ANTIBIOTICS

I just started taking an antibiotic called Cephalexin. It was prescribed by my doctor, for reasons I will have to explain later after I regain the use of my left hand so I can type more quickly.

Anyway, the pharmacist's notes with the drugs include the following warning:

"CHECK WITH YOUR DOCTOR AS SOON AS POSSIBLE if you experience vaginal irritation or discharge, mood or mental changes, or joint pain."

Really? I experience 2 out of 3 of those symptoms on a daily basis -- without taking any drugs. I'll let you guess which 2 symptoms.

More later....

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

This weekend I tried my first "brick" workout. A "brick" is when you combine two different workouts consecutively, in preparation for the transition you would have to make in a triathlon. The most common brick workout consists of a medium bike ride followed by a short to medium length run, with little or no transition time between the workouts. This format teaches your body to adapt to the metabolic and other physiological requirements (like complicated muscle recruitment!) which arise from that sequence of specific events in a long endurance race. In other words, after spinning your legs in circles on a bicycle for several miles, it is kind of hard to jump off and use different muscles to propel your body forward. The longer and harder the bike ride, the harder the transition!

(A quick etymological note: I believe the term "brick" arose from the shorthand version of how the workout might appear in your training log. That is, a "BR" stands for "Bike + Run", and the prevalence of "BR" on training logs eventually led to "brick". This sort of linguistic portmanteau is not uncommon -- an abbreviated shorthand being un-abbreviated into something it didn't stand for in the first place -- though this particular etiology is somewhat disputed. Others have argued that "brick" refers to how heavy and lethargic your legs feel after this kind of workout.)

Anyway, Robin talked me into going for a bike ride before our typical Saturday morning long run. (Why do all my stories about extreme suffering involve Robin? What a jerk.) So we met at 6AM at Madison Park and rode our bikes briskly in the pre-dawn over the I-90 bridge to Mercer Island, and rode a good chunk of West Mercer Way, then back to Madison (maybe 30 miles in total)-- lots and lots of rolling hills . It was fun, exhilarating, and brilliant! I always love my time in the saddle. We got back just in time to join our running buddies, which meant I got to practice the transition in real-time: stripped my wet cycling gear off, and threw on a pair of dry shorts, shirt, and running shoes, then immediately started running. I wanted to run 13 miles... but didn't quite make it that far.

So what did I learn from this experience?

The Good:

The bike ride served as an excellent "warmup" for my run. Usually I spend the first 3 or 4 miles getting into a running rhythm before I feel good at all. This time, however, I hit the ground running because my legs were full of blood and endorphins. In fact, I felt awesome. For about 3 miles.

The Bad:

I felt too good. I ran my first 3 miles at a much faster pace than I could reasonably sustain for a 13 mile training run. I naturally fell into about an 8 minutes-per-mile pace, which intellectually I knew I would not be able to hold onto for very long. But I felt so good, I didn't want to slow down! Hmmm, this seems to be a pattern in my running. (See blog post about my first marathon). After about the 3 mile mark, I slowed down to a more reasonable pace, then by about mile 5 I slowed WAY down to a crawl and finished my run at around a 10 minute pace. Ouch.

The Ugly:

Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. I burned all my muscle glycogen on the rolling hills of Mercer Way and in the 3-mile bike sprint to my car before my run. Oops. Worse than that, I didn't eat enough to make up for the lost fuel. I did manage to cram down a Luna Bar (you know, the Complete Nutrition Bar for Women? Excellent source of folic acid, and other vitamins. Not sure why I like chick bars so much). But Luna Bars only have about 180 calories. So, after an hour and a half on the bike, then about 30 minutes on my feet, I basically ran out of gas! It was a horrible, horrible feeling. I don't think I technically "bonked" because I saw the writing on the wall and curtailed my run by stopping at the 7.5 mile mark. Just flat out stopped. I need to be smart about event nutrition, or I will never be able to work out for more than 2 hours at a time! Nutrition management is an unavoidable requirement of the endurance athlete. Perhaps the only sine qua non.

MOTO TRIP 2008

I never got around to blogging about our summer vacation. In the last week of August and the first week of September we rode our motorcycles to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. We stopped at several points along the way there and back, and had a great time.

Some highlights:

We spent the first weekend in Penticton, B.C. because Iron Man Canada happened that weekend and we knew a few people competing. (My first experience watching Iron Man Canada in 2006 was quite memorable, and I wanted Lorinda to observe this race firsthand). We camped near Lake Skaha with our friends Robin, Chris and Chris. Chris and Chris were Iron Man virgins like Lorinda. (Chris L. took several really excellent photos, of which a sampling can be found here).

The race started, of course, in Lake Okanagan; 2300 swimmers preparing for a very, very long day:

After the first wave of swimmers got on their bikes, we headed out in Robin's minivan to watch the cyclists cruise around the hills of the Okanagan Valley wine country. Then we sped back to town in time to catch the first pro cross the finish line at the conclusion of the marathon portion of the triathlon at about 3:30 PM. Brian Rhodes of New Zealand won his first Iron Man:

We stuck around until the bitter end at midnight, watching the final long-suffering souls cross the finish line. The crowd enthusiastically willed each participant across the line. As always, it was an inspirational night filled with tears, loud music, blood, Subaru employees in sumo wrestling suits, free candy, and even an unseasonable monsoon. You had to be there.

I was not so inspired, however, the next morning when we had to break camp in the rain and ride north through the valley. Fortunately we were only going as far as Vernon.

A couple days later we finally made it to Banff, after enduring a brutal stretch of heavy rainfall over Rogers Pass on our way to Revelstoke. We had intended to camp along the headwaters of the Columbia, but I sprung for a Super8 motel room out of a desire to stay dry, or rather -- GET dry.

We wandered into the town of Banff and in spite of the light rainfall and unseasonably low temperatures decided to go canoeing on the Bow River:

The razor-sharp Canadian Rockies loomed gloomy over us on our journey down the river:

After a couple days, the sun finally came out and we got to see a bit more of the surrounding peaks, like this view from the parking lot of the condo we stayed at in Canmore:

We did finally venture to Lake Louise in spite of the sub-40 F degree weather. It's always good to check in on the glacier receding up the flanks of Mt. Victoria:

Banff National Park is full of wildlife and we sampled some. While riding on the back of my bike, Lorinda managed to snap this shot of a big-horned mountain sheep on the side of the road.

We left Banff and rode south through the Kootenay region, stopping briefly in Radium Hot Springs for lunch. ("Radium" hot springs? Sounds scary. We did not examine the decaying isotopes).

Soon we arrived in Cranbrook, B.C. where Lorinda's parents live. We spent a lovely couple of days lounging with them. We even coaxed Lorinda's mom into going for a ride on the back of my bike, with Lorinda at the handlebars.

From Cranbrook, we rode perhaps the most beautiful stretch of motorcycling we've ever done: west along Canada Highway #3 via a dramatic roller-coaster of a ride, then south on #6 and we crossed the border into Washington State at a tiny little border crossing near "Nelway". The Pend Oreille National Forest was exciting, and I had never been in this part of my home state so I was wide-eyed the whole time. We worked our way south to the one-building town of Tiger and turned west again on Highway 20. I finally got to see Kettle Falls. The "Falls" haven't really fallen in about 80 years since the Grand Coulee Dam slowed the downhill trajectory of the Columbia and turned the falls into a virtual lake.

We pulled off the road for a brief rest and to take a peek at some leftover forest fire scarring.

We spent the night with my parents in the hamlet of Okanogan, then flew home on the incomparable North Cascades Highway which included an obligatory bathroom break at the Diablo Dam overlook.

We are currently researching a route for Moto Trip 2009! Any suggestions? We're contemplating: Zion and Bryce National Parks in southern Utah, and/or northern Colorado... Perhaps a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. Maybe an aggressive trip all the way to Tucson, Arizona... Stay tuned.

VICTORIA 2008

I'm way behind on my blog, so let me see if I can get you up to date on a few items...

About 3 weeks ago we went to Victoria, British Columbia for the half marathon. Victoria's one of our favorite cities so we turned it into a short vacation, by taking the Clipper passenger ferry directly from Seattle and by extending our stay in Victoria to include the Monday after the race -- which happened to be Canadian Thanksgiving.

Neither Lorinda nor I ran our fastest half marathon times, but we both felt really good after the race.

I approached this half marathon with a new strategy: I decided to run it as if it were two events -- a 10 mile warmup, followed by a 5k tempo run. So, I hovered around the 8:20-8:25 minute per mile mark, and at mile 10 I kicked it up a notch and ran something like 7:20's to the end. It sure felt good to FINISH a half marathon strong like that. I've never been able to "pick off" people towards the end of a race, because I always feel like dog crap. Not this time. Ran across the finish line in 1:48 and felt totally fine. Probably could have run harder. But I am focusing on PACE more than anything these days. Slower is fine, as long as I'm even. If I learned ANYTHING from my horrible marathon earlier this year... It is that I need to pace properly. Working on that now.