I want to fill in a few more blanks here so that the whole thing makes sense.
In my 20's, I was a rollerskating whore. I also took a bodybuilding class around the age of 26, and was told by the instructor that "if I wanted to, I could pack on a bunch of muscle." I guess that means he thought I am an endomorph, how funny considering certain people (I call them jealous assholes in my head) seem to get a kick out of calling me skinny now, which would imply that I'm an ectomorph who has trouble adding muscle mass. Which is it? If I don't do a lot of cardio, I know I can put on muscle pretty quickly...keep reading.
Right after I got married, I stopped rollerskating in order to adopt more of the hobbies of my husband (fishing, canoeing, camping, drinking, ping pong), although I did not take up running 2 miles at a time occasionally--I just wasn't into running.
In 1991 at the age of 35 (still married at this point), I became tired of being skinny and flabby. I enjoyed the way I felt in my 20's when I was at least doing about an hour of aerobic exercise a day, and I also liked lifting weights. So with one of my bonuses (from being a workaholic), I bought a weight machine that I still have and love. I also bought some dumbbells to round out the weight collection. I started working out with that stuff, and in about 3 months' time, my then husband remarked to me, "Don't you think your arms are big enough?" What the fuck, man. It's not like I was a steroid bitch. Sure, I was showing some bis, tris and delts (nice ones, too), but I still had a nice ladylike coating of fat over them. Still, that comment sat with me.
In 1992, I became fed up with the workaholic lifestyle, received a poor, undeserved performance review (my then manager was fired soon thereafter, so my instincts about him were right on the money), and quit my job with the blessing of my husband. I just wanted to take a few weeks to breathe and figure some things out. I don't remember how long I took off, but it wasn't too long, and I secured another job easily. I continued lifting and began adding some cardio to my week because I thought it was the right thing to do.
In 1994, my husband asked for a divorce. That sent me reeling, and 3 months after the process got started, I was laid off from my job. I pulled a stupid maneuver and went rollerskating after a few too many drinks, crashed and ended up with a broken arm and good concussion that made me pass out a couple of times in front of my Mom. I wasn't exactly at my best.
I picked myself up and got onto the job hunt, which at first depressed me. Here I was going through a divorce, lost my job, crashed on skates drunk, my self-confidence was at an all time low, and I am supposed to be all smiley and confident walking into job interviews. The first 2 weeks were hell, but then things turned around and all of a sudden I had 3 job offers. I took the one that required the shortest commute with the most pay.
Since I was so happy to have found myself in a slightly better place, I rewarded myself with a trip to Kona before I began my new job. I had a great time, basically laying on the beach drinking and snorkeling. It was awesome.
I made some fast friends at the new job, had some post-divorce wildness (I won't go into details), and joined the health club in the office building because it seemed like a fun thing to do. I was invited to join a step aerobics class. I thought, OH NO I AM A SPAZ (Spaz is my brother Mike's affectionate name for me), but I caught on soon. And then I liked it so much that when they told us to take our heart rates and mine was quite low, I took it as a signal that I needed to work out harder.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
I kept doing the step class to the point where I was so good at it that I could sub for the teachers when they were sick. There was a parade of trainers at this gym until 1998 when the guy who led the step class changed it up to a circuit format including jump rope, jumping jacks, assorted step things, etc. When it turned to summer, we headed outdoors and it got even more fun because now we incorporated sprints. I had never run before, but I was cool with the sprints.
One day, I thought, "I wonder if I can run around this outdoor path all the way." And so I did, and it felt easy, so I did it a few more times. One of the runners I knew said, "You just basically ran a 5K." I didn't know what that meant, but I found out, and also that every weekend in the Chicago area in spring through fall you can find a 5K race, so I thought I'd try one out.
I puked at the end of my first official 5K in 1998, but loved it. The reason I puked is because I took my then usual handful of vitamins like 2 hours before the start, and so they didn't really have time to digest much with the nerves and all, and hence I puked heartily at the finish. In fact, I found the nearest garbage can and heaved into it once, backed off, and then went back for seconds! Someone asked if I was okay, and I said, "Just leave me alone once I finish puking I'll be just fine." And I was.
Next, these "runners" began talking about marathons. Not me, NO FUCKING WAY NEVER! And fall of 1998 I agreed to run the last 5 miles of the Chicago marathon (or at least try to) with a friend. The week before, I realized I had never run that far ever, so after my usual 3.5-ish mile run, I ran another 5. It seemed like I could do it, so I was happy I would be able to keep my promise.
That year they had a 5K that began about 1/2 hour before the marathon start, so I did it, and then I took the El out to the 21 mile point of the marathon. I met up with my friend, and she was running maybe 8:15's and I couldn't run that fast, but I think I kept with her for about a mile, and then told her to go. I still ran all the way in and they tried to give me a medal and everything (I did have a bib on from the 5K).
My friend tried to convince me to do a marathon and again I said NO FUCKING WAY. I went to Kona on vacation the day after the Chicago marathon. The second day I was there, I decided to just run a bit more slowly and see how far I could go. I ran 7 miles. Then 2 days later, I ran 9 miles. 2 more days later I ran 11. I decided right then and there that I could run a marathon.
When I got home from Kona, what should appear in my mailbox but a flyer for Team in Training's program for the Anchorage marathon in June, 1999. I signed up, and also decided I'd do Chicago marathon later that year.
Now, it was in April of 1999 and I was in Kona again on vacation and I did an 18-miler to prepare for Anchorage, and it was on my way home from Kona that the fateful discussion about Ironman took place. I had not even done my first marathon and I was thinking of Ironman.
I find this all very entertaining to recall. See I just listened to people who took time to know me and see things in me that maybe I couldn't see myself at first. And now I've done 15 Ironmans, 8 open marathons (2 of them being on my own) and one Ultraman.
My dear Dad (rest in peace) did not at first understand why a seeming smarty (he considered me the brightest of all his children and I believe he was correct) would want to get involved in endurance sports. I pointed out that Alan Turing, for one example, was into endurance sports. Albert Einstein was known to go on 3 hour walks. My point being that endurance and deep thought (even mathematics and physics!) are very compatible pursuits. So I guess I was convincing Dad that I wasn't an outlier. And he did come to understand how the physical stuff balanced me out emotionally and intellectually.
There. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Outlier?
A few days ago on Facebook, I shared an article about recovery. Someone chimed in that it didn't mention one of the obvious factors in recovery--one's age. I took that to be a given, in that it's widely recognized that as one ages, the ability to recover from hard workouts diminishes somewhat. To which I added, but if one practices good recoverability, then as one ages, the impact of aging alone can be significantly mitigated.
And then I was called an outlier. I didn't take that as a compliment or insult--just something to ponder. I took the comment to mean the second of the definitions below:
out·li·er (outlr)
n.
1. One whose domicile lies at an appreciable distance from his or her place of business.
2. A value far from most others in a set of data: "Outliers make statistical analyses difficult" (Harvey Motulsky).
3. Geology A portion of stratified rock separated from a main formation by erosion.
I don't now nor have I ever considered myself an outlier athletically. I didn't come from "good" parents (good in the sense of being gifted athletically or genetically), I didn't deliberately engage in sports (unless you count riding a bike maybe 2 miles to an outdoor pool in the summer and flopping around for an hour or so) until my 20's (and even then it was just rollerskating), and I didn't begin serious training until I was the ripe old age of 42. All I have done is make choices and seized opportunities that improve my ability to train hard and recover from it.
I will now tell the complete story of how I got to where I am today in triathlon. This may bore the hell out of you, but I enjoy writing about it and have never really gotten the entire thing together at once, so here goes.
Oh, sure I'm damn lucky that I get to work out of my house. It wasn't always that way. I was a workaholic in my 20's and early 30's, regularly putting in 60-80 hours per week. I got married at the age of 29 and saw my hours spent working out decline to a pitiful amount--near zero. I found that that made me an unhappy person, although I thought it made my marriage better, because I worked tirelessly at it to try and be the perfect wife. You can't be the perfect anything unless you are being true to yourself, and I wasn't. I began a slow return to "working out," (which is what I had considered my exercise in my 20's to be--it was certainly not training), while continuing to pile on the hours at work.
I became happier with myself. I got divorced. I began a new job in the software industry, and there was a gradual acceptance of doing the computer/phone thing from home a few days per week. And if you were good at managing yourself this way (and I was) and being productive, you were able to spend progressively more and more time working out of home, until well now, where it's more the norm than the exception for many people in the industry to work from home full time.
So sure, I'm lucky that I get to work out of my house, but the opportunity to do so only came after I'd worked myself into the ground for many years. So I earned it, and then I began using it to my advantage. And I rediscovered the joy I get in movement, and it just escalated from there. From 1997-1999, I was only running and lifting (and a little miscellaneous "cardio"), maybe 8-10 hours a week, which is still a lot for most people, but it was manageable, and I wasn't yet working at home full time.
Then I got bit by the triathlon bug. Or, should I say, the opportunity presented itself. I had run 2 marathons with Team in Training, and my local group was starting up a triathlon program, and I was asked to be a mentor. ME! What the fuck, right? I knew NOTHING about triathlon and figured I had better start reading up, and so I did. I bought books, I found all the best websites from which to glean information, bought a decent road bike (which is now in the loving hands of my massage therapist), took some swim lessons (Cindy can attest those were good times indeed!) and pronounced myself a triathlete. A crappy triathlete, but at least I had some of the best gear around (not my bike yet, though).
Meanwhile, in April 1999, a dude in Kona had suggested that I would do an Ironman someday. Here's the back of my then business card that I made him write it down on:
Here I was practicing being a crappy triathlete (and I did suck) and this idea was now rolling around in my head. I announced at a summer track workout in 1999 (preparing for my second marathon, the Chicago marathon) that I was going to do an Ironman. I sure got some interesting looks. I wasn't exactly svelte at the time, and I didn't (and still don't) run very fast, either. So it was, at the time, a rather bold statement. But anyone who knows me, knows that when I decide to do something, I do it. I usually need to make myself a plan, and in my head, the plan was to do my first Ironman in 2004 or 2005.
As fate would have it, though, a person (let's call him Steve) suggested that I register for Ironman Lake Placid in 2001, and like an idiot, I did. So, OK, I was ahead of my plan, but I rationalized that I wasn't getting any younger (I was 43 in 2001), and what the hell, why not?
I got a coach (whose first triathlon was an Ironman, by the way, even though he told me right off the bat that I had no business doing an Ironman so soon), and he put the hurt to me real bad. I was able to do the training, but it was still a huge leap for me to go from 8-10 hours of training per week to an average of almost 14 per week. Along the way, I osmosed whatever I could about training and recovery, and thus began my quest to figure out how I could keep training at or above this level and feel better while doing it. As beat up as I was that first Ironman season (and I was told a few years ago by someone I admire that she could see just how beat up I was back then), I really did enjoy the training. I was still lifting, which I loved, and running, which I was coming to enjoy more and more, and I had always like swimming and biking, and I enjoyed the process of trying to get better at all of it. And also improve my race time, duh.
It took me a few years to get comfortable with the fact that it would be better for me (and my left knee which has no ACL anymore) to drop some weight in order to protect my running health mostly, but also maybe improve my race time. And then the lights went on about stretching and massage, and well, an athlete (such as it was) was born. It is no coincidence that I had an Ironman PR in 2004 that stood up until 2009, when I finally cracked it. Between 2005 and 2009, my life was a hell of sorts, with my Mom's declining health and then death, my Dad's death and then the whole executor thing which finally ended this past February.
I am rereading a book that I finally got back from a person I lent it to like 8 years ago called Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously. I can see myself in the book, as sometime around 2003 or 2004, I had decided I wanted to see what it would be like for me to really explore my athletic capabilities, despite a full time job and regular life. The author's Dad dies while he is on his quest for personal athletic excellence. Was it a premonition that I had read it back then before I went through the same thing myself? Who can know.
It is a wonderful book, and there are so many statements in the book that resonate so much with me, like:
So maybe it was making that choice is what people think makes me an outlier? Well, if so, fuck it. Anyone can make the choice, and I don't want to hear any excuses like I'm married, I have kids, I don't work at home. I am not who I am by chance--it's by choice. I've worked damn hard in my career and athletically, and yes, I have sacrificed some things along the way, but in the end, I don't consider my life any better or worse than anyone around me. It's the life I chose, and that's what I like most about it.
Since then, I've discovered a bunch of things about myself, been through a bunch of life crap, and now here I sit being able to say that, for a person my age, I tend to recover quite well from heavy training. Outlier? Nah, I just work my fucking ass off.
And then I was called an outlier. I didn't take that as a compliment or insult--just something to ponder. I took the comment to mean the second of the definitions below:
out·li·er (outlr)
n.
1. One whose domicile lies at an appreciable distance from his or her place of business.
2. A value far from most others in a set of data: "Outliers make statistical analyses difficult" (Harvey Motulsky).
3. Geology A portion of stratified rock separated from a main formation by erosion.
I don't now nor have I ever considered myself an outlier athletically. I didn't come from "good" parents (good in the sense of being gifted athletically or genetically), I didn't deliberately engage in sports (unless you count riding a bike maybe 2 miles to an outdoor pool in the summer and flopping around for an hour or so) until my 20's (and even then it was just rollerskating), and I didn't begin serious training until I was the ripe old age of 42. All I have done is make choices and seized opportunities that improve my ability to train hard and recover from it.
I will now tell the complete story of how I got to where I am today in triathlon. This may bore the hell out of you, but I enjoy writing about it and have never really gotten the entire thing together at once, so here goes.
Oh, sure I'm damn lucky that I get to work out of my house. It wasn't always that way. I was a workaholic in my 20's and early 30's, regularly putting in 60-80 hours per week. I got married at the age of 29 and saw my hours spent working out decline to a pitiful amount--near zero. I found that that made me an unhappy person, although I thought it made my marriage better, because I worked tirelessly at it to try and be the perfect wife. You can't be the perfect anything unless you are being true to yourself, and I wasn't. I began a slow return to "working out," (which is what I had considered my exercise in my 20's to be--it was certainly not training), while continuing to pile on the hours at work.
I became happier with myself. I got divorced. I began a new job in the software industry, and there was a gradual acceptance of doing the computer/phone thing from home a few days per week. And if you were good at managing yourself this way (and I was) and being productive, you were able to spend progressively more and more time working out of home, until well now, where it's more the norm than the exception for many people in the industry to work from home full time.
So sure, I'm lucky that I get to work out of my house, but the opportunity to do so only came after I'd worked myself into the ground for many years. So I earned it, and then I began using it to my advantage. And I rediscovered the joy I get in movement, and it just escalated from there. From 1997-1999, I was only running and lifting (and a little miscellaneous "cardio"), maybe 8-10 hours a week, which is still a lot for most people, but it was manageable, and I wasn't yet working at home full time.
Then I got bit by the triathlon bug. Or, should I say, the opportunity presented itself. I had run 2 marathons with Team in Training, and my local group was starting up a triathlon program, and I was asked to be a mentor. ME! What the fuck, right? I knew NOTHING about triathlon and figured I had better start reading up, and so I did. I bought books, I found all the best websites from which to glean information, bought a decent road bike (which is now in the loving hands of my massage therapist), took some swim lessons (Cindy can attest those were good times indeed!) and pronounced myself a triathlete. A crappy triathlete, but at least I had some of the best gear around (not my bike yet, though).
Meanwhile, in April 1999, a dude in Kona had suggested that I would do an Ironman someday. Here's the back of my then business card that I made him write it down on:
Here I was practicing being a crappy triathlete (and I did suck) and this idea was now rolling around in my head. I announced at a summer track workout in 1999 (preparing for my second marathon, the Chicago marathon) that I was going to do an Ironman. I sure got some interesting looks. I wasn't exactly svelte at the time, and I didn't (and still don't) run very fast, either. So it was, at the time, a rather bold statement. But anyone who knows me, knows that when I decide to do something, I do it. I usually need to make myself a plan, and in my head, the plan was to do my first Ironman in 2004 or 2005.
As fate would have it, though, a person (let's call him Steve) suggested that I register for Ironman Lake Placid in 2001, and like an idiot, I did. So, OK, I was ahead of my plan, but I rationalized that I wasn't getting any younger (I was 43 in 2001), and what the hell, why not?
I got a coach (whose first triathlon was an Ironman, by the way, even though he told me right off the bat that I had no business doing an Ironman so soon), and he put the hurt to me real bad. I was able to do the training, but it was still a huge leap for me to go from 8-10 hours of training per week to an average of almost 14 per week. Along the way, I osmosed whatever I could about training and recovery, and thus began my quest to figure out how I could keep training at or above this level and feel better while doing it. As beat up as I was that first Ironman season (and I was told a few years ago by someone I admire that she could see just how beat up I was back then), I really did enjoy the training. I was still lifting, which I loved, and running, which I was coming to enjoy more and more, and I had always like swimming and biking, and I enjoyed the process of trying to get better at all of it. And also improve my race time, duh.
It took me a few years to get comfortable with the fact that it would be better for me (and my left knee which has no ACL anymore) to drop some weight in order to protect my running health mostly, but also maybe improve my race time. And then the lights went on about stretching and massage, and well, an athlete (such as it was) was born. It is no coincidence that I had an Ironman PR in 2004 that stood up until 2009, when I finally cracked it. Between 2005 and 2009, my life was a hell of sorts, with my Mom's declining health and then death, my Dad's death and then the whole executor thing which finally ended this past February.
I am rereading a book that I finally got back from a person I lent it to like 8 years ago called Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously. I can see myself in the book, as sometime around 2003 or 2004, I had decided I wanted to see what it would be like for me to really explore my athletic capabilities, despite a full time job and regular life. The author's Dad dies while he is on his quest for personal athletic excellence. Was it a premonition that I had read it back then before I went through the same thing myself? Who can know.
It is a wonderful book, and there are so many statements in the book that resonate so much with me, like:
- "In the end, endurance sports are a test of yourself against yourself; they require nobody else, and sometimes they can hardly tolerate anyone else."
- When Rob Sleamaker is watching the author reach for some chips to go with guacamole he says, "You know, we all like chips. But they have an awful lot of fat in them." And in that moment was born The Man Who Reads the Sides of Every Can.
So maybe it was making that choice is what people think makes me an outlier? Well, if so, fuck it. Anyone can make the choice, and I don't want to hear any excuses like I'm married, I have kids, I don't work at home. I am not who I am by chance--it's by choice. I've worked damn hard in my career and athletically, and yes, I have sacrificed some things along the way, but in the end, I don't consider my life any better or worse than anyone around me. It's the life I chose, and that's what I like most about it.
Since then, I've discovered a bunch of things about myself, been through a bunch of life crap, and now here I sit being able to say that, for a person my age, I tend to recover quite well from heavy training. Outlier? Nah, I just work my fucking ass off.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Bike Porn!
bling...bling...bling...Hello? It's SKULL KINGDOM! I finally got worthy aerobars on her and recabled her with red Nokons. All that's left to do is get flames on the rims...getting that looked into. She is truly the sweetest ride I have ever had or seen!
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