hours a day and shows up at the start line, hair uncombed, with eye-boogers, yawning, in basketball shorts, and without starting blocks. This must drive the real sprinters insane. Anywho, Mary and I drove a few hours to watch him run the 800m. It was stifling hot. Erik usually runs in a black bad t-shirt under his singlet. We were watching him from across the track and saying to ourselves, "Is Erik wearing a white t-shirt? Does Erik even own a white t-shirt?" Then it dawned on us, "OH MY GOD, THAT'S HIS TAN!!".

Erik was second in the 800m and ran everybody down in the last 200m except the leader. If he only started kicking earlier ... and dressed better.

On Sunday I dropped out of society again to run for 6 hours or about 36 miles. This begs the question: Does Stimpy really have my long term health in mind? It is also interesting to note that I started Sunday walking the dog in Sponge Bob pajamas carrying a coffee and ended it in leopard print bowling shirt clutching a Corona.

As a purely symbolic gesture, I mowed the lawn after the run. It was symbolic because our lawn is about the size of a postage stamp. At least I tried to maintain the impression that I can contribute to the household.

Marit is getting a bit militant about being seen in public with me as the weeks go by and had been heard to remark on more than one occasion, "Dad, hygiene, remember?" On a related note, I've stopped shaving on weekends. It's just too much work. Alarm bells will not start to ring however, unless I stop wiping. I talked to my mother on Sunday. She thinks I should have my old jeans back. Finally, we rented the van for Quebec from "Hertz," of course. I am the only one who thinks this is funny?

Weekly damage:
Run: 75 miles
Bike: 188 miles
Swim: well. nothing

Week 5

I awoke on Monday and suddenly realized that I need to swim ... something about an 8k swim looming in the future. I also checked the race website and noted with no small amount of alarm that original leisurely float down the St. Lawrence with the current and outgoing tide which raises the possibility of actually hydro-planing, overshooting the finish and ending up somewhere in the North Atlantic has been changed to a multiple lap affair in a "sheltered bay." Fuck.

With a slow and painful death on race day firmly ensconced in the back of my mind, I returned to Swim-Fit at lunch on Tuesday and the now heavily sedated instructor didn't care what stroke I used. Once again I got my own lane. Word of my previous indiscretions in the pool travels fast in the tightly knit local swim community.

On Wednesday June 6, a full three and a half weeks earlier than I've ever done this, a few of us drove out the lake for a quick swim. I lasted a whole kilometer. I've jokingly expressed my longing on some occasions to feel the "icy hand of death." I no longer want to make that reference, at least not for a while.

On Friday, I desperately wanted to sleep in but NOOO! I was up at 4:30am and ran 10 miles including 10 hill repeats. But it just gets better.then I swam for 5k with pull buoys and arms only. Since I forgot breakfast, had a big cup of coffee instead and 2 water bottles in the pool I found that all of this liquid went through me like the bullet train. The Y needs to drain pool ... perhaps tear it down and start again from scratch.

On Saturday I rode for 160 miles and whatever crazy ass Zen Buddhist monk version of myself I summoned from the depths of my psyche to get me through this was immediately drowned in Corona as soon as I was done.

On Sunday I found out that my dominatrix is on vacation so I ran for another 60k instead.

Weekly Damage:
Run 79 miles
Bike 213 miles
Swim 7k

Week 6 - Flogging a Dead Horse

I woke up on Monday morning with a backwards ball cap sun burn on my forehead and my testicles are no longer speaking to me. I also note that the pile of stinky workout clothes has become self-aware.

I did my weekly 10mile indoor trainer time trial on Tuesday morning and, much to my surprise, I am still able to squeak out some improvement. I knew it was going to be a good day when the Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" came on and I dropped my chain into my second highest gear and could still turn it over. I have a one more gear on my bike, an 11 tooth cog just to show that I have a sense of humour. I planned to have wanted to hear the Headstones "Unsound" to start playing as I hit the final 4 minutes, only to hear the line "I'd give you more but you know I have noting - hardly get any sleep at all". This was more than appropriate. By 9 am at work that day I crashed. I had already eaten my lunch and the spent rest of day looking for food.

I took Wednesday of work to bike for 96 miles including an 80 mile time trial and to watch Stewy run his school city championships in the afternoon. I know I shouldn't bet on grade 5 and 6's but I did anyways. Anyways, I wanted to get my long ride in early in the week because I'm racing an Olympic distance tri in Saskatoon on Sunday and entertain hopes of doing well.

In other news, I got some consulting work in Alberta after a long dry spell.then I got another project there. It's funny that lately I can't seem to attract flies in my home province ... well, that's not true. I attract a lot flies after a long run.

We visited some family on Saturday and I noted that I fell asleep twice will sitting up. I'm glad that the end is near.

Sunday was the last time I'm racing in Saskberia which felt rather strange. I don't need any short course racing in 2008 and after the Deca thingy, I doubt I'll have much enthusiasm for it. Finally, local triathlon politics are getting just too ridiculous for me.

Here's some history. In 2001, Regina Multisport Club (RMC) wanted to offer bike and run training. I volunteered to lead this and do it as a volunteer (as in free). Instead, they hired a board members wife to do it on a profit basis. After this failed, I started my own club. Actually, it wasn't me alone but I was the lightening rod for all the backlash. I think it is pretty juvenile and stupid and never ever responded to any of it until now and this is as far as I will go. Please note that I have retained a detailed email trail of my volunteer offer and it denial just in case any doubts the authenticity of the above.

Anywho, this year RMC, in there infinite wisdom, determined that online race registration is/was reserved for club members only. With races selling out in a matter of days this meant that even if you are from out of town you have to be a member of the local club to race. (I signed up Marvin as a youth member, he's only 7, to accommodate those who wanted to race locally without forking out the extra cash to join the club.) The Saskatoon club, in turn, made it very difficult for out of town athletes to do their races such as a Thursday night only race package pickup, no exceptions. So, I'm not interested in any of this and will race elsewhere, thank you very much.

The race was ok, I guess. My swim sucked, my bike split was 64 minutes and change which was tolerable for cold and raining. The run course was closed after I finished 5k because there was a single crack of lightning. I went and finished the run anyways, by myself, in the rain. It was all very anti-climatic for a last local race.

I was up at 4am on Monday to run 23 miles before work. It's my training log and I'm counting it as belonging to Week 6. If it was possible to sleep and run at the same time, I did it here.

Weekly Damage
Run 57 miles
Bike 160 miles
Swim 5k

Week 7- Flogging the guy who died while flogging the dead horse

Monday and Tuesday I worked long and hard on the consulting contract while still training and working my day job and was pretty pooped by Tuesday evening. I ran hills anyways. This required the least imagination and mental effort. The Running Room group was on the hill. I resisted the temptation to call Cult Watch. I must look like as much as an alien to them as they do to me. They have on cool max shirts, matching, baggy shorts, and run carefully heart-rate monitor monitored paces. I'm in a t-shirt, split shorts, no heart rate monitor, and weeze, grunt, fart and drool as I run uphill. I should note I own several coolmax shirts, usually from races, but reserve these for "formal t-shirt" occasions. I did run in one once, by accident. It felt kind of refreshing to not be all sweaty and clammy but I figured that something that feels good has to be wrong and I reverted to poly 50/50 blends.

I surprised myself by still being able to squeeze just a tiny bit more performance from my skinny little body. The prognosis for Quebec is good, very good ... and I could still drag my sorry ass to the pool on Friday morning and swim 4.5k (arms only) with pull buoys.

We headed up to the lake on Friday evening and then while riding on Saturday morning in the winds and hills I finally cracked and finished up 20 miles short of my goal. However, being sick and twisted, I did the final 20 miles on the wind trainer when I got home on Sunday night to make up for it.

The coup de grace for the 7 weeks of pure unadulterated Stimpy-led abuse was a 40k run on Sunday with 2 hours of it down a trail in northern Saskatchewan covered in honey and raw hamburger to work on speed. Actually, I ran with a bear bell because, although I'm not much of a meal right now, I'm a big coward when it comes to bears.

I'm developing a new appreciation for the lake mostly due to the lack of cell phone access (a very good thing), no TV, no internet, and no radio reception except for a very fuzzy am radio station from Melfort: 750 Oldies. Being a glutton for punishment, I just have to hear what they will play next. Where else are you going to hear Andy Kim, the Poppy Family, The Archies, and Keith Hampshire?

So, what was it like to finish the 7 weeks and taper? You know at the end of "Holmes on Homes" when the owners see the renos and there is all that relaxing music playing? It wasn't like that at all. To celebrate the beginning of taper time I stopped at KFC in Melfort and was promptly rewarded by 2 days of explosive diarrhea.

Weekly Damage:
Run 58 miles
Bike 165 miles
Swim 4.5k

Sleep is For Wimps

2007-05-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

It’s the beginning of May and I have one last easy week before all hell breaks loose. I am staring down the barrel of 7 consecutive hard weeks, where I over-load myself with both intensity and distance, followed by a 2 week taper, then the double in Quebec. Basically all the training I do up to this point is to prepare myself for surviving the next 7 weeks. Sometimes this phase is 6 weeks; sometimes it is 3 hard weeks, one slightly less hard week, and then 3 more hard weeks. This year, due to the random nature of when I started training in earnest in November, it worked out to 7 weeks.

So, is there any physiological basis for this? I doubt it. I recall, however, that Dave Scott used to leave home for 6 weeks and do something similar to prepare for Hawaii. Unfortunately, I have to do this at home and my capacity for logging excessive miles is hampered by the need to earn a living. Instead I substitute even more intensity for miles, day after day after day. If I don’t breakdown, I emerge on the other side a much tougher athlete. The good news is that during this pause the expectations for me to contribute to the functioning of the household go from low to zero. I have to do a lot of sucking up after this.

I’ve found that sleep becomes very expensive during these weeks and is traded at the margin like a scarce and valuable commodity. A typical evening conversation may go like this:” I need to sleep now. I will give you $20 to get coffee ready for the morning. Five extra minutes of sleep is worth that much to me.”

It’s a bit of a relief during the final 2 months to stop holding back. Prior to this point there really is a fuzzy thought process that which allows me to keep something in the tank for the final push. From this point forward, however, I can relinquish this burden and let my alter-ego Stimpy make most of the training decisions. Don’t try this at home: give virtual power of attorney to an overweight cartoon cat with a happy helmet. Back in my salad days, another athlete wanted to engage me in a detailed discussion about my “inner demons”. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my inner demon lives with a chihuahua named Ren Hoek and a collection of magic nose-goblins.

These weeks are crucial for me mentally and, to a lesser extent, physically to survive the meat grinder that is a double iron race. There isn’t exactly a text book on how to prepare for this. So much of the effort is mental. Flogging myself day after day for 6 or 7 weeks seems to be the only way to prepare for the relentless pounding I have to take during the race. I have another crack pot theory: that the body can take just about any training load for 6 or 7 weeks. In any case, I take a bit of joy in the age of power meters, heart rate zones, and certified on-line coaches with mountains of liability insurance to indulge myself in one last bit my iconoclastic behavior. I just hope it works otherwise I will look really stupid.

But it takes a lot of suffering just to get to this point. Since November, I re-learned a few lessons. First and foremost is the value of consistency. My weekly long run went to a minimum of 20 miles and sometimes touched on 22 or 23. My weekly, long bike stabilized at 3 hours, indoors, of course. I rarely missed my 2 night a week on the track, pounding out 300m to 1000m repeats. The same can be said for the Friday am bike-run. One thing that I try to impart on those I coach (or coached…I’m working very hard to not be coaching anyone) is that there is no silver bullet. No training camp, single workout, new diet, new heart rate zone is going to yield overnight results. The only thing that works is consistent work, week in and week out.

By the end of April, despite all the crap I ate on the randonneuring rides my weight stabilized in the 140-141 range. Somehow I completed another contract project in March but I can’t understand how this happened. Did I find any serenity during the training? Not really during any one moment but I found that rhythm of training was soothing. Rather, the rhythm of life around training was soothing: sleep, train, work, train, back to work, train, and sleep.

In other news, the swim class instructor, who lives a couple of doors down from me (and kicked me out for not learning another stroke), was hit by a car on his bike. He broke his collarbone and a couple of ribs as well as collecting a lot of road rash and I have an air-tight alibi. He was in the paper and on the television news. I dropped off a bottle of wine when he came home from the hospital. I’m sure that when the wine and painkillers kick in he will be in the news again: “Nude man in Armed stand off with Police”.

Stupid Human Tricks (Vol. 2)

2007-05-07T19:22:00.001-07:00

In April I did a number of things that has my cold, analytical, rational economist self scratching his head.

First off, I ran a marathon on my easy week. A friend of mine wants to run his 100^th marathon this year and needed one this month, on Good Friday. He needed 8 starters and 5 finishers to make it an “official” marathon so I got sucked into it. I did have the foresight to really ease up on the training the week before to pull this off without jeopardizing the next 3 weeks of abuse. The back of my right knee was a bit sore for a few days afterwards but I kept running on it and it went away. Sometimes it is good to be me.

Secondly, I rode a lot. I hooked up with Prairie Randonneurs for 200k on April 14 and 300k on April 28. The pace was a bit slower than what I would ride if left on my own (16 to 17 mph when riding) but I don’t care, I rode 200 and 300k in April. I never do this. I like the Randonneurs, they like to stop and eat in greasy diners. They don’t seem to mind having me along and seem to be willing to put up with aerobars, no fenders, dubious personal hygiene, and my asking the waitress at breakfast “if this is low fat bacon?” The difficult part of these rides is the temperature range. For the 200k ride, it was -2c to start and +20c at the end. This means freezing for the first few hours and over heating at the end if you run out of places to store extra clothes. My, uhm, “boys” (more specifically my “boy”) were awfully frosty for the first hour. I had no choice but to employ the zip lock bag containing my route card and cash as a hasty wind break. If any of the waitresses, cashiers, or gas station attendants who had to handle and sign my route card are reading this, I’m very sorry. 200k menu: I had a big, greasy bacon and egg breakfast in Fort Qu’Appelle and then grilled cheese in Southey.

300k menu: bacon and eggs, hash browns, and white toast in Fort Qu’Appelle and cheeseburger with fries and gravy in Raymore. I think I may have gained weight during this ride and somewhere along a cold, lonely wind swept stretch of road I lost my cycling vest, my self-esteem, my pride, and the ability to father children.

I’m not sure, what got into me on April 28-29. The next day I ran 60k. This, however, was not the stupid human trick. This comes when I slathered a bunch of Lakota (topical pain relief. It generates a lot of heat) on my tight calf to loosen it up. The combination of this, my sunburn from the day before, and the post run hot bath produced a lot of blood curdling screams.

Finally, I threw a lot of threshold and V02 max running at myself, on top of everything else. I could’ve been content with just jump in mileage, but no. In any case, it just felt “right” so it happened.

Training

April 2-8

Run 42 miles

Bike 100 miles

Swim 1k

April 9-15

Run 62 miles

Bike 224 miles

Swim 3k

April 16-22

Run 61 miles

Bike 164 miles

Swim 1k

April 23-29

Run 71 miles

Bike 284 miles

Swim 2k

Swimming

2007-05-07T19:16:00.002-07:00

A keen observer will note that I stopped swimming for a couple weeks in March. I did a Splash and Sprint race and my 750m time was identical to last year’s time when I did virtually no swimming. I guess that tripling my weekly swim yardage of 0-1000 meters per week to 3000 meters per week is equivalent to 3 times nothing is still nothing. Finding myself a captive of irrefutable laws of mathematics, I went back to my tried and true swim training technique of not doing any. This seemed to work. Anyways, the instructor at the Swim Fit class at the Y was not amused by unwillingness to try any other strokes and kind of “suggested” that I stop coming for a while. As of April, I’m back to weekly long, slow swims of 3k(ish) on Thursday mornings. The downside is that this effectively eliminates my one morning to sleep in. The upside is that my new wetsuit is here.

300

2007-05-07T19:16:00.001-07:00

300

Erik (14) and Anders (12) wanted to go and see “300”, rated PG-13. Suddenly all their friends wanted to go. Apparently, I’m the neighborhood’s number one irresponsible parent and an easy mark for this kind of dirty work. When the smoke had settled, I had 8 teenage boys in tow. About 45 mins into the movie, I realized that I just took 8 teenage boys to see 2 hours of gay porn. The plot, as near as I am able to surmise, was that the king of Sparta gets 300 of his most buff buddies together, they don their black leather speedos, red capes (the whole ensemble is held together by an very attractive silver brooch), get all oiled up, and they go camping. Anyways, I might need you to help me post bail.

In March, I started throwing in some threshold work on the bike by doing away with the 25-40mins at a heart rate of 150-160 and replacing it with 25 minutes at a heart rate of 162-168, spin easy for 5 minutes and follow this with another 10 minutes at 162-168. I also got out on the road with my bike a few times, more specifically when it got above 0C. March 15 was my last indoor track workout. From March 15 forward I moved all my hard quality runs outside, excepting the Friday morning Bike-run which I’m keeping inside until the end of April. I’m pretty maniacal about getting off of the indoor track as soon as feasible. I tend to view the indoor track as an injury magnet. There were 2 memorable workouts where common sense, if I had any, would have dictated moving back inside. One was 14x300m hills during a blizzard and the other one was 20x100m STEEP hills into a 60-70km/hr headwind. These are both fine examples of pig-headed stubbornness trumping intelligence.

Mar 5- Mar 11

Run 40 miles

Bike 100 miles

Swim 3.5k

Mar 12- Mar 18

Run 54 miles

Bike 150 miles

Swim 0k

Mar 19- Mar 25

Run 57 miles

Bike 199 miles

Swim 0k

Mar 26- April 1

Run 68 miles

Bike 184 miles

Swim 2.5k

Style

2007-05-07T19:15:00.002-07:00

Style

I don’t have a sense of style. Maybe I do, but it is best described as “bad”. This is what I wear to work: Dockers (black or olive), low hiking boots, white dress shirt with button down collar (top button is always undone. Note I have to buy dress shirts on-line because I defy you to try and find a 15-35 shirt in Canada’s second fattest city), skinny 60s vintage tie (garage sales, vintage clothing shops, dead grandfather’s closet) and tie clip. I also have a hair cut that looks like Pee Wee Herman with side-burns. I used to shave my head, but I found that my “Death Camp Chic” look may have been career limiting. Let’s just assume for a moment that the “Pee Wee look” isn’t. I keep in my ear-ring (I got it when I was 17 at Eaton’s in The Midtown Plaza in Saskatoon) to offset my little round glasses, it confuses people, and to show that I am unafraid to be different, just like everybody else. Sometimes, I wear a suit. Invariably it is 3 button, narrow legs, slim fitting and made in the 60s. I desperately want to believe that it makes me look very “Rat Pack” but I know deep down that it makes me look like somebody who shouldn’t be allowed to dress himself. All in all, I look very “White”. But I know that. How do I know I’m white? Easy, I own 2 Rush CDs: “2112” and “Farewell to Kings”. Ok, I own 3 Rush CDs if you include “All the World’s a Stage” which was an ITunes download. Originally, it was not included in “own” because I didn’t go through the soul rendering process of taking it to a check-out counter and proclaiming to the world my “whiteness” and lack of style.

I want my old jeans back. There, I said it. Unlike the guy in the Diet Pepsi commercial, I looked good in my old jeans. Mary and my daughter, Marit, will probably disagree with me, here. They were the ones who stole all of my narrow jeans and took me shopping at American Eagle to buy baggy, adult jeans. It was sort of like an episode of “What Not To Wear” but without the gay guy. Now I have baggy jeans that 2 or 3 of me can fit in. The upside is that I can work on my “Home Boy” persona: DJ Darnell J-Stone. Of course, my Home Boy persona is about as menacing as my pro-wrestling persona: “Shower Boy” with his 2 signature moves: “The Prance of Danger” and the “Towel Flick of Doom”. I want my old jeans back. I know they are in the house someplace. I think the world would be a better place if I had my old jeans back.

I took my 2 sons (Erik and Anders) to see Heaven and Hell (Black Sabbath with Dio) and Megadeth in March. Mary asked how the concert was; Erik and Anders said the Megadeth was “awesome”. My review consisted of 6 words “I want my old jeans back”.

Outside of my old jeans, I’m also a tad miffed that I can’t find any running clothes in Canada’s second fattest city in size small. I hold Hal Higdon and John Stanton personally responsible for this. Men’s split shorts are also an online only purchase for me….unless I buy women’s which has been known to happen, purely out of frustration. I mentioned this to Deb, the Wednesday night bike nazi, who part-times at a local running store. The conversation went like this:

“Deb, why don’t you carry sizes in running clothes that fit the stature of someone of who, let’s just say for the sake of argument, runs a lot?” She just told me to shut up. Maybe the world is trying to tell me that it doesn’t want to see my chicken legs in anything but baggy basket ball type running shorts. In any case, I’m going to keep very close tabs on my few remaining pairs of running shorts. I’m worried that they may go the way of my old jeans……which I want back.

Oh yeah, the training stuff:

Feb 5 – 11

Run 40 miles

Bike 100 miles

Swim 3k

Feb 12-18

Run 58 miles

Bike: 152 miles

Swim 1.5k

Feb 19-25

Run 62 miles

Bike 152 miles

Swim 1.5k

Feb 26- Mar 4

Run 70 miles

Bike 180 miles

Swim 3k

Fridays

2007-05-07T19:15:00.001-07:00

Fridays are exhausting. Wednesdays are a double bike workout, double run, and maybe weights day. Thursdays are a double run day, maybe a bike and weights, but the hard part about Friday is that the lousy track/interval time I/we have on Thursday nights. It is 8-9:30pm which means getting home around 10pm and hopefully asleep by 11pm, then getting up at 4:30-4:45am to be set-up and ready to do the bike-run workout at 6am. Of course, this breaks all the training rules by doing 2 track interval workouts less than 48 hours apart, hell, they are less than 12 hours apart. I’ve tried sleeping at the track, on the pole value mats, but security keeps throwing me out. After this workout, I go to work. I can function until noon, after that I start to drool on my keyboard and make barnyard noises.

The good news is that I work in marketing, which means that we leave early to go to the bar on Fridays. The badnews is that my VP always calls me on Fridays around 4pm to ask me a question he knows the answer to which is just a ruse to see if I am still there. I resent this for 2 reasons:

He doesn’t trust me
I can’t duck out early until after he calls.

Training:

Jan 8 – 14

Run 40 miles

Bike 100 miles

Swim 3k

Jan 15-21

Run 54 miles

Bike: 150 miles

Swim 1.5k

Jan 22-28

Run 55 miles

Bike 150 miles

Swim 3k

Jan 29- Feb 4

Run 70miles

Bike 186 miles

Swim 2k

Stupid Human Tricks (Vol. 1)

2007-05-07T19:14:00.001-07:00

On December 31^st, I rode for 67 miles on the indoor trainer and then ran for 5. Normal people, I suspect, just drank. I did that too but that wasn’t really the stupid part. Anywho, I did the ride with my good friend and partner in stupidity, former drummer for Foghat, Al Barry. We aren’t really sure if Al ever drummed for Foghat, it could’ve been Crowbar, KickAxe, an early incarnation of Rush, or maybe even Procol Harum. I suspect Al drummed for a lot of bands in the 70s that he doesn’t remember.

We did the ride in Al’s basement, while watching the 7 hour (including bonus disc) Kissology DVD that I got for Christmas. Why in Al’s basement? His amp goes to 11.I half expected his 20 year old son to come down stairs and tell us to turn it down.

Casino Life

2007-05-07T19:13:00.001-07:00

I kind of enjoy my job. This is major breakthrough for me to admit that going to work in a cube to stare at a screen full of numbers all day is somehow enjoyable. Sometimes admission is the first step in getting help. Working in a casino can be pretty surreal. The average age of our customers if pushing 60 but we pump day time music onto the playing floor such as Rick James "Super Freak" and the Black Eyed Peas "My Hump".

Once in a while I get to host some radio contest winners for dinner and a performance in the Show Lounge. The casino knows that as math nerd/research winkie I have a naturally bubbly and effervescent personality and am natural host material.

I actually volunteered to host the Tom Jone's impersonator, Harmik.

Damn, he was good.... and hairy.

I also volunteered to host the Holly Cole performance. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a weakness for Holly Cole. Not the same kind of drooling, stalking, restraining order weakness that I have for Lee Aaron, but a weakness nonetheless.

At this point I could go into great detail about the time I met Lee Aaron, told her I have a daughter conceived during "Sweet Talk" from the Body Rock album...I thought this was pretty clever, however, her reaction was eyes rolling and inner sarcastic voice "gee, I haven't heard this before" and a restraining order. But writing about this would just be embarrassing.

After the show, I got to meet Holly Cole. I bought the CD, took it up to get autographed. And blurted out that, "I have a 12 year old son conceived during "Girl Talk”. She responded with obvious, unrehearsed disgust, "Ok what’s his name?", while slowly reaching for the can of mace and thinking "This must be the Lee Aaron retraining order guy”. I stammered, "Anders... no, wait, Stewy". Confusion ensued and she told me, THE Holly Cole told me, "Hey, get your story straight.” So, I got that going for me.

Training this month:

Dec 11- Dec 17

Run 40 miles

Bike 100 Miles

Swim 3km

Dec 18 – 24

Run 49 miles

Bike 140 Miles

Swim 0 km

Dec 25- Dec 31

Run 50 miles

Bike 147 Miles

Swim 1.5km

Jan 1 – Jan 7

Run 57 miles

Bike 175 miles

Swim 3k

On top of this, I survived Christmas in a haze of alcohol and glycogen depletion. The rest of the family made out pretty good, as well. Mary gave me a vintage smoking jacket, because, well, I really needed one. Yikes, and I pounded out 2 contract pieces for a tight December 31^st deadline…well, really January 1 if you want to get technical.

The Ballad of Stimpy Frye

2007-05-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

With an abundance of free time on my hands (well, not really) I occasionally find myself staring blankly at a television screen. I feel a bit better about this momentary lapse in judgment if the television is turned on. Anyways during one of these brief periods of inactivity I was watching an Alice Cooper concert DVD. You have to admire someone who refers to his alter ego in the third person and guillotines himself nightly. There was a particular moment when his alter ego “Alice” has assumed control and he is singing “The Ballad of Dwight Frye” on his knees in a strait jacket. Historical note: Dwight Fry (without the “e”) was a character actor of the 30s and 40s noted for his portrayal of Igor in a number of horror flicks. The song is about Mr. Fry(e)’s mythical stint in an insane asylum. Stimpy immediately thought to himself (a keen observer will note that I as now referring to my alter ego in the third person), “There is a piece of mental imagery I can use for the next few months”. Less than a week later, just as in a bad movie, or training blog, I found myself finishing of my usual 3 hour Sunday run. I usually do these in the morning to be asleep for the first 90 minutes. But this week we were visiting family and I had to wedge it in during the early evening. 2 hours into the run, the wind was howling, the side walk and road in the park had long since drifted over, the sun was down, the temperature was plummeting, my few remaining self preservation instincts were kicking in, and I reached a corner. I could go left and be home in 20 minutes or I could go right and get in my 3 hours. I thought to myself, “What would the tightly restrained Alice/Dwight/Stimpy do?” I went right. Stimpy is a dumb ass.

Boot Camp

2007-01-14T14:23:00.000-08:00

December 11, 2006

I survived my first three weeks of self imposed boot-camp. The weeks went pretty much as per “the Plan” plan. Weekly mileage looked like:

November 20-26:
Run 52 miles
Bike 135 Miles
Swim 1.4km

November 27-December 3:
Run 51 miles
Bike 136 Miles
Swim 3.0km

December 4-10:
Run 58 miles
Bike 135 Miles
Swim 1.5km

I guess I should come clean. I train in miles, not kilometers, except for swimming, which I do in kilometers, although the pool in measured in yards, I swim in kilometers. It allows me to pad my training log by 3 inches every yard. Rest assured, I wouldn’t pad anything else by three inches, honest. But I digress; I record running and biking in miles. It just happened that way and forces me to convert back to kilometers on the fly to keep my mind limber when I’m falling asleep and hallucinating and it bugs the hell out some people I train with.

A few observations from the first three weeks:

I tried a new thing this month. It’s called “swimming”. My first day back, the infamous SaskRV shouted across the pool as I entered, “Do you see this? It’s called ‘water’”. He’s so funny. Anyways, swimming 1.4 to 3km a week isn’t enough for the deca. I did, however, buy a new wetsuit; a faster wetsuit. It’s still not enough.

I only missed 3 workouts from the “plan”: two swimming (go figure) and one run (evening work function) which is seems to suggest that I am a deeply disturbed individual with far too much free time on his hands. In reality, life would be a lot easier if there was 30 hours in each day. I could get everything done.

I need to find another hour a week to bike this winter. I think of it as just another sacrifice to the cold unfeeling gods of mileage. I figure that I can get up an hour earlier on Saturdays and spin for an hour before heading to the 2 hour JFT workout. I never really liked sleeping, anyways. The rest of cycling is proceeding as planned. I’ve built some fitness to the point where I can no longer pop over a heart rate of 160 beats per minute at will. I have to work at this. I think I need to change things up a bit in the next 3 week cycle of hard, hard, and hard by adding some power. I know its’ too early but I like to break a lot of the “rules” of training and I like to be competitive in short races, as well as the insanely long ones.

I seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement with the Wednesday night bike workout Nazi, Deb. She will continue to give me workouts I don’t like and play music that I hate and I will just shut the hell up.

I wish I could just get out and run for about 45 minutes to an hour a couple times a week and do some decent moderate to sort of hard Lydiard kinds of efforts. This would be a nice a change from the slow, painful, between-track-workouts shuffle that my runs have devolved into lately. I could do this when I take the offspring out for a run, and try my best to crush them. However, I suspect that it will be the other way around. Alternatively, I could run Marvin, the retired greyhound a lot harder at noon. The downside to this is that Marvin does not like to run. Once he figures out what is going on, I run the risk of dislocating my shoulder when he stops dead in his tracks.

I should come clean on something else. I would be lost without a heart rate monitor while cycling. But I wouldn’t be caught dead running with an HRM. Why:
• I’ve never seen a Kenyan with a HRM
• They people I run with don’t give a rat’s ass what my heart rate is.
• In the last kilometer of a race, my fellow competitors are not going to slow down if my heart rate pops out of my optimal zone.

I’ve trained with people who slow down when they pop out of that workout’s hear rate zone….or at least; I’ve trained with them for awhile and then ditched them. Sometimes, you need to run with a bit of “passion”.

Beyond the extra 20 hours a week to abuse myself, not coaching has another divided. Without having to haul around my coach man-purse filled with entry forms, training programs and valium (for me) I can return to bike commuting to work. I have this wonderful 22 year old road bike, converted to a single speed. The beauty of this arrangement is that no one will ever steal it, ever. I put some knobbies on for the winter. However, I realized after the first major snow fall that commuting on this bike all winter may not be feasible unless I keep a supply of clean underwear at work. I think it is back to the mountain bike for the winter commute.

And speaking of bikes, I have a pair of Genesis titanium aero bars on my racing bike, I wasn’t too taken with the s-bend extensions and wanted to try strait extensions. Until a factory pair arrived, I thought I would fashion a prototype using 2 lengths of tube I cut from a lamp in the basement. I would’ve got away with it but my daughter ratted me out. Mary wasn’t really amused and my punishment for this misdeed was that she told all my training buddies. Big deal. I have my eye on a part from the blender that would great as a heart rate monitor mount. I just need to wait until the next time she is out of town.

Other new and exciting developments: I’m now a permanent employee at the corporation rather than just a contractor. I made the first in what promises to be a long series of presentations to the president and VPs on research. I have to admit that it was hard taking it seriously when I saw so many of them with lamp shades on their heads a few weeks before. I wasn’t sure to open the floor to questions or order another round of shooters.

I don’t want to talk about weight loss. The scale at the track says 141.5 The scale at the Y says 145-146. The scale at the Y is a big, fat liar

Later

Week at the Roxbury

2006-12-13T18:27:00.000-08:00

December 1, 2006

I’m not sure my employers would want to send me to a gaming convention in Las Vegas. I’m the research winkie.

Prior to this, I was in Vegas a year ago for a data-mining course. This was far less interesting than it sounds. This was my first trip and I did not know what to expect. It was tolerable for 2 days but then I had to get out with 2 days left before my flight out. I showed up at the airport 3 hours early for my flight to get some peace and quiet but the airport had slot machines in the boarding area. There is no place to run in Vegas, which I could find. I went up and down Industrial Drive at 6am past the 24 hour a day strip clubs. I stayed at Circus-Circus. I guess I shouldn’t complain because I wasn’t paying for it but I will anyways. When I checked in, there was another guest in my room. It could’ve been worse. It could’ve been a chalk outline of a person in my room.

For this trip I was much more mentally prepared and ready to fully accept my “inner Vegas”. This trip also featured far less accountability than the last one so I prepared accordingly: shot gunning beer while balancing on a medicine ball in front of a pitching machine with Wayne Newton blaring in my ear. But still nothing can prepare for the real thing. The show took place at the LV convention center: 25,000 delegates and about 4 football fields of exhibits. One entire football field was devoted to just food and beverage samples. This is perfect for the off-season ultra-triathlete with maybe (just maybe) an addictive obsessive-compulsive personality. By day two, the Nathan’s Hot Dogs guys were getting sick of my skinny mustard-stained face…not to mention the Scotch distributors. It should be noted that I did actually leave the food and beverage exhibits, periodically. I was there to learn, honest. Anyways, most of the machine and software vendors had showgirls handing out product information.

In the evenings slot manufacturers would host parties for their customers in clubs I would never, NEVER be allowed into otherwise. It was like “A Night at the Roxbury”. The only thing that could come out of my mouth was “Was up, you from out of town?” and repeat, ad nauseum.

By some strange rift in the space-time continuum I found myself at the Playboy Club on the Fifty First floor of the Palms. Expecting to be kicked out at any second, to allow the real customers in, I wanted to maximize my free booze intake. So I ordered a vodka martini. The bunny asked me if I “wanted it Dirty”. Suddenly, time stood still. The world is ruled by apes, one particular group discovers a mysterious rectangular monolith near their home, which imparts upon them the knowledge of tool use, and enables them to evolve into men. "Also Sprach Zarathustra" blares triumphantly in the background … or just try to imagine the deer-in-the-headlights look as I responded with a resoundingly weak whimper of “uh-huh?”. I don’t know what “dirty” means, I think it means “dry”, however, when a playboy bunny asks you if you want something “dirty”, it’s probably a good idea to say “uh-huh?”

Wait a second, I should probably write about training. I went running one morning for about 40 minutes. My head hurt.

Toodles

The Plan

2006-11-26T13:06:00.000-08:00

November 26, 2006

It is always as good idea to set goals either:

During the off-season (all 2 weeks of it) when I don’t remember the pain or
December 31^st after too many tasty beverages.

I’ve found that both approaches usually lead to crappy decisions. However, since I tend to view triathlon as a fall-winter sport that is played in the spring-summer, I usually have a very clear idea about what I’m doing in the summer by November/December and can limit my bad decision making on December 31^st to subjects such as:

Blue or red cocktails… which one to start with?
The fondue is running low on fluid. I’m sure its fine to just pour more fondue fluid into the already lit burner. Mary didn’t really like that table cloth.
One more martini? Why not?
Anything that starts with “Hey, watch this!!”

Although my race plan looks suspiciously like the product of the volatile combination of alcohol and flaming blue fondue fluid, I assure you that I put it together the following strategy without the aid of any mind altering substances. Rather, I’ve just forgotten how much these things hurt:

Double Ironman Quebec July 2007
100 mile trial run September 2007
Ultraman Hawaii November 2007
Deca Ironman June 2008 or Ten Ironman in Ten Days November 2008

Of course, I plan to compete in as many sprint and Olympic triathlons as I can and a half-ironman or two because I wise man once said that “racing teaches you courage”. I’m not sure how you can be “taught” courage. Maybe he wasn’t that wise.

I also plan to pace Mary in a marathon or two, hopefully to a Boston qualifying time. I should mention that I don’t want to qualify for Boston. I just want Mary to so I can go on the trip, watch, drink lots of Sam Adams, and have Mary drive the rental back to the hotel.

But wait, there’s more! I haven’t run any track for three years. I would like to have another crack at a fast 800m. This was what I ran in high school and university. I’m sure that the training is completely consistent with preparation for a deca. To be honest, I did my fastest double ironmans (if you can use “fast” and “double ironman” in the same sentence) after a winter of training for indoors masters 800m.

Given my current state of fitness, this seems pretty feakin’ ambitious. I’ve put on somewhere between 5 and 7 pounds since September. Any day now the Jerry Springer Show will be tearing down the side of my house to rescue the 145 pound morbidly obese shut-in. To paraphrase “Fat Bastard” in “Austin Powers”, “I eat because I’m unhappy and I’m unhappy because I eat.”

I kind of half committed myself to a 200km randonneur ride on November 4 thinking that this will provide some kind of motivation to keep some consistency in my fall training. Instead I found myself praying for either a blizzard or a broken collar bone to keep myself out of it. As it turns out, it was barely nice enough to ride, but I chickened out anyways.

I really dislike this time of the year. I find that getting back into a reasonable rhythm of training, sleep, work, and the rest of life to be very unsettling. I’ve had a few glimmers of hope: a number decent indoor trainer bike rides where the inter-play between cadence, heart rate, music, and the detachment (that only comes with being awake this early in the morning) did not have me longing to be someplace (anyplace) else. I’ve been on the track a few times for some real suffering and my last four Sunday long runs have been consistently at the three hour mark. Hell, I even swam a few times. All of this came to naught because I found myself in Vegas for work for a week. Darn. I’ll discuss my time in Sin City shortly.

I really need about a three week self-administered boot camp to jump start my fitness and force me to stop obsessing about my “bloated” state. ….but then I managed to fall into some contract work that just kept expanding in scope to the point that it will pay for most of the Hawaii trip including taking the family….maybe not all the pets but the human part of the family. All of this is moot; however, if Mary determines that this money can be better spent on luxuries like food, mortgage, and clothing. So, reaching new depths of depravity I will embark on my own personal boot camp while banging away on this latest contract, working my real job, and doing all that other “living” stuff. Sleep is for wimps.

Anywho, this is week one of post-Vegas boot camp and it should set the tone for the rest of the winter.

Monday: Bike indoor trainer in the AM for 45-60mins including 25-40 minutes at a heart rate of 150-160. My threshold heart rate is 165. I’m letting my heart rate creep up to 165+ during the next few weeks because I’m not that fit so it is easy to get there and I’m impatient. Run 5-8 miles (3 noon with Mary and the Marvin (retired greyhound)) and 2 to 5 in the pm with the children). I also lift weights on Mondays. Nothing very fancy and upper body only, bench presses, standing curls, shoulder shrugs, crunches, occasionally something else such as military presses, butterfly presses, preacher curls. I usually complete 3 set of 10 per exercise with a minute rest between each 10. Pressed for time, which is often, I often find myself doing a set of another exercise as I’m resting from another one. Then it becomes more of a circuit, I guess. I shoot for 200 crunches per workout but will settle for 160. I think I’m bench pressing about 110lbs…I should really check…it’s obviously not an ego thing…and curl 60lbs with the curl bar and 30lbs on each arm when doing concentration curls.. Weights are often just an afterthought

Tuesday: Bike – same as Monday – Swim 1 to 2 km at noon with the Swim Fit group at the Y. I hate this swim. Not because it is hard but because there is some expectation that I use back stroke, breast stroke, and butterfly. There is only one stroke: front crawl. Ok, 2 strokes: front crawl and freestyle. I’m not too keen on the 30 minutes of yoga, stretching, and Gregorian chanting before we even start. However, left to my one devices, I won’t swim. Run – I run with the track club. I train like an 800m-1500m runner on these workouts. I don’t really care that it doesn’t make any physiological sense to do this. I derive a great deal of enjoyment from this kind of suffering. The children are running at the same time so this almost counts as “family time”. I also do weights on Tuesday.

Wednesday: Bike same as Monday and Tuesday in the am (it’s a real bitch to get up at 5am after getting home from the track at 9:30pm but the liter of coffee seems to help. Wednesday night I bike again on the indoor training with the Team JFT group. I sometimes lead this one but lately someone else has been. She likes lots of high cadence work. It takes about an hour and I’m beginning to resent her irritatingly positive comments. I’m not doing “awesome” and I just want her shut up. I try to hide behind a pillar so she can’t read my lips. I also run on Wednesdays, using the same routine as Monday. I go to bed as early as I can on Wednesdays.

Thursday: I sleep in on Thursdays. By “sleep in” I mean I don’t work-out before work. I swim again at noon and try to avoid the chanting. Thursday nights, I’m back at the track (more family time) and I lift weights again.

Friday: Friday is bike-run day. This means getting up at 4:30-4:45am to drink a liter of coffee and get back to the track and ready to go for 6am. This workout is another truly nasty experience…not for the faint of heart or loose of sphincter. The workout consists of lugging bike and mag trainer to the track and riding hard for 5mins (up to the 165-170 bpm range in the last 2-3 minutes followed immediately by 800m on the track. There is no recovery between. Five or six of these is about all I can handle. Sometimes it might be 25 minutes at threshold on the mag trainer followed by 5k threshold run. I would rather do another bike workout on Fridays and I know that less than 12 hours between track workouts is nuts, however, this is another of these JFT things for the benefit of others so I’m content to keep going and physically things held together last winter on this schedule. Mentally, the jury is still out. Finally, I’ve found that if I keep piling intensity on intensity the body will either adapt to recovering on the fly or I will go insane. In any case, I need both of these for the deca.

Saturdays: Saturday am is the long indoor bike workout. By “long” it is currently sitting at 90-120 minutes. I know this is not enough but it is only November. To prevent a complete mental meltdown while biking on the mag trainer I break each half hour into this: minutes 1-4, 6-9, 11-14, and 16-20 HR is 120-130, minutes 5,10,15 and 20-30 HR is 140-150. The advantage of this is it can be repeated for 1,2,3 or even 4 hours. Fun! I revisited my training log from preparing for the triple ironman (I was in scary condition although I hardly had the results to justify it) and noted that I rarely topped 150 bpm on these rides. I thought it was higher for some reason....just another example of thinking that I was faster than I was. We do this as a group, again with the zany JFT people. We rotate the DJ but keep the workout the same. I need to find away to add an hour or two to this without giving up the social aspect of the workout. I also run 30-60 minutes on Saturdays. If I miss a weight workout, I‘ll try to make it up on Saturdays.

Sundays: Sundays are long run days. It’s just like going to church. This is a minimum of 3 hours during the winter. Mary usually comes for some or all of it. On the third week of a three week hard cycle it gets up to 4 hours. During the summer, it is from 4 to an occasional 6 hours.

I know it looks like I’m dreaming but this is very much the mirror image of last year’s winter training except that I added some actual swimming. As always, every fourth week of training is easier and I drop some of the multiple workouts and take the long run down to 90 minutes. I found that last year I had some success with making the last hard week in the four week cycle really hard; stupid, nutty hard.

I also plan to change this up in the spring and summer. I get out on the road with my bike a lot more, increase the intensity of the morning indoor rides to a heart rate of 165 (threshold) and beyond, increase the long bike ride to 4 hours plus, and will add back to back long run days to prepare for the 100 miler. I will likely ditch the Friday bike-run workout because it leaves me rather beat up which compromises the Saturday long ride. I found that last summer I benefited from the big aerobic weekends last year where I would long run on Friday evening, long bike ( four plus hours) on Saturdays and another Long run on Sundays. ….I just didn’t swim.

It has been suggested by those in the know that I work up to a 12 hour swim this summer. I imagine that I could wait until a few months away from the deca but I would rather know sooner rather than later what to expect. I’m planning to do it in a pool because I am sick and twisted.

….and speaking of “sick and twisted” I’m not planning to take a dedicated rest phase after Ultraman Hawaii. As you can probably tell from the early part of this entry, I don’t like taking rests. Rests give me a host of other variables to obsess over.

Toodles

Our Story So Far...

2006-10-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

October 16, 2006

I am not a masochist. I don’t like pain. I’ve just adapted to a higher level of discomfort than most humans. This is what I do: multiple iron distance races, more specifically double the iron distance: 7.6km swim followed by 360km cycling followed by 84.4km running without sleeping. I’ve done 8 of these and attempted 10. I’ve finished under 24 hours 3 times with a best of 22 hours and 44 minutes. I’ve also finished a triple iron distance race 11.4 km swim, 540km bike and a 126.6km run/limp/stagger in 52 hours including a few 10 min cat naps. This almost killed me is probably a topic for another post or two or three. Oh, in between there have been some iron distances races (9 of them), a few marathons, and two Ultraman Canadas (a bit farther than a double but over 3 days).

While doing all of this I have managed to stay married, stay employed, raise 3 children, several cats and the occasional retired greyhound.

This is about as much ego as you are going to get from me.

I did my first double in 1993 in Huntsville, Alabama. There aren’t many from those days that are still in the sport. Many do one and are content. I’ve seen a number who throw themselves into the sport, do as many IUTA events on the circuit in the space of a year or two as possible, burn themselves to a crisp and disappear. A few others, like myself, pop in and subject themselves to an annual beating and return next year.

To get to the point of this blog, it will chronicle my journey to a deca iron distance race. Specifically it is the one in Vidauban, France in June 2008. The distances are: 38km Swim, 1800km Bike and a 422km run. Oh, it just gets better: the swim is in a 25m swimming pool. The bike course is 350 5.2 km laps in, according to the website, “the winegrowing area of Vidauban”. This does make it sound kind of attractive. However, the run of 533 laps of 0.788km quickly dispels any visions of idyllically sipping wine.

Hopefully, it will still be held in 2008. If not, I have some other options such as the 10 iron distances in 10 days in Mexico. This sounds a bit more manageable, I mean I can sleep between races. However, by day three I will, no doubt, be begging for the sweet embrace of death.

Don’t worry…I think both races are remarkably bad ideas. I’m not too crazy about this blog thing either but I promised my legion of fans (1) that I would have a crack at it. In any case, some find my meandering race reports mildly entertaining. My last two reports from Ultraman Canada can be found here: http://www.geocities.com/teamjft/RaceReports.html buried under a bunch of other race reports. I was also faced with the daunting prospect of updating my old web page, www.geocities.com/stimpy242, but thought that a fresh start can’t be such a bad thing. One thing will carry over from the old webpage: the black background. I’m either mourning Johnny Cash or despairing over the death of a free yet productive society. Take your pick.

Back to the event- why is this a bad idea- other than the distance? During the swim of the German triple, also held in a 25m pool, I was overcome by either or some combination of, motion sickness, German chlorine, jet lag, or bad bratwurst and became, what could only be described as a “human vending machine”. The others in my lane were less than impressed. How much fun do I think 38km of pool swimming is? Secondly, I’ve managed to sustain 2 stress fractures in my left ankle over the years just from the relentless pounding. A race week flare up with 400 plus kilometers to run is less than appealing.

So why the interest in an event that I don’t know I can finish or leave me a crippled piece of meat lying on the pavement or worse, flopping around like a barfing seal on the pool deck? Some recent history would help.

Over last summer, I found myself in the rare situation of having free time on my hands. It’s a long story that began three years ago with my children’s track coach resigning in mid-season (even a longer story) and faced with 40 children (including my own) without a coach. I reluctantly agreed knowing that (due to the small city politics of coaching track) it would, for lack of a better word. “suck”. Local coaching politics demanded a five to six night a week volunteer commitment 8 months out of the year and three evenings for the remaining four months. I’m surprised I lasted that long. However, the club merged with two other clubs, there was a surplus of distance coaches and, rather than have a disjointed distance program; I thought this would be a good time to bow out.

With this sudden influx of leisure time, not to mention far less stress, I found that, while training for Ultraman Canada, I could run 100 miles per week, on top of 300 or so kilometers of cycling and the occasional swim. I also found that during these runs, rather than fretting about arguing with the club treasurer about buying running shoes for inner city athletes, giving up and buying them myself or which parent hates me this week, or how to get two teenage girls who hate each other to run on the same relay team, I found myself with the luxury of thinking about…..nothing. Alone on the bike path, I would emerge from thinking about “nothing”, unsure where I was or how much time passed, and occasionally smiling at passing insects. In short, I fell in love with logging ridiculously long miles all over again. Finally, thanks to orthodics, I think my ankle has healed to the point where 422 kilometers is within the realm or possibility. It’s not a reasonable thing to do but either was coaching six nights a week.

I suppose, if I approached this in the conventional way, that this would be a training blog/log. However, in case it’s not clear, I’m not very conventional. This will be more of travelogue of the journey from now to the deca. A training log would put people to sleep. Above all, it will be entertaining, I promise. After all, you’ve probably determined that I have a keen sense of the absurdity of all this.

I hope during this process I can answer the burning question: What comes first, the tranquility or the training? During my thankfully brief sojourn into executive management, I found myself riding the indoor trainer at 4:30am (because I had a breakfast meeting, I’ve learned to loathe breakfast meetings) unable to concentrate on the task at hand (the ride) because my brain was too full of work “what-ifs”. I thought that if I had some freakin’ peace in my life, this ride would be going so much better. But then it hit me: the sweat, the noise, the music blaring in the head phones, and the elevated heart rate was about the only peace I was going to have that day and the workout took on a bizarre sense of tranquility. Or, on the other hand, does the tranquility come from being exhausted and lapsing into a stoned semi-comatose state at the end of the day? I have a little less than two years to sort this out.

I guess I should discuss some logistical issues. Regardless of how good you are ultra-distance triathlon in Canada hold about the same interest as Jaialai. As a result, I, for the most part, cover the costs. This means I have a job. Actually, I have two. First of all, I work in the gaming industry, crunching numbers. This makes perfect sense, because I have no interest in gaming (and surprisingly little knowledge). I was invited to a poker night once and showed up with my copy of “The Idiot’s Guide to Texas Hold’em”. Apparently, I had a significant negative impact on the pace of play due to my reading of select passages such as, “Bluffing….hey, there is whole chapter on bluffing!” and my inability to ante up without being told to every single hand. My other job is a consultant. I do economic impact studies from my home office. I have a Master’s degree in economics with specialization in input-output analysis. It is not as exciting as is sounds. However, I get an unnatural amount of enjoyment out of putting on, as my children would call it, “stoner music” (Old Pink Floyd and Bob Marley, mostly) and working through complex matrix algebra. This is where the absurdity comes in. I can’t afford to race internationally without working two jobs. However, training to race internationally while working two jobs is likely more insane than a deca. In any case, the sleep deprivation I will undergo will be ideal preparation for the event.

I should note that there is no way none of this will occur on my own. I will introduce the cast in a later edition.

Above all this will be the story on the process of getting there. The end result will be a brief footnote in comparison.

The few people in the ultra world that I discussed a deca with assured me that there is no way to train for this. It is just too mind-warpingly long. I said “thanks”. I imagine this will work out in my favor because I don’t have enough time to train long and, believe it or not, will swap intensity for distance like a madman. It seems to work for me. And I do have the workings of a training plan; it just does not look like any pre-packaged base-miles-followed-by-intensity plans usually nailed together. The “plan” is more like a vast, nebulous cobweb of logical functions in a borderless excel spreadsheet taking into consideration time, work, sleep, weather, family, health, level of fitness, time before next race, peer pressure, whimsy and the position of Saturn relative to Jupiter.

Perhaps this quote (one of my favorites) from the Australian miler, Herb Elliot, will put things in perspective. "I believe you must train intensely. There's been a tendency these days to be overawed by the scientific explanations of why long slow running or interval training is the answer. Both are probably physiologically and biologically defensible but what they neglect is the spiritual and mental side of a person. If you emphasize the physical side of training you may become superbly conditioned but mentally not advanced at all. On the other hand, if you concentrate on the mental aspect it is inevitable that the physical side will follow. My golden rule is to train for the mental toughness and don't train for the development. I used to have one day off a week but four of my other six runs would be excruciatingly intense and challenging. About half-way in each of the runs your body would be telling you to ease off, slow down or even stop and you've got to confront and grapple with that challenge."