Opening Up to Open Water Swimming

Although I've swam hundreds of miles in my lifetime, very few of them have been in open water, and even fewer of those in Alaska. I've always harbored (heh) a fear of swimming in the "wild" water - god knows what's beneath the surface. It's cold and murky, there are living things down under there just waiting to bite my toes off and, mostly, I can't see where I'm going. God, swimming in the outdoors sucks.

But, I'm sucking up the suckiness and just doing it. The first serious (as in "I meant to") open water swim of my life was on Saturday, in the lake at my parents' house. I rented a triathlon wetsuit for the occasion but forgot my cap (super lame), and went out there and totally had a near-panic attack after swimming too hard out to the middle. Breathing, moving, recovering all work differently in the open water - you get to breathing hard, it's cold so you're slightly hyperventilating, there's chop on the surface and bam! - you've inhaled a lungful of cold, murky water and there's nothing to grab onto. So that happened, it freaked me out and I was very discouraged. Luckily Julie was waiting on the dock to encourage me when I got back in and that made me feel better.

Two days later I decided that I had to get back up on that horse so today I returned to the open water. This time I met up with the Alaska Triathlon Club (for the first time) for an open water swim clinic and it was great! There were maybe 30 people there and Little Campbell Lake in Kincaid Park was marked off with clearly visible orange buoys to swim round. We went over basics like applying body glide to prevent chafing, how to quickly put on and get off wetsuits, handling the churning washing machine madness of a mass start, drafting, sighting, swimming around the buoys without getting into a jumbled mess, and then making the exit from swimming in water to running on land. Oh, and I got a couple laps round the lake in, too.

Image via d_seagars/Panaramio

 Little Campbell Lake during a Hammerman Triathlon

Some of triathlon training is just learning protocol, etiquette, how things are done in this world. I showed up carrying my wetsuit in a bag, I don't know why - maybe thinking I couldn't drive there in it, and possibly there'd be this time when it was officially the "put on your wetsuits now" segment. I didn't know. Upon arriving I noted that everyone mostly had or was putting theirs on standing near their cars, surfer-style (I'd parked far away so didn't get to observe this until too late). So I kinda skulked to the edge of the group and oh-so-casually dropped my pants (at least I had my swimsuit underneath) and tugged that sausage casing of a wetsuit on before rejoining the group. Didn't matter though, ultimately, after the swim everyone was changing on the lawn, drying off, pulling on dry clothes over wet speedos, chatting about their last or their next race.

Beside the swimmers, there was a canoe class in session, people fishing from shore and kids and dogs running up and down the shoreline. I won't lie, the combined effect felt not unlike adult summer camp - all we needed was someone with a clipboard and whistle directing us to the arts and crafts bungalow for the next activity while handing out chocolate milk. (Actually, chocolate milk would have been awesome.)

So, on this rainy and gray evening in the freezing ass cold water, I felt really encouraged to compare my (wonderfully average) skills with other triathletes of all levels and to see that I was going to ultimately be okay in the open water portion of the swim when it comes time to race in 40 days. That kind of mental assurance is huge. When I can get my head right that's like 85% of the way there, seriously. I'll go back each Monday and train with the team, while repeating my swimming mantra: "I'm a calm and steady swimmer who finishes strong. I'm a calm and steady swimmer who finishes strong. I'm a calm and steady swimmer who finishes strong."

It feels kinda brave to do this, and it's also quite fun, satisfying. I said later tonight that when I grow up I want to be a triathlete and an independent media producer... Wait - did I finally figure it out?!

Week 4 of Triathlon Training: An extra rest day pays off big time

Today was a good day. I received some positive feedback on my new television series project, wrapped up some loose ends on the radio show project as we head into production hiatus and the weather - ohhhh the weather was amazing! Sunny, blue skies and 70 degrees. Just lovely and oh so fitting for the first day of summer. It's still warm and bright out at 10pm. If only it weren't for those damned mosquitos everywhere forcing me to move inside.

I took an extra rest day this week because I just felt like crap from training so hard. Instead of resting Monday as on my schedule I rode 12 miles and during the whole ride it felt like my legs were made of wood. And my throat was sore the next day so I didn't train Tuesday or Wednesday and tried not to feel too guilty about it. Even though I definitely did feel guilty, and also pretty discouraged.

So, the extra rest turned out to be a great decision because today I felt like MAGIC! I rode to the gym, ran/walked for 35 minutes, did legs and glutes on the weight machines, swam 1000 yards and then rode home. I felt great, not wooden or fatigued at all. Today was a real confidence booster for me - to be able to feel and see my hard work paying off in that these slightly longer workouts that felt like they required less effort and I enjoyed them - that was such a spiritual lift and a relief, too.

The running has been a challenge for me just because I've never been a runner. But it turns out that it was mostly a mental obstacle. When I first started this training schedule almost 4 weeks ago, my newbie triathlete directions warned against overexertion and running only every 2-3 days, encouraging walk/run cycles. So my first day out I was doing 1 minute walking/1 minute running and I was DYING on the running minute. Almost four weeks later I'm really excited to say that I can run for FIFTEEN minutes without getting tired! That makes me feel really encouraged and really proud. I know that I will only get better, too.

Ironically, the swimming has been the toughest challenge of the three sports for me. As a former swimmer I thought I had this part of the tri licked, but actually no. I think because I know very well what my former times and my former workouts used to look like it's really easy to judge how slow and how not very far I'm swimming now (compared to when I did this as a teen 6-10 times a week. Ha!). Again, it's a mental challenge to overcome, changing the way I think about it - I'm doing good for not having swam for years. I enjoy totally blanking my mind out in the pool as I do laps - it's one of the only parts of my life in which I can do that - and then whatever "floats" to the top of my brain is what I think on. Today it was ways that I can be good at my job, a professional and amicable person whom others want to work with.

Cycling has been awesome - rain or shine. I got beautiful new cycling shoes to clip in to my pedals and they really have made a difference I can notice - being able to pull on the up-pedal (??) as well as hammer on the down stroke is great. The day after I got them I rode 15 miles, last Saturday, and never clipped out once - mostly because I was afraid of stopping and not being able to unclip, slowly falling over with my feet attached. I'm really excited to learn about working on my bike, changing a tube and other routine maintenance. Jim will teach me. I'm also looking forward to swapping out my hybrid tires for some skinnier road tires so I can go faster during the race.

I think it's super tedious to read about other people's workouts, so apologies. This is really just a way for me to remember my progress. And, too, I hope it could be encouraging that there is obvious progress to be seen in the 4th week of training for a sprint triathlon. I'm glad I took that extra rest day because it let me see that progress - and the wider implications of this as a metaphor is not lost on me. Sometimes when I'm exhausted and not performing well, just pushing myself and miserable, it pays to take a break and let my body/mind/spirit recover just enough to reap the benefits the next time out, and to be encouraged by those benefits so that I can keep going strong, believing in myself.

Really Brief Assessments of Recent Books Read

Here are the books I've read recently (many due to the book club I started about 5 months ago):

• The Help by Kathryn Stockett - I tore through this book, anxious to understand the hype. Then I understood- it was an entertaining, good read but somewhat missed the mark on racial politics, striking out when it came to relying on a white voice to tell the black experience in an imperative time in history. Which I know was the point, but I'm not sure this was successful.

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King - I really did not enjoy this book. I wanted to, though, to read something about time travel, the incredible discovery and comparison of what traveling backward in time can tell us about the present day - especially when it comes to interrupting a major history changing event like the assassination of JFK. I thought it would be full of as-yet-undeclared observations about politics and life in the early 1960's. But overall I found it to drag on, dully, inserting too many meticulously researched unimportant facts instead of observations about how the past and the present differentiate, complicate, explain each other. It disappointed me.

• Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman - Here's a book about an American ex-pat in France realizing that French kids are much better tolerated and tolerant in usual, adult society so she sets out to discover if there's something psychological, sociological, cultural behind better behaved French kids. She thinks there is, but the American parents who've heard of this seem to resent her observations. I keep thinking of a certain lunch picking up handfuls of thrown food off the floor as we leave, wondering how it could've gone differently. Nothing wrong with investigating different methods. Yet, as not a parent myself I find that I don't really get to have an opinion that counts yet, even if I do think some of the French child-raising ideas are squarely sound and I do plan to somewhat incorporate them when I raise mon bebes.

• Cruising Altitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet by Heather Poole - I'm a big fan of specific sociological studies because I'm so curious - okay nosy - when it come to other subcultures, ways of life that I've yet to learn about. Flight crew on commercial airlines was an inside job that I thought would be super interesting to hear about. Could have been better, this book, it was pretty poorly written with so! many! exclamation! points! And needless drama that I groaned as I read, even as I finished it.

• The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentleman Farmers by Josh Kilmer Purcell - I hearted this book in a deep way and here's why: on Netflix I found the TV series about Josh, his farm and Brent, his partner a former employee of Martha Stewart and in true TV fashion it was the episodic yukyuks about a couple gay city fish outta water, some goats, etc which I thoroughly enjoyed of course. But this book was like the diary behind all that, the true not-made-for-TV serious shit (and funnier stuff, too) that explains the context, the deeper considerations and realizations that occur when you give up a big city life and try to make it work it the littler country.

• Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale - I was excited to read this book because our previous (summer) book club choice was The Reader (not even briefly reviewed here - in two words: "sexually tedious") and so I tore into this travel memoir written by a young 20-something LA television writer out to have a worldly number of experiences as she circled the glob-------schreech to a halt and WTF? She's halfway into the book and hung up on a South American prisoner, giving up her job, her life and moving south to what - get him out of prison while she hates on her parents boo hoo who never helped her pay for college and wouldn't help her pay her expenses now as she's run out of money, trying to free her South American prisoner who eventually leaves her high and dry? Ugh, halfway through it becomes seriously so whiny and almost unbearable.

• If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley - I heard this author interviewed on Fresh Air, talking about how the toilet, the architectural placement of the kitchen within the home could be used to trace the development of humans through history. I was intrigued and so I bought the book and read about how everyday, meaningful human actions like food preparation, sex, giving birth, dinner time, taking a shit, entertaining guests - how these all informed our living spaces and shaped our homes and our lives. So interesting.

• You Are An Ironman by Jacques Steinberg - So I started training for a triathlon which means that I started reading a number of books to inform me, motivate me, educate me. This is a NY Times journalist who chronicles the roads of 6 amateur ("age grouper" as in not professional) athletes who train for the Tempe, Arizona Ironman. We hear their stories, struggles and a lot about their training in this book - all culminating in crossing the finish line after 140.6 miles to hear "You are an Ironman" declared upon them. Pretty inspiring.

• Slow Fat Triathlete by Jayne Williams - This is one of those books that all the onliners recommend to newbie triathletes - here's a book that is for anyone ready to achieve their athletic goals in the body they have now (as the book cover states), despite age, weight, clumsiness, etc... Definitely for me. It's funny and encouraging; stressing the point that you'll look like a dork out there trying to get your wetsuit off, dealing with the cycle chafing issues or walking during the "run" when you need to - so suck it up and FINISH THE RACE! (This is really meant for specifically triathletes, slow fat ones for that matter.)

• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed - Goodness, this book broke my heart immediately in the introduction. It was one of those what if you lost your mother and the love of your life in the same year kinda tragedies and where does that leave you? Well, it left the author promiscuous and lost in life, experimenting with heroin and totally lamenting that this was not her best life. So she shed it all and put on a heavy pack, deciding to hike from Southern California to Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail to get her head right, find her real self sans makeup and tampons and showers and lacy bras. Such a lovely, brave read, one that as Helene Cixous says, could only be written with such ferocious honesty because the life barriers were removed - sense of self, loss of parents - or, those who would judge, scare you away from writing what you really are, what you really did, what you really think. It made me cry a lot and also inspired me much.

• A Life Without Limits by Chrissie Wellington - Another triathlon book, this one by the 5 time female world Ironman champion. I like to read these bios to know what they know, hear what they have to say and try to understand what it is that they go through to be the best in the world. Then I read these books and understand they do this as a full time job, it's their entire life and the book details all this inside information of a professional athlete in 24/7 training and it makes for a somewhat dull read on the page, even though I get that this person is winning big time. I guess it helps me see that this is true, top level elite athletics - it's the all day, every day training routine that sets you up for winning. I sort of covet that kind of focus, that sort of complete exertion that leads to obvious results, swimming biking running as your day job, the races your evaluations. 

Snowy June hike at Hatcher Pass

Neicey approves the nursery

Is this a flocking joke?

Spotted on the next street over last week. Where what how - I want one!

Liberty Falls

 

We camped next to these falls last night, like 10 yards from the river. We had to yell to speak to one another by the campfire. When we got in the van to leave this morning and closed the doors, it was suddenly so quiet that my ears felt plugged. Beautiful spot about 15 minutes away from the Chitina dip netting madness.

Copper River Dip Netting at Chitina

What a massive, raging river! Not even a bump, but we'll try again tomorrow.

My First Tri: Here's Mud in Yer Eye!

It's always something worth noting when you make a circle, ending up back somewhere you once couldn't wait to leave only to find that it really suits you after all. For me, that's being a jock. I know, crazy - years later she realizes that being clever, artsy and jocky are not all mutually exclusive avenues to pursue in life.

I can't even suss out where I picked up the bug again. It was a combination of stuff - like needing an energy outlet, summer weather, wanting a goal, requiring a challenge. There was also this Vogue article about how triathlon training made for the best bodies, how this ex-smoker who'd once lost her way in life now had ALL her shit together on her bike, running, swimming and a great body to boot. I was like, exactly yes yes yes please. I barely realized it but I was so ready, contemplating kickboxing, fitness bootcamp, something anything, and I think that's what did it. So I decided to train for a sprint-distance triathlon and I started training two weeks ago. Made sense - I used to swim competitively, I can ride hard on a bike and well, I suck ass at running, so there's my truest challenge (besides swimming in open water, eek). Actually, it's all a challenge - yet - I've just lost 40 pounds and it's the right time to exert myself, whip this body into fierce action, and there is nothing like competing against a clock to focus one's exercise routine.

So, I'm sitting here writing this with a super sore body and a tired, but satisfied mind, while also making new music mixes for these 5x a week workouts (2-3 of which are doubles, as in running + biking, swimming + biking, running + swimming) and I TOTALLY LOVE IT!!!! It's so awesome to feel all the muscles flexing, burning, thinking that I might die, but then to find in myself to just go....a little...bit...further. The only downside is that I feel super selfish putting all this energy into my training regimen, and I feel like I'm bleeding money getting all the gear for this endeavor - speedo, cap, goggles, socks, running shorts, wicking shirts, super-amazing-outrageously-expensive-Victorian-corseted sports bra (by Enell- revolutionary!!!), bike computer, new running shoes, backpack for toting gear to gym/pool, gym membership, watch with timer and chrono, cycling tune up, new brake pads, freaking Gatorade. I need a sponsor!

On a training ride yesterday I was this nutty cyclist on the side of the road in full rain gear (because it was pouring), soaking wet and covered in mud, just grinning from ear to ear and singing along to my iPod, nodding at my fellow muddy crazy cyclists. I totally wanted to pump my fist in the air when I got that huge endorphin rush at about 9 miles. Here's me just finished my 11 mile ride:

I look effing crazy. Mud in both my eyes, running mascara, but man did I feel flush with endorphins. Today I swam hard and walked fast (couldn't handle the running, so I walked it out) and was so exhausted that I thought I might barf and almost did. 

It's something to really get into. Something healthy to get addicted to. I'm so motivated and I'm so ready to compete again. My running/walking, swimming, cycling workouts have been the highlight of my days (which is simpler now that it's this slightly lighter work schedule in summer) and because it's 3 sports, it's not boring at all. So that I have a clear goal to work toward, I signed up for a triathlon on August 4, the Aukeman in Juneau, and put myself on a rigorous 10-week training course that will prepare me for the 750 meter open water swim, 19K bike ride and 5K run. My goal is to finish in 1 hour 45 minutes. Or, to just finish period. That'll make me happy.

I realize that, in a way, I'm returning to the athletic roots of my teenage years, to Juneau, when I weighed 150 pounds and could swim a 100 yards of the pool in 1 minute. "It's a continuum," says Jim. Meaning, I think, that you pick up 5, 10, 17 years later and just go from there, wherever you are, whatever you weigh, however old you may be. So, on this continuum, I'm 8 weeks to go, all sore and ripped up, but feeling good and excited to get to race day! I hear people get addicted to these races and I'm just hoping my addictive personality will pick up on this thing - could be fun. But we'll start with one and go from there.