This weekend was the first serious training weekend of the season for me with a 45-mile time trial on Saturday, followed by a 17-mile run at Rockefeller Park on Sunday. No bricks yet, still too early and I’m still focused on building the foundation to tolerate the increased volume and intensity that this training demands.Cindy gave me “the speech” that apparently included the double blind results of a survey of our friends and family members who apparently all agree that I look like a coked-out-old druggie at 175lbs and much younger and healthier at 200lbs. She said “I hope you aren’t planning on dropping all of that weight like you did back in 2004.” Followed by, “Others are reading your blog and I know that’s what you…..” and she didn’t even finish the sentence. I could tell she was struggling how to incorporate all of the advice that her friends must have told her about how to approach me on this subject, especially in only my second week off of chocolate. Insert motive for domestic murder-suicide here. Yeah, sure it’s easier to stay with my natural weight, which at only 10 hours of training a week can probably hover around 200 pounds. Ten hours a week?, you’re thinking? Lord forbid that I ever have a serious injury where I have to stop working out for an extended period of time.
Claire Standish: What’s your name?
John Bender: What’s yours?
Claire Standish: Claire.
John Bender: Claire?
Claire Standish: Claire. It’s a family name.
John Bender: Oh, it’s a fat girl’s name.
Claire Standish: Oh, thank you.
John Bender: You’re welcome.
Claire Standish: I’m not fat.
John Bender: Well not at present, but I can see you really pushing maximum density. See I’m not sure if you know this, but there are two kinds of fat people: there’s fat people that were born to be fat, and there’s fat people that were once thin but became fat… so when you look at ‘em you can sorta see that thin person inside.
This week, I’m in the gawkies, you know that funny period where you’ve made adjustments that you know should be working but your body is fighting you, because quite frankly, it likes the chocolate and sugar more than you do. Daily, my weight fluctuates anywhere between 194 and 200 at any point during each day, on the same scale. Hey maybe that’s a reason not to check so often, but at this point, it’s kind of like a game, “Hey, what if I cycle for an hour, how much water will I lose? What if I starve myself? What if I hold as much fluid in my bladder for as long as I can? How much does a bowl movement actually weigh? Insert scenes of Matthew Modine in a sauna wearing a sweat suit in the movie Vision Quest.
I know what you’re thinking, “What if you get sick?” See, now I’ve already thought about that years ago and you already have to know where I’m going with this one. Coming off of a virus, we always look great! When I started as a trainer back in college, I took genetics for the sole reason of trying to see if I could come up with a way to create a virus that only affected women from the hips down. Seriously, you know I’m right. I’d be a gazziolionaire if I had figured out that one. I even went around asking women if they would be cool puking and feeling violently ill for a full week if it meant that they’d lose pounds around their core, hips and thighs and unanimously they all answered “YES!”
Getting back to me, carrying my ass up 2,000 feet of climbing like I did today is sure a heck of a lot easier at 175 pounds, and based on my calculations will account for a full two hours of difference in my Ironman finishing times. Two hours!
So like most conversations Cindy and I have, I nodded my head understandingly and she went and reorganized something in frustration. Hmm, I’ll have to think about how to handle this one to get down to competition weight while still maintaining balance in the Abingdon house.
Moving on: This weekend I got to meet up with a few members of the Westchester Cycle Club Triathlon group. Mostly made up of women, this group was not light on enthusiasm, nor was it light on ADHD. When asked about nutrition, my first recommendation was going to be a Cytomax-ritalin cocktail. This group makes TriScoop look focused - hey look there’s a bird, shiny object, shiny object. All kidding aside, they are really a great group of people who are mostly first or second year triathletes, and in the short amount of time we had, we got to know each other’s backgrounds and see if there were any common threads that would possibly create an environment where they could train together to increase their enjoyment of the sport and feed their co-dependencies. Cind-Jo would be reeling right now. “You race alone, so train alone!”
A few like Carolyn, Johnny and Jill were really sweet and definitely like deer in the headlights and reminded me that I can get a little intense sometimes. Essentially, as I was providing a few of the basics, Johnny furiously scribbled down every word, Jill tried to understand what the hell I was talking about and Carolyn sat patiently trying to figure out when anyone would stop talking long enough so she could ask a question. Javier, sitting next to me, rolled his eyes, waiting to ask the only question he cared about, “Does anyone in this group actually want to get together to train, or are we simply going to be another tri-group that gets together to talk about triathlon?” In short, the session was a little like the video at the top of this entry. Notice Lance’s calm exterior as he requests “Hey Kevin, you mind showing this nice customer how to kill the coward within?” You have to love that.
Lance: “You want to feed the warrior?”
Customer: “Hunh?”
Lance: “Feed the warrior twenty pounds! Feed the warrior by training the body to respond to the mind.”
Customer: “Yeah, I was just thinking of maybe getting into a little light cardio.”
Lance: “Hey Kevin, you mind showing this nice customer how to kill the coward within?”
To the WCC Triathletes looking to complete and not compete, the reality is probably somewhere in between the two.
Cheers.
