triathlon dreams

So, as you and I can plainly see, this whole "I'm going to blog once a week in addition to the four intense workouts I do" plan hasn't quite been working out. In fact, I am highly ashamed to see that it's been nigh on two months since my last entry! How the time flies: even when I am moving as fast as I can, it's never quite fast enough to keep up with the passing of the days.

Anyway, without trying to valiantly fill you in on the ups and downs of my last, oh, SEVEN weeks of training, I will say that all in all I feel like things have turned a bit of a positive corner since I last wrote, and even when we received a recent "race-day-is-ten-weeks-away" e-mail, I haven't been feeling quite so panicky or behind the curve as I was there for awhile. Which is interesting, because just a few days ago I had my very first

TRIATHLON ANXIETY DREAM!!!

I mean, I knew they were coming - I've known that since my running shoes first hit the icy pavement. Because, even from that far-off vantage point of Week One of my training program, I knew myself well enough to understand that no matter how ready I am to perform come race day, this event (just the very existence of it) will jangle at least one, if not a few, of my very sensitive and highly attuned nerves. And, when my nerves get jangled, I have dreams. Anxious ones. Ones in which I am trying and trying to get all my hair tucked into my bathing cap, but just cannot get the job done, no matter what I do.

It's really telling to me that this recent dream was about the swimming portion of the race, because although technically the dream took place in the pool where I train on Monday nights (and so wasn't exactly about the actual triathlon day itself), I thought I was pretty clear from the start on the fact that the swimming portion of this event was going to be, by far, the easiest and least stressful of the three sections. Hmmm. I guess that might not be so. I think that even if you look at my previous few posts you can see that it's safe to say that the swimming has in fact NOT been the least difficult for me, but perhaps actually the MOST. I've been swimming for so long - swimming and swimming as if I was, in fact, born swimming - that there seemed to be nothing much there for me to fear, and also not as much to improve on. Here's what I had been thinking, going in:

I knew my running would have to take some serious leaps and bounds, being that starting out I could only sweat out about 10 minutes before feeling like my lungs were going to explode - a pure "beginner", you could say. (I'm up to over an hour, now, by the way, and clocking in almost 5.5 miles at a go). The biking I had gauged to be my "intermediate" event, in the sense that the training wheels have certainly been off for long enough to make me a proficient biker, though not one to take on long distances. And so the swim - the swim! - would, in my pre-training brain, fill the space of my "advanced" level activity, and as such I didn't seek out an extra place to swim each week (I figured once a week would be enough to get me into tip-top shape), or worry too much about it.

And yet I've been finding that these weekly sessions in the pool are the ones that get me the most nerved up, and the ones that I most desperately (see two entries up) look to avoid. I haven't actually skipped that many sessions, which I am proud of, but I am still interested in the fact that even up to this past week's session I had to have a minor battle in my head right before leaving for the swim in which I egged myself into going mostly by reminding myself of the yummy dinner of lentils and tofu that would be awaiting me upon my return.

Once I'm in the pool, things are ok - I don't perform poorly, and I don't ever feel like I physically need to stop. The drills we do are challenging to me, though, and because we are swimming in a pretty small pool and with lots of us crammed into one lane, when I am feeling slow or need to really take my time on one of the exercises we're doing, I know that I do feel pressured to speed up and stay with the pace of the group I am with, which isn't so productive for me. We recently were introduced to a technique called the two-beat kick, and it's something I actually found to be really helpful because it relaxes me and slows my stroke down so that I am doing less work with my arms on each length that I complete. However, last week the coach watched me doing it, and he said that I'm not timing my arms with my kick correctly, and thus am not getting the most efficiency out of the stroke. As you can guess, I wasn't thrilled to hear this, and I spent a good deal of the rest of the session obsessing about the timing. I still felt good, the whole time, which I think is also a testament to how much my overall fitness level is improving, but damn, I want to get that two-beat kick down!

So, as you can see, the dream is not so much of a surprise. But, as I tucked my hair into my cap with absolutely no troubles this past Monday, I reminded myself that the learning is in the doing, and that no matter what kind of jangles are in there and need to be worked out about this swimming stuff, now is the best time. You know, now - before I'm plunged into the Hudson with hundreds of other swimmers, hanging on to a rope so as not to be dragged away by the current before the starting gun, and trying for the life of me not to accidentally swim to Jersey! Land ho!

That's all for now,

Katie

A quick follow up

So tonight we spent the majority of our swim session working solely on the "dig" portion of our stroke! We did something called sculling, and we built up to a full crawl using different hand motions and with buoys between our legs to help us focus on what our arms were doing. I won't go into to too many details right now, but the point is that I am SO glad I decided to go, and so glad I participated in this particular set of drills because I truly think it's going to help improve my form enormously. Success!

Alright, off to bed now -

K.

Feeling like a wet blanket...

So it's 6:45 pm, and I am just about to finish up working for the day. Normally I finish at 6pm, but I came in an hour late because (shock!) I couldn't get myself out of bed this morning. I have swim practice tonight at 9pm in Brooklyn, and although I have all my gear at work with me, and all the best intentions in the world to leave here and go directly to the area of the city where the practice takes place, it is the time of day when my mind starts to do that "Aren't you feeling too tired to swim (jog/bike/do anything at all)?" dance it is so fond of. I decided I'd blog about this particular aspect of my training in the hopes that I'd psych myself up for tonight's workout in the process.

I think that my particular resistance to swimming tonight comes from the way that last week's practice went. We've been working on some drills that are meant to help us increase our efficiency in the water; being the first leg of the three-part event, the coaches have said that it should be our goal to be able to complete the 1 mile swim without feeling terribly tired or winded afterwards, as the two most high impact aspects of the race will still be in front of us. People who have already completed a triathlon in NYC tell me that because of the current in the Hudson River (that's right, we're swimming in ye olde Hudson come July!), the swim portion usually zips by pretty quickly, in about 20-25 minutes, because you are pushed along and thus are able to expend less energy during the actual event than in training. We're training for a mile, nonetheless, but it's good to know.

Anyway, so I consider myself to be a fairly competent swimmer; my father started taking both my sister and I to parent-child swim lessons at the local Y when were under 2 years old, and so at the very least I've always had a really high level of comfort with all things water-related. And, when we do the continuous swim aspect of our training sessions, I fair pretty well with my steady, rhythmic crawl - the same one I've been doing since I was probably about 10 years old, lapping around the lake at Girl Scout camp while the other campers splashed in the shallows. It's when we try and do these drills, however, that I feel, quite simply, like I am going to die of exhaustion. After last week's session the coach gave me some advice that makes me think I may understand why this is - he informed me that when we are doing any type of arm-related drill (fingertip drag, lifting one elbow at and time, pausing, and then plunging forward), I tend to arch my back a bit and hold my head up so that my legs are sinking further down and I am having to do more than the average amount of work to keep myself afloat. Also, based on last week's session, I believe that I have been neglecting a VERY important part of the whole arm portion of the crawl, which, according to the childhood swim lessons I mentioned earlier, breaks down to something like this (are you ready, Dad?):
Reach, Dig, Touch Your Knee, and Scoop!

I have repeated this mantra so many times both audibly and in my head that I cannot begin to count. It was the way, essentially, that I learned to swim, and it has always made sense to me in that I cannot separate those four steps from my understanding of the "crawl" that we all know and love. Or so I thought. Turns out, my friends, that I may have been forgetting (all this time) one very essential piece of that four-step process: the dig! I am forgetting to dig! The coach told me that he can see that when I put my arm out in front of me, and then start to pull it down, I am sort of just mildly flopping it forward, instead of getting a real, tangible dig-ful of water. Part of this involves turning my fingertips down towards the pool floor, rather than out towards the pool wall, because it helps create a "shovel" of sorts, to help me dig with. Basically, if you don't do the dig, then you are doing A LOT of the work of swimming with only your legs, and believe me, while I consider myself to be a champion kicker, it is FAR more tiring to try and stay afloat without the aid of those precious limbs, the arms.

In addition to these recent discoveries I should also mention that part of my chagrin about tonight's swim is that it takes place at the closer, but far smaller of the two pool locations that we are allowed to train at. There is a swim session on Wednesday nights that happens at the Riverbank State Park pool which is enormous and long and which we as a team get to have all to ourselves. There end up being about 6 of us per lane, and we get to do up and backs, which means there is one lane for going to one end of the pool, and one for coming back. It feels glorious and relaxed, and I also really like the coach, Jay, and the advice he gives. The pool I will visit tonight (see how I said "will," there, instead of "should" or "might"?), however, is located at a Y in Brooklyn (thumbs up to BK!), but is very short and only has two lanes available for about 25-30 of us. Yes, that's 15 or so per lane, and we don't get up and backs. There is a lot of crashing into one another and also lots of splashing, and I have to admit that I end up feeling much more pressured and rushed there because there is always someone swimming right on top of my feet. I get home earlier from this pool, but I sometimes feel more tired from the workout. It's a conundrum.

I've been trying to switch up my attendance, to give myself a break from the tiny pool with the somewhat less friendly coaches, however this week I have to take my cat to the vet on Wednesday evening, and so will not be able to attend that session, even if I wanted to go all the way uptown. Which means I have no choice but to endure the little roiling mess of a swim session this evening that will at some point undoubtedly leave me gasping for breath, but the way I figure I'll be a lot less happy with myself when I'm climbing into bed tonight if I don't go at all than if I go and feel maybe a little bit defeated by the whole thing. The defeat will pass, like it always does, as will this chance to do some really important work on both my body and my mind, so now is the time to take advantage of that chance and know that the victory is in the process, not just in the product.

--K

Week 5...or, I guess I'm actually doing this!

So, it has taken me some time to actually sit down and get to this blog thing, which is something they suggested to us when we went to our first fundraising meeting back in February. Being someone who has always made writing a part of my life, I liked the idea of keeping some type of journal or log of the process I will go through over the next 5 months as I train for my first ever triathlon in July.

The title of this entry sort of helps to sum up a big part of why I am just now starting this blog - although some of the procrastination can definitely be attributed to just plain slackerish behavior on my part (hey, I'm a busy girl), I definitely know that I hesitated to get going on it because of just a small amount of uncertainty as to whether I would, in fact, be doing this event. Everything sounded fine and dandy in the info sessions, and in theory all the group training sessions fit into my schedule, but I think there was still a little nagging fear that maybe, just maybe, I had bitten off more than I could chew in regards to the physical demands the training program would bring. I felt like I needed to wait and see, to some extent, how I would fare with the 40 minute runs, hour-long swim sessions, and suggested 90-100rpm paced bike rides.

So, I waited. And you know what? Here we are, heading into Week 5 of training, and I haven't had a single failed training attempt to date. Which, of course, doesn't mean that some of the sessions haven't been hellish - they most certainly have. But even with the hell of trying to push through an intense side stitch for 20 minutes out of a 40 minute run, or the horror of turning my head to get a desperately needed gulp of air during a 10-minute continuous swim only to have my mouth and nose fill with a giant gush of water instead, I haven't once had to stop. I've slowed down, sure - pumping the treadmill up to a 5.3 miles per hour pace seemed like a good idea, but not after it resulted in me spending the following 10 minutes down at 4.6 mph just to recover - but I've never had to say "I can't finish." And discovering that, for me, was key in feeling like I can really say, "Yes, I am training for and will complete an Olympic distance triathlon next July." No kidding.

Anyway, this entry is a kick-off to what will hopefully be at least a weekly ritual of recording what's going on for me as I spend hours and hours physically conditioning myself for this event. It will also record the mental conditiong, and the emotional, because something I am coming to understand as I go is that the challenges you give your body are invariably linked to resistance from your mind, and so it's proving to be almost meditative for me to observe the way my brain is dealing with the demands I'm placing on my body. And I want to share that with all of you who are so supportive of me in this endeavor specifically, and in my life more generally.

So if you stick with me, and continue to read as I train, you can expect some interesting revelations, possibly some lamentations, and definitely many celebrations of this crazy journey I've taken to calling "Fast As I Can."

Lots of love,
Katie