As a New Englander turned New Yorker there are some things I am very accustomed to contending with in my training and racing. Let's take snow, for instance. In my happy little training drawer I have me a pair of grippy cleat-y things that are a little like chains on snow tires. I can run in snow no biggy. Heat is another great example. Said drawer contains 3 different fuel belt set-ups to contend with heat... along with salt and electrolyte tablets, sunscreen and hats should it get even more crazy hot. But one thing I am just not used to having to contend with-- hurricanes. And damn it if I haven't had to contend with the last two already!
The first one forced me out of Texas two days earlier than I had intended on leaving. It was a real bummer, but I decided to shake it off. As said New Englander, its not like I have to contend with these very often. But oh-ho, was I fooling myself. No, instead a second one decided to come up the coast and thwart my triathlon endeavors. Yep. I got hurricaned out.
So here I was breaking out all the gear-- the special transition bag, the wetsuit, the travel pump, the body glide. Tho I sound like a tool for doing it, I even pulled out a picture I took once I ironed out my preferred transition area set up and made sure I had everything I needed ready to go. I was excited and I was ready. (And if you are about to mock me for the picture thing... try it... the more I played with how I was going to lay it out and then took a snapshot, when things irritated me I could move em around and make the flow better. And it makes sure I don't forget to include anything in the setup.) I checked the weather to make sure I didn't need to get some arm warmers if the morning temperature was low and there was a call for rain. Rechecked the next day and it was thunderstorms. Pulled up the more impressive weather resources and low and behold another hurricane was going to mess with me.
By Friday I was agonizing over what I was going to do. It's like having those two characters on your shoulders... one was telling me that it didn't matter if it rained... worst case there was lightning, the race was rain-or-shine, it would turn into a duathlon (run-bike-run) and keep going. While the change to a first leg run wasn't exactly my cup of tea, I could deal with it. It got me racing. The other character was telling me that rain and wind on the bike and run for an hour and a half to two hours was not going to be my brightest moment, even if it was part of the come back of 2008 I was hoping for.
It rained most of Friday and Saturday and on Saturday night I conferred with the friend I was going to do the race with and we opted out. In the end, while I am disappointed, I knew it was far better to live to fight another day, you know? So alas, my tri 2008 dreams kind of came to an unexpected conclusion. That just means I will need to be better prepared for tri 2009.
Instead of racing, I had a very Crossfit intense weekend. This weekend was Fight Gone Bad 2008, which was like nothing I had ever expected. I volunteered to do timing and scoring for the event, so I got to witness it all enough to know what I am getting myself into when I sign up for the next round. It is very difficult to describe, but one of the guys made a movie of it so you can watch a montage of the event.
It consisted of a circuit of 5 stations, each station lasting for one minute, as many reps as you can bang out. The stations ran like this:
1. The Wall Ball. Take a 20 lb medicine ball, toss it up the wall to a spot marked on the wall by tape some 10-12 feet in the air. Catch it in a deep squat (hips below knees) and then throw it up again.
2. Sumo Deadlift High Pull. Take a barbell with about 50 lbs on it and pull it from the floor all the way up to your chin with your shoulders shrugged up and your elbows and high.
3. The Box Jump. With both feet, jump up onto a box that is about 2 ft. tall. Stand totally upright before jumping back down.
4. The Push Press. Again, barbell about 50 lbs (option for less weight), but you take from rack position, push overhead and back so your head pops out in front and your ears come ahead of your shoulders.
5. Rowing on the ergometer for as many calories in 1 minute as you can do.
Once you get through 1 circuit, you get 1 minute rest and you repeat 3 times. It's brutal. The video speaks for itself. Wicked nuts, as we like to say in Boston.
Sunday in lieu of the tri itself, I wound up at my Level 1 class at Crossfit. I was amazed how many of the FGB participants showed up the very next day for more fun. Class was good. We focused on maximal dead-lifting and some "knees to elbows" which are controlled curl ups while hanging straight armed from the pull up bar. So in essence you hang and then you use your abs to curl yourself so that your knees reach your elbows and your back is parallel to the floor, and then you controlled lower yourself. We did sets of 3x12 reps. Quite honestly, I didn't have the core strength to get all the way up, so I had to just take what I could get to get them all done. OMG it was brutally hard. My core is still sore and it is now Tuesday. D'oh.
So all things considered, while it wasn't the weekend I had expected, I feel like perhaps it wasn't so bad after all.
Now when is that next Fight Gone Bad, yo. I am ready to bring it.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Happy Mountain Day!
Back many years ago, I got my undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College. I loved it there. It was one of the most beautiful campuses I had seen and there was nothing quite like the fall in Western Massachusetts. The leaves were turning, the air was crisp and we had a tradition that seemed to bring it all together-- Mountain Day.
You never knew when it was going to be Mountain Day. If your dorm was close enough to the chapel, you'd be awoken at 7am by the never ceasing sounds of the church bells. If you were a little further away and the sound didn't carry as well, the day usually started with manic cheering and screaming in the dorm hallways. All classes were suspended for the day and you were encouraged to get out, enjoy the fall, and at least once in your 4 year career, hike up Mount Holyoke in Skinner State Park.
As an alumna some years later, I am still struck by the urge upon hearing it is Mountain Day, to throw on my hiking boots and head out on the trail, even if work is calling, meetings are piling up... it seems to me the tradition should last. Call it a mental health day, a day to commune with nature, what-have-you. It's Mountain Day today and dang it I should be out there on a hike.
I'll go for a run later, but it just isn't quite the same. Next year I think I'll need a spontaneous sick day.
So to all of you who aren't alums yourselves and don't have the same visceral reaction to the news... well heck, its a beautiful day out there... what a perfect day for a hike.
Happy Mountain Day, everyone.
You never knew when it was going to be Mountain Day. If your dorm was close enough to the chapel, you'd be awoken at 7am by the never ceasing sounds of the church bells. If you were a little further away and the sound didn't carry as well, the day usually started with manic cheering and screaming in the dorm hallways. All classes were suspended for the day and you were encouraged to get out, enjoy the fall, and at least once in your 4 year career, hike up Mount Holyoke in Skinner State Park.
As an alumna some years later, I am still struck by the urge upon hearing it is Mountain Day, to throw on my hiking boots and head out on the trail, even if work is calling, meetings are piling up... it seems to me the tradition should last. Call it a mental health day, a day to commune with nature, what-have-you. It's Mountain Day today and dang it I should be out there on a hike.
I'll go for a run later, but it just isn't quite the same. Next year I think I'll need a spontaneous sick day.
So to all of you who aren't alums yourselves and don't have the same visceral reaction to the news... well heck, its a beautiful day out there... what a perfect day for a hike.
Happy Mountain Day, everyone.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Let's Play Catch Up, Shall We?
I've been back to traveling lately and when I haven't been traveling, I've been noodling on some new ideas... mulling and chewing and finding myself coming full circle in a way that I hadn't anticipated. I've been somewhat quiet about it all as it has unfolded, but I think I am ready to put some of it out there now. So hang on, cause this is going to be long and messy.
I finished my Crossfit Foundations class. And.I.Loved.It. Yep. It brought me back to the energy I had lost in my training. It gave me a sense of re-invigoration. Between getting to work locally, joining the swim team and then Crossfit, I found myself regaining the love of being fit that I had lost over the course of injury and then the marathon. Truth was, I didn't really enjoy marathon training. I remember back to high school and having to read a book called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and hating it. I think I enjoyed the actual act about as much. I had wanted to run the Boston Marathon, and don't get me wrong, I loved it, but what I missed in all the training was the energy and the essence of what drew me into my adult onset athleticism in the first place. Camaraderie. Marathon training was long and lonely and without the variety I had fallen in love with when I was just a triathlete in the making.
So here came my chance to work local for a bit. And I joined the masters swim team and I took up Crossfit and little by little, with the variety of workouts and the camaraderie of people to do them with, I finally felt like my old self again. It was fun and before you knew it, I was off and running like a crazy person again.
In addition to all the training, I started to get excited about things like nutrition. Now if you know me in real life you know how far out and crazy this new interest really is. Sure I like to eat, but I'm the girl who baked cookies at 550 degrees because the 350 on the package wasn't written very clearly. I know nothing about food or cooking, struggle to taste salt and much like my sense of body awareness, existed in a very binary spectrum (this is yummy, this is yucky, this knee is fine, this knee is hurt). The idea that I would start to cultivate an interest in things like the effects of ghrelin and leptin on appetite regulation, insulin resistance and the endocrine system is a little... uh... way out there.
See, here's the thing. Crossfit for me was a little like yoga and a little like my injury recovery-- it was focused in something I knew nothing about-- the subtleties of bio-chemistry and kinasthetics. And you give me something I know very little about, and I am going to want to learn more and more and more. The thing that I love about Crossfit has been its obsessive focus on form. Each movement, each lift, each breath is specific. It's focused on efficiency within functional movement. It's about using your body in a dynamic way and then about optimizing that dynamism by perfecting the form. Sounds a little like yoga, right (at least yoga done right). Much like when I was in PT and much like in my yoga practice, again I was being pulled into strength through detail and it fueled my interest and energy towards getting stronger and better. Each class I would come home literally feeling exhausted and for the following 2 days I would feel tiny little muscles I had never felt before reminding me what I had done. I spent time doing pull-ups, push-ups, box jumps, squats, push presses and push jerks, dead lifts, medball cleans, kettlebell swings, thrusters, sumo dead-lift high-pulls and ring dips, just to name a few things. And through it, we talked about the nature of fitness, of health, of nutrition. Things started clicking.
Over the past few weeks I've been watching my body composition altering again. I've not only lost some weight, but I've been watching my body fat composition begin to drop in favor of more muscle (yes, I actually can measure this), my measurements begin to change (altho not uniformly... my left bicep has gotten bigger than my right) and new muscles begin to appear. In addition to the changes I am feeling inside, I am starting to see those changes outside too. If you've met me in person you've probably noticed the slight kyphosis I have in my back. It's slight and inherited (most of the clan has it), but it gets pointed out to me a lot by body workers. So much of my work in redeveloping my body has been focused around that-- restrengthening muscles in my shoulders, core, back and chest, to re-align as much of that as I can. Especially with weight-lifting, without very mindful attention to fixing that, my center of balance can be compromised, so each movement has had to be deliberate and attentive and I can begin to see some of the subtle improvements in my posture as well.
All this has got me thinking about something even bigger. I enjoy all of this stuff. I enjoy seeing the results of playing around with subtle movement, subtle bio-chemical changes, whether from diet or otherwise. I enjoy learning about occupying my body and my skin in a much more mindful way. I've talked with my mother a few times lately about just some of the changes in body awareness that I have cultivated and it occurs to me that the majority of people aren't really raised to be mindful of these kinds of things. We don't think about metabolic pathways, anabolic and catabolic reactions, movement efficiencies and the like. As a culture we are so far removed from ourselves that it feels like we are on auto-pilot and for many of us that's just the way life is. It's like being in the matrix. But something came along and made me unplug. So now here I am thinking about all of these things. I'm chewing on insulin resistance, on growth hormones, on tearing down and rebuilding muscle, on plyometrics and realizing I might have something here.
When Marisa first got started teaching yoga, I had talked to her about possibly working with survivors-- I knew well of domestic violence and rape survival from my work for many years in the field. One of the biggest challenges was working with people to re-inhabit their skin, to find the strength and the capacity to own their bodies again when someone had come along and taken that sense of ownership away. When I think of the extremes of that auto-pilot I was talking about, this is the most critical example in my head, but is by no means the only examples. To me, however, the need was and is real. Part of healing, if one ever truly heals from those kinds of traumas, is learning to reclaim yourself and to me body work, whether it is massage or yoga or training or whatever... can and should be a part of that process. But it's not something that would ever be easy. The emotions that get stored in muscle and in body tissue are palpable. The reclamation process can be overwhelmingly emotional and I think Marisa knew it wasn't an area she felt overly comfortable in. For me... well... I think I do. I've worked with survivors for years and while I had to give it up when I moved to NYC, its been something so important to me that I knew it would come back around-- I just wasn't sure in what way. And then it hit me.
I have a long way to go in my own fitness-- I have a lot to learn, a lot to adapt, a lot to strengthen and all of that. But as I am learning, my brain is starting to lean towards wanting to make this more and wanting to bring this back around to the work with survivors I had done before. So I am beginning to consider getting certified as both a trainer and a dietitian (yep... scary stuff for the girl baking cookies at 550.) and working that in to a part-time gig in addition to the work I already do and love. I'm not giving up the crazy traveling security consulting work cause I am damn good at it and I enjoy it... but I see this as something I can do on the side as a way of coming back around in the full circle I've always imagined making.
Anyway, its crazy and brewing and really where my brain is these days. It's fun to think about and over the next few weeks and months I am sure it will get some additional traction as I start to put some things in place and look into some programs I may want to consider.
On that note, this is long, so I need to wind it down, but I will leave you with a teaser for later this week. I got me a triathlon this coming weekend. I wasn't going to let 2 seasons slide without at least one tri. So now... look out... things are about to get a little bit crazy.
I finished my Crossfit Foundations class. And.I.Loved.It. Yep. It brought me back to the energy I had lost in my training. It gave me a sense of re-invigoration. Between getting to work locally, joining the swim team and then Crossfit, I found myself regaining the love of being fit that I had lost over the course of injury and then the marathon. Truth was, I didn't really enjoy marathon training. I remember back to high school and having to read a book called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and hating it. I think I enjoyed the actual act about as much. I had wanted to run the Boston Marathon, and don't get me wrong, I loved it, but what I missed in all the training was the energy and the essence of what drew me into my adult onset athleticism in the first place. Camaraderie. Marathon training was long and lonely and without the variety I had fallen in love with when I was just a triathlete in the making.
So here came my chance to work local for a bit. And I joined the masters swim team and I took up Crossfit and little by little, with the variety of workouts and the camaraderie of people to do them with, I finally felt like my old self again. It was fun and before you knew it, I was off and running like a crazy person again.
In addition to all the training, I started to get excited about things like nutrition. Now if you know me in real life you know how far out and crazy this new interest really is. Sure I like to eat, but I'm the girl who baked cookies at 550 degrees because the 350 on the package wasn't written very clearly. I know nothing about food or cooking, struggle to taste salt and much like my sense of body awareness, existed in a very binary spectrum (this is yummy, this is yucky, this knee is fine, this knee is hurt). The idea that I would start to cultivate an interest in things like the effects of ghrelin and leptin on appetite regulation, insulin resistance and the endocrine system is a little... uh... way out there.
See, here's the thing. Crossfit for me was a little like yoga and a little like my injury recovery-- it was focused in something I knew nothing about-- the subtleties of bio-chemistry and kinasthetics. And you give me something I know very little about, and I am going to want to learn more and more and more. The thing that I love about Crossfit has been its obsessive focus on form. Each movement, each lift, each breath is specific. It's focused on efficiency within functional movement. It's about using your body in a dynamic way and then about optimizing that dynamism by perfecting the form. Sounds a little like yoga, right (at least yoga done right). Much like when I was in PT and much like in my yoga practice, again I was being pulled into strength through detail and it fueled my interest and energy towards getting stronger and better. Each class I would come home literally feeling exhausted and for the following 2 days I would feel tiny little muscles I had never felt before reminding me what I had done. I spent time doing pull-ups, push-ups, box jumps, squats, push presses and push jerks, dead lifts, medball cleans, kettlebell swings, thrusters, sumo dead-lift high-pulls and ring dips, just to name a few things. And through it, we talked about the nature of fitness, of health, of nutrition. Things started clicking.
Over the past few weeks I've been watching my body composition altering again. I've not only lost some weight, but I've been watching my body fat composition begin to drop in favor of more muscle (yes, I actually can measure this), my measurements begin to change (altho not uniformly... my left bicep has gotten bigger than my right) and new muscles begin to appear. In addition to the changes I am feeling inside, I am starting to see those changes outside too. If you've met me in person you've probably noticed the slight kyphosis I have in my back. It's slight and inherited (most of the clan has it), but it gets pointed out to me a lot by body workers. So much of my work in redeveloping my body has been focused around that-- restrengthening muscles in my shoulders, core, back and chest, to re-align as much of that as I can. Especially with weight-lifting, without very mindful attention to fixing that, my center of balance can be compromised, so each movement has had to be deliberate and attentive and I can begin to see some of the subtle improvements in my posture as well.
All this has got me thinking about something even bigger. I enjoy all of this stuff. I enjoy seeing the results of playing around with subtle movement, subtle bio-chemical changes, whether from diet or otherwise. I enjoy learning about occupying my body and my skin in a much more mindful way. I've talked with my mother a few times lately about just some of the changes in body awareness that I have cultivated and it occurs to me that the majority of people aren't really raised to be mindful of these kinds of things. We don't think about metabolic pathways, anabolic and catabolic reactions, movement efficiencies and the like. As a culture we are so far removed from ourselves that it feels like we are on auto-pilot and for many of us that's just the way life is. It's like being in the matrix. But something came along and made me unplug. So now here I am thinking about all of these things. I'm chewing on insulin resistance, on growth hormones, on tearing down and rebuilding muscle, on plyometrics and realizing I might have something here.
When Marisa first got started teaching yoga, I had talked to her about possibly working with survivors-- I knew well of domestic violence and rape survival from my work for many years in the field. One of the biggest challenges was working with people to re-inhabit their skin, to find the strength and the capacity to own their bodies again when someone had come along and taken that sense of ownership away. When I think of the extremes of that auto-pilot I was talking about, this is the most critical example in my head, but is by no means the only examples. To me, however, the need was and is real. Part of healing, if one ever truly heals from those kinds of traumas, is learning to reclaim yourself and to me body work, whether it is massage or yoga or training or whatever... can and should be a part of that process. But it's not something that would ever be easy. The emotions that get stored in muscle and in body tissue are palpable. The reclamation process can be overwhelmingly emotional and I think Marisa knew it wasn't an area she felt overly comfortable in. For me... well... I think I do. I've worked with survivors for years and while I had to give it up when I moved to NYC, its been something so important to me that I knew it would come back around-- I just wasn't sure in what way. And then it hit me.
I have a long way to go in my own fitness-- I have a lot to learn, a lot to adapt, a lot to strengthen and all of that. But as I am learning, my brain is starting to lean towards wanting to make this more and wanting to bring this back around to the work with survivors I had done before. So I am beginning to consider getting certified as both a trainer and a dietitian (yep... scary stuff for the girl baking cookies at 550.) and working that in to a part-time gig in addition to the work I already do and love. I'm not giving up the crazy traveling security consulting work cause I am damn good at it and I enjoy it... but I see this as something I can do on the side as a way of coming back around in the full circle I've always imagined making.
Anyway, its crazy and brewing and really where my brain is these days. It's fun to think about and over the next few weeks and months I am sure it will get some additional traction as I start to put some things in place and look into some programs I may want to consider.
On that note, this is long, so I need to wind it down, but I will leave you with a teaser for later this week. I got me a triathlon this coming weekend. I wasn't going to let 2 seasons slide without at least one tri. So now... look out... things are about to get a little bit crazy.
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