Tag Archives: swimming

Mailbag

Posted on by
Reply

Whad’ up in FL? Mother Dear isn’t getting any younger. Love her a tad bit more than I hate flying. Just hangin’ with her. Helping her with her new iMac, swapping stories from the last several months, even accompanied her to Ybor City for the Saturday morning Cuban coffee/toast confab with the girlfriends. And there’s no (provable) truth to the rumor that I timed this trip to overlap with the Cal Lutheran college roommate reunion at the crib.

Where are the fitness updates? Stopped moving? Nah, still moving. Weird summer in that regard. One week, no teaching, getting every work out in, pushups, stretching, planking, solid 12-15 hours of swimming, running, cycling. Next week, full-time teaching, missing some workouts (no bike in Eastern WA), cutting others short. So not enough of a rhythm. Zero races and I’m skipping our local triathlon breaking my nine year streak. A couple of new events on the calendar over the next six weeks. Average swimming/running shape, slightly above average cycling shape. Getting soft(er). Niece asked me if I wanted to work out with her today at 1p. Heat index north of 100. I politely declined.

Starting college in a few weeks, top three suggestions? 1) There are power outages, dropped internet connections, empty printer cartridges. Never leave printing until the morning something is due. Even if it’s 2 a.m. the “night” before, print all final drafts before going to bed. You’ll sleep better and “tech glitch” excuses are tired. 2) Backwards plan. Who are you going to get to write recommendations to grad school or other post-grad first steps? Go to office hours with genuine questions about the course content and/or your work in the course and get to know at least one prof a quarter/semester. 3) Study abroad. Bonus suggestion: call or (even better) email your dad regularly. 

Best blog discovery of recent weeks? The best five books on everything.

Why Exercise?

Posted on by
1

I once had a colleague, a smart scientist, who said research showed exercise extends people’s lives the same amount of time spent exercising. If that’s close to correct, and if you excercise 5 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, for forty years, that’s an extra 13 months. If that seems paltry, he’d agree, which was why he chose to be sedentary.

I don’t exercise to extend the length of my life as much as I do to improve the quality of it. Most of the time I enjoy the activity itself, the swimming, running, and cycling, especially since I have great training partners. Long story short, exercise improves the quality of my life on lots of levels.

Last Sunday I was traveling all day and on Monday and Tuesday I wasn’t able to squeeze in a workout. Felt completely out of whack. Finally rebooted with a 5 mile run along the edge of Storm Lake Tuesday night. Travelled all day Wednesday, so four days, and one five mile run. Salvaged the week by hitting it hard Thursday-Sunday.

Sunday’s ride was especially nice. Longest ride of 2010 thus far. The numbers, 63.27 miles, 3:34:11, 17.7mph avg, max 42.5, 2,954′ of elevation, 4,057 calories. Morning resting heart rate, 48, 52 in the middle of church (so I drifted during the sermon, what else is new). Great riding with Lance except for the hills he added on. His front tire exploded mid-ride. Loudest flat ever. Embarrassing the lengths he goes to to force rest.

The pictures.

In the peloton, you are what you eat and drink

Ready to roll

Dropping in on 81st Street

Line of the day, "Don't throw that away, I'm going to patch it."

Lance's elaborate rest stop ruse

Self portrait mid-ride

Calorie replacement. . . stage one

Calorie replacement. . . stage two

Calorie replacement. . . stage three

Calorie replacement. . . finishing kick

April Miscellania

Posted on by
1

• The wife got me with a pretty good April Fools, said the new car “wasn’t starting in the morning” and “we should have someone look at it.” I had to return serve. So a few hours later I told her “Good news, the NYT is reporting that young trendsetters are dying their hair gray.” She laughed heartily until I said “April Fools!” That fact that it wasn’t a joke, is now the joke. That’s just the multi-layered way I roll.

• Got some rare direct blog feedback at dinner last week. One of my sibs said indignantly, “Why should anyone care about the details of your fitness routine?!” I explained those posts are primarily for Lance. Consider them optional, not required reading. Lance NEEDS to know how hard to work to maintain his running and cycling superiority.

• So here’s my indignant sib-adjusted fitness report for March. Battled a micro-tear in one calf and then threw my back out lifting/twisting dumbbells to and from the rack without my legs. Lost about a week. Swam 23,900m; cycled, 340; ran 97. WOM (workout of the month) was a 33 mile ride and 2.25 mile run with my 22 year old uber-niece who is about to kick some serious butt at the College Nationals Triathlon in Texas.

• March Madness update. The WSJ computer and I are currently in sixth or seventh place out of eleven in the office pool. If Duke wins, I will probably end up on the podium, but no one remembers who came in second. The first five participants don’t even follow college bball. I’m actually glad computers apparently can’t quantify something as complex as a 64 team tournament. It won’t be the same when it goes to 96 teams. Classic case of less being more. Of course this year I wish it had been 196 because then UCLA might have qualified.

• This recent David Brooks essay is one of my favorites of his of all time. Brooks got killed by the most recommended commenters. I found some of their comments perceptive, but most of those were of the “Look at me, I caught you being inconsistent” variety. No one is always perfectly consistent. Many of the most recommended comments struck me as weakly argued, mean-spirited, knee-jerk liberalism. I’m a liberal, but not a fan of knee-jerkism of any variety. Very easy to criticize especially so indirectly. I give Brooks credit for courage. He knows he can’t win when it comes to most NYT readers.

• Personal record for blog readership in March 2010; however, no reason to get carried away, you’re still a member of a select group. For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, people never comment on my personal finance posts, so I think I’ll retire that thread. Even though readership is up, commenting is not. Maybe I’m not angry enough? Maybe I need to tap my inner-Glenn Beck. Also, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I can’t get many readers to follow the small number of links I sometimes include. Case in point, you didn’t even open the previous Brooks’ link did you? I know everyone is pressed for time and I appreciate the fact that more people are at least logging on and skimming posts.

• Turns out I was exaggerating when I wrote that I’d pay anything for an iPad. I have not ordered one yet not because I wanted to read the reviews that were just published and let the application/software dust settle a bit. I anticipate buying one sometime before the summer equinox, but as a card carrying late adaptor, if so moved, I reserve the right to postpone the purchase indefinitely. Not owning one won’t stop me from adding “Sent from my iPad” on the bottom of my emails. Faux tech cache. Sometimes I amaze myself.

• Speaking of email, publicly admitting that I suck at it in my last post proved cathartic. Oddly, it inspired me to turn over a new email/internet leaf captured in this sticky note. Three days later, I’m stickying to it. Now email is not the boss of me, I’m the boss of email!

The note doubles as a logo cover, sorry Apple

February 2010 Fitness Notes

Posted on by
1

Wasn’t the symmetry of February 2010 off the hook? Every month should start on a Monday, have four weeks, and end on a Sunday. Miss it already. Positive Momentum readers are like the children of Lake Wobegone, so someone draw up a new calendar with a leap week or something.

Swam 26,700 meters. Did not re-up for the second Masters session of the year so volume ebbed. Last Masters practice was a time trial and I set three personal records since I had never swam the “events”. 25 free, 13.1; 25 fly, 15.2; 25 breast, 18.1. 100 free was slow, 1:05 something and 200 free was so slow I can’t seem to recall it. 100 IM was slow too, something like 1:21. I’ve written nine workouts, three with a sprint focus, three middle-distance, and three distance. I rotate through in a sprint, middle distance, distance rhythm. Nine, the third distance workout, is a time trial. A “circuit” will take a month now that I’m only swimming 2x/week. Eliminates the “wonder what I should do today” pre swim meditation. Let me know if you’re interested in seeing the workouts. I didn’t see the kind of improvement in early February that I thought I would from the January increase in volume. I thought I would be able to hold 1:19’s for ten 100’s (short course yards, I convert totals to meters) on 1:30, but I was doing 1:21-1:25 on 1:35. My guess is I need to incorporate resistance training or what we once called weight lifting. There are a few problems with that though. One, even though I lift very light weights and concentrate on form, I somehow usually tweak my lower back. Two, if my Squeeze finds me any more alluring, I won’t get anything done. I think I’ll risk both and see if that’s the missing link.

Cycled 226 miles, 73 outdoors. Our winter has been the opposite of the eastern U.S. and Western Europe, unusually mild. It’s so nice to see a light at the end of the indoor cycling tunnel. Two weeks from Daylight Savings Time when the outdoor cycling season officially begins for wusses like me. I like where I am for late February/early March. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m an indoor 6 and an outdoor 4.  Thoroughly enjoyed a brilliant 40 miler with Dano and Lance on Sunday.

Ran 112 miles. Frontloaded the month a bit, weekly totals were 32, 32, 22, 26. Can’t wait for more daylight. The team is running well, holding 7:30’s while discussing the difference between triple lutzes and axles. Well, most of the team. Principal entered the Witness Protection Program probably for some malfeasance at his place of employment. Health Care Analyst somehow forgot that you run a cold into submission. Trooper continues to recycle the “hammy” excuse to avoid Saturday long runs. In contrast, Architect manned up (pun intended) and ran in shorts on a 27 degree morning, Highway Chieftain took a dive for the team on a darkened trail, and Hair Care Sales Manager was nails as usual. I seemed to have picked up a new nickname while in Spokane, Adolph, I’m guessing because I impressed the team with my knowledge of World War II Germany.

And in related news . . .

• My brothers co-authored a book about my steriod use, but I filed a cease and desist order and kept it from seeing the light of day.

• Last indoor cycling session, 250w avg, 75 minutes, 20.4m, 1,104c.

• Luckily for Armstrong, I was not selected to ride in the Leadville 100 in Leadville, Colorado in August.

• There’s building momentum for a repeat Olympia Half Marathon in mid-May. Nothing else on the calendar.

• I’m undecided on what Olympic event to begin training for, the summer 400IM or winter 50K cross country. Seventeen suggested figure skating. Not sure how I didn’t think of that myself. I will see if my sister is up for training with me for a run at Ice Dance gold in Sochi.

Shortcut-mania

Posted on by
4

Spent Saturday at the King County Acquatic Center in Federal Way (the “KCAC” if you’re cool) watching the State YMCA Championship swim meet with over four hundred competitors. Fourteen’s swimming career began last August at the start of high school. She decided to swim because she recognized she wasn’t lighting the soccer world on fire, her parents encouraged it, her older sissy was a co-captain, and she thought it would be a good way to make friends.

The season exceeded her expectations in part because she improved a lot, a result of swimming five times a week and improving her technique. Dropping time is fun. Now though she’s an intermediate swimmer and dropping time is considerably harder. And swimming isn’t as fun. Saturday she swam more slowly than she had hoped. There had to be an explanation she thought. “Was the pool meters?”

The great thing about competitive swimming is there’s an almost perfect correlation between one’s training, pre-race prep, and race day performance. Fourteen misinterpreted her results on Saturday. Her conclusion, “I didn’t race very well. Just didn’t have a good day. Maybe I’m not as good as I thought.” The truth of the matter is she hasn’t been training consistently and intensely enough to swim any faster. It doesn’t matter if you have the perfect track on on your iPod pre-race and are completely amped, race day is simply a barometer of the quality of your training. The question is have you put in the time, have you done the work?

Aren’t we all like Fourteen? We often want to see improvement in some aspect of our lives without investing much time and energy in whatever it is? For example, recently I’ve read some extremely successful blogs that generate one hundred plus comments per post. When I do this I don’t think about how much time those bloggers spend on their blogs, I just say to myself, self, “You should have a blog like that.”

One’s blog readership and juice is almost exclusively a barometer of time and energy invested. The blogosphere is a meritocracy.

So the question for Fourteen, me, and maybe you, is how badly do we want to swim fast, have a widely read blog, get out of debt, lose weight, make a relationship work? Fourteen has other priorities like school and I have a day job. She swims and I blog “on the side” or maybe the “side of the side”. Maybe you try to reduce spending, save money, eat more healthily, exercise more consistently, and spend quality time with your partner “on the side”.

The challenge is being honest with ourselves about what’s most important. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised by the meager results of our sporadic, abbreviated labors.

Tech Notes

Posted on by
Reply

Personal record for links in this post.

By the time you read this, I hope Steve Jobs will have changed personal computing again with Apple’s long awaited tablet. I invest in vanilla bond and stock index funds, except for one stock, AAPL. Wednesday night, I expect the value of my AAPL shares to be flat or slightly down due to the Obama-effect, unrealistic, unmeetable expectations. More importantly, I’m hoping the tablet makes reading even easier and more enjoyable, makes flying more tolerable (via a mobile library or t.v./movie viewing), is as simple as a toaster to use, and enables me to reduce my personal tech footprint. Bonus points if it drags me into the 21st Century cell-phoning, texting world.

I recently purchased a desktop computer which, four or five years ago, I swore I’d never do again. At that time, I didn’t factor in my worsening vision. One complication is keeping the university’s laptop and my personal desktop in sync. Apple’s MobileMe program was okay, but I didn’t want to pay $100/year for it. So I resorted to thumbdriving, which is a hassle. Then I read this. Love it. Hard to believe the Late Adaptor is cloud computing. Check it out if you’re digital life is out of sync.

I also joined the DVR-world recently, Tivo more specifically. What was I thinking trying to watch t.v. without Netflix and Tivo? To quote my previously brilliant/illuminating review, “love it.” One unintended benefit. Fourteen is watching a lot more t.v. That translates into worse grades, which translates into a less expensive college. Genius. Sometimes I amaze myself.

The New York Times has announced plans to charge nonsubscribers for some content in about a year. Others have tried this unsuccessfully and I predict this effort will fail too. There’s simply too much competition, meaning substitutes. Tonight in the tub I’ll read an article from GQ and the Atlantic Monthly. That reminds me, I also hope the tablet is water proof.

Lastly, if you fancy yourself a runner, swimmer, or cyclist, check this blog post out. The triathlete author is a blogging and technology savant.

Fitness Update

Posted on by
Reply

Swimming. I’m not a joiner so I surprised myself when I signed up for the January/early February Masters swim team session. Paying extra to swim with other people? New year/decade kind of thing I guess.

I’ve been getting in about 3-3.5k three times a week. 10k, a regular day in the life of a “swimmer”, a solid week for me. Got some grief for not signing all the way on and buying a team suit before the big meet on February 6th, but I was proud of my excuse, “I’m a triathlete disguised as a swimmer.” Same reason I kick with fins!

That’s a versatile one that I’m ready to use with the cycling team.

Speaking of suits (product pimping alert), the other day I was marveling at how long I’ve been wearing my polyester Speedo Endurance jammers. If I had known about these a decade ago, I wouldn’t be driving a Honda Civic.

Flashblack to the first practice of the New Year. I’m hanging on the wall during a rest interval when all of a sudden, the magic jammers up and quit. A fissure of biblical proportions, just tush and water.

When I got home, my best friend who has a lot of friends on the team demanded I tell her exactly what I did next. So of course I had to embellish it. Truth be told, I timed my locker room dash perfectly and kept my privates out of public view. I had a backup suit and was back in the water with only the coach knowing how close a call everyone had.

It’s important to make a good first impression.

Cycling. See my Christmas present to myself below. Now when the rain or snow is blowing sideways I kick on ESPN and laugh at Mother Nature. Oh, the seven? That’s my Lance Pharmstrong impersonation for Lance. Notice the blurred feet, serious power.

Today’s numbers, off a run, 849calories, 219 watts avg., 28.8k in 1:05. 30m warm up followed by 4 on, 3 off. One benefit of the new bike, I can now be a watts geek.

L, G, and I entered a lottery for an epic ride/race that’s not in Washington State. We entered in that order. I may not know until mid-August if signing up was the result of positive or negative peer pressure.

Running. Taught all day Saturday most of the month so my posse is in more disarray than the Democrats. Missed the Saturday 10-milers. Solid week-day routine though, about 25m/week.

Week that Was—12/7-12/13

Posted on by
2

Swimming, 2x. 4,000m. Cycling, 2x. 35 miles. Running, 3x. Took Su-W off, ran R, F, Sa. 20.7 miles.

14 degrees on F’s pre-dawn run. Not bad after the first mile. Like the Norwegians say, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.”

Time to start thinking about 2010 s/c/r goals. What races, if any, should I do? What goals should I have besides the three main ones, beat Lance on one Saturday morning run, stay healthy, and have fun?

Shifting gears, look, it appears as if I do have a Facebook page after all. Is it just me, or do you too get weirded out when someone has your exact same, uniquely spelled name?

I should change mine to ALtotheDizzle Byrnes.

Image of the Week—11/25/09

Posted on by
2

Timeless

Name something that’s utterly unchanged over the last four decades. Answer: swim meet ribbons. More design genius. If it’s not broken. So simple, yet so motivating.

Yes, rest assured, these babies still have the little white tab on the back with all the pertinent race info for sports historians.

Fourteen brought them home from a recent meet. I used to store mine in a cigar box with my baseball cards. Not all of mine were blue and red though! The beauty of swimming for the Y is they’re never very strong teams, so here’s the formula: 1) pretend there are no uber-fast club swimmers; 2) load up on blue and red nylon goodness; and 3) bask in heightened self-esteem.

Heightened self-esteem, hum. Maybe I should start handing these out in my college writing seminar after reading each batch of papers. Maybe the Villanova women got ribbons like this Monday at the NCAA cross country meet. Maybe I should have given a blue one to Lance for his winning finishing kick at the end of Saturday’s 10 miler. Maybe I should have given the wife a blue one this morning for sleeping more hours than me. Maybe I should send each of the Seahawks a red one for finishing second to the Vikings on Sunday. Maybe if I had sent Sarah Palin a red one last November she wouldn’t have felt the need to write a book and travel the country promoting it. Maybe I should give Marley a blue one each time he fetches the morning paper.

Clearly, these timeless treasures deserve a wider audience.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Week that Was—11/16-11/22

Posted on by
Reply
11/16 M T W R F SA SU Total
S 4,000

 

1,500 p/b 22:05

300kick

300drills

18×100

3rdIMon45

25’s/35’s

500 c.d.

 4,000
C 17 1:05

 

55/10

 17 1:05

 

50/15

 34
R 7.7 1:01:30

 

5hillrepeats

 6.3

5k 21:20

 

6:57,52,42

 6.3 10.5

 

1:20:51

7:43

 31

S—22:05 for 1,500 (scy) isn’t fast by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s faster than I would go without the paddles and buoy. I have no kick normally and the buoy I use could double as an ottoman. It lifts my hips almost like a wetsuit and so I don’t sink quite as much on my awful flipturns. So adjust accordingly. The 18×100 set was a lot easier than normal. Oh yeah, doh, I’ve always done them on 1:40. Five seconds makes a big diff. Not all of us can hammer out 10k weeks in the water like Lance.

C—The bad news, looks like I’m going to come up about 50 miles short of my 2009 goal. The good news, new p.r. for miles in a year.

R—Solid pre-race week. Not sure yet whether to “take what my body gives me” on Sunday in the Seattle half or force myself into a more challenging than normal pace per mile or some combination of the two. Please advise.