Run: 5 miles (Sat), 5.5 miles (Tuesday)
Swim: 1300 meters (Sat), 1500 meters (Mon)
Bike: 18 miles (Sun), 12 miles (Tuesday)
Calories eaten: 9,243,265
Training has begun. Here's my main thought so far: what else can I eat? I'm not used to working out like this, and body has decided we are on a death march and wants very much to preserve my, um, curves.
One mistake people make when they start exercising for weight loss is pigging out afterward because they feel they have earned it. (I was going to find an article to support that, but got lazy. Just trust me.) So you burn 300 calories, and then you eat an extra smoothie or a delicious Mexican pizza from Taco Bell, and boom, you are no longer in a calorie deficit.
I never really had trouble with this concept while I was running. But put me in a pool, and I come out like a building-eating Godzilla in a pink swim cap. What is it about swimming that makes you immediately need sandwiches?
So, enough about sandwiches, and back to training. Swimming, as previous posts have pointed out, is hard. I can run six miles no problem, but one length of the pool tends to have me panting on the edge. But this time I have some help. Coach meets me at the pool and observes me swim freestyle. I'm not going to say it isn't weird having a man observe me swim while I'm wearing a bathing suit, as I'm shy about things like my bottom, but on the other hand I'm sort of over it, and that is one of the great things about being over 40. One gets over certain things.
So, I freestyle down the pool and come up gasping, as usual, and here is where he changes my life. "You're kicking like crazy and it isn't moving you down the pool. It's just making you tired."
Lights shine down from the heavens. A choir sings. It's an a-ha moment.
I'm KICKING too hard. No wonder I can't get across one length of the pool without wanting to collapse from oxygen deprivation. I'm flutter kicking like mad. It's like I'm trying to sprint through a marathon. I TOTALLY get it.
There are about 500 other things wrong with my stroke but seriously, the kicking comment changed my life. I could suddenly go up and down and up and down the pool and still have air. Now I had the oxygen to worry about things like how my arms entered the water, keeping my body long like a ship, and breathing like a pirate and saying "Arr." (Coach teaches kids.) And when I got back in the pool on Monday, it felt much, much, much easier.
One thing though: ill-fitting goggles, contacts, and chlorine appear to be a very bad combo. I have to figure out what to do here, and fast, before blindness comes. Also my goggles have caused the side of the bridge of my nose to swell. It is a tiny spot on my face that I admit I have never paid adequate attention to. Now I am.
As for biking, I met my friend Dig for a ride on Sunday at her house. She immediately proved herself a good cycling buddy by showing me how to put the front wheel back on my bike. I had managed to forget how to put the bike carrying device (what are those things called??) on the car, so I just took the wheel off and threw it in the back. Then, uh, things got complicated when the wheel refused to go back on. But Dig is competent at bikes and solved the problem, nimbly retrieving all the parts I had dropped into her yard and assembling them back into a bike with two wheels.
We rode through Tempe and through Papago Park and then into Scottsdale. It was really a beautiful ride. I was following Dig mostly so I would remember to take my clips out of my pedals at intersections. I really did not want to tip over into the path of a car or something. And then, of course, with all my fear of clipping in and falling, poor Dig fell over. We had been talking on the sidewalk planning our route, and she clipped in and began to go when a cyclist came flying around the corner and startled her. She had one of those slow-speed tip-overs and got a lovely bruise on her hip. She says her career plans to be a nude model are temporarily on hold.
But, being a tough cookie, she got back up and started riding again to finish the ride. 18 miles down. And then? Time for LUNCH.
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