Texting from the back of a tandem recumbent, weighing yourself in the middle of a binge weekend, and other stories

Today is a few random tangents, so I'm sub-sectioning.

Checking in
Monday goal: Stretch & strength (core)
Actual: 30-min Biggest Loser video + 10 min core work
Next day: Very sore

Tuesday goal: 5x400 @ 5K pace
Actual: Achieved!
Pace: 7:55 per mile

Wednesday goal: 3 miles
Actual: 3 miles
Pace: 10:26 per mile
+ 1 hour yoga

Thursday goal: 3 miles + strength
Actual: Nothing

Friday goal: Rest
Actual: 1 hour yoga

Saturday goal: Cross-training
Actual: 25 miles cycling

Sunday goal: Cross-training
Actual: 41 miles cycling

Monday goal: Stretch & strength (arms)
Actual: 20-min Jillian Michaels video + 5 min arm work
Next day: Jillian is a sadist

Tuesday goal: 3 miles
Actual: Nothing

Wednesday goal: 30-min tempo run
Actual: 32-min tempo run (3.15 miles)
Pace: 10:24 per mile
+ 1 hour yoga

Pro tip: Go biking with your grandparents
I improvised a bit from Hal Higdon's schedule this past weekend to make room for a trip to Texas to see my grandparents and get psyched up for RAGBRAI, a bike ride across Iowa held every July. My grandparents are avid cyclists (yes, they are that awesome), and we're riding a few days of it at the beginning of the week together. Luckily, I don't have to haul my own bike all the way from Chicago to Council Bluffs, then back from Des Moines (where I'll depart halfway through to return to the rest of the work week). Why? Because I'll be riding a tandem recumbent bicycle with my grandfather.

I'm going to let that sink in. A tandem recumbent.

Grandpa prepares our noble steed. Yes, those are baby doll legs as a kickstand.

We are the bomb, y'all.

So instead of the 3- and 5-mile runs that Hal had planned for me on Saturday and Sunday, we logged more than 60 miles on the bike (5-6 hours of riding) in the Texas heat. Besides my butt falling asleep and Grandpa losing his lunch on the second, longer ride, it went perfectly. The recumbent style bike uses a different set of muscles than a regular sit-up bike, so part of the goal of the weekend was to get me used to the format and work out any kinks beforehand. My gracious grandparents invested in clip shoes for me, and so I've been getting used to those in spin classes but sitting on a bike for hours at a time is a whole new experience.

During the longer ride, I had the pleasure of hearing from my friend Kay that she completed her first half-marathon that morning. I joked that she should go ahead and sign up for her next one, and she told me she already had -- a shorter run, but another one. Running is addictive, y'all. Congratulations Kay!

Screw you too, scale
Of course, no weekend visit to the grandparents and excessive biking activities would be complete without binging on delicious calories. We ate much and well, and I made the mistake of weighing myself on Saturday. I prefer to think the scale was having a grumpy day, or perhaps I was bloated, but it would appear I've gained back the weight that I'd spent two months slowly shedding. That feels very frustrating, especially in the midst of an energy-sapping workout regimen. And though it's a mistake too many of us make, it's so difficult to live the truth that the scale DOESN'T matter. It feels good to see a lower number than you're expecting, especially over the course of many dozens of pounds. But worrying about five pounds here and there -- if you know that you fluctuate within a given range -- is a waste of energy.

Speedwork isn't so scary
I completed my first interval speedwork last Tuesday with LaJuanda. We ran 5x400 @ 5K pace, meaning we ran five sets of 400 meters (1/4 mile) at "5K pace," which we surmised to mean that if we're going for a 9-minute average in a half-marathon, we should be running a 5K at around 8 minutes per mile.

You guys, that is crazy sauce.

We were dying by the last one, but I admit that it was pretty neat to be done with the day's workout in just 20 minutes. Marathon training acclimated me to spending two hours or more on a training run -- a TRAINING run, not even the races -- so short workouts feel like a treat.

The idea of speedwork is that in order to train your body to run faster in general, you should run faster than normal for short spurts. And it definitely has an interesting effect -- I ran my slowest in the last few weeks the next day, at almost 10:30 per mile, mostly because it felt so slooooooow, like I was barely moving, and I got frustrated and kept slowing down even more. But as LaJuanda says, I got the mileage in, so no worries.

Yesterday we did our first tempo run -- meaning it starts with an easy warm-up, builds gradual speed in the middle, peaks about 2/3 through, then cools down at the end. We started slow, gradually sped up, and broke into a sprint at mile 2 for about 1/2 mile. My lungs were burning, and I stopped to walk for a minute before jogging the last 1/2 mile, but it felt good to run for the first time in a week.

And now I'm off...to run!

Crawling Back

Hello, abandoned blog. I'm still here. I ran the Chicago marathon last October in 5:04 and change, and I've been working on a long-form piece about it that I hope to have published somewhere that will either pay me for it or at least publish it inside something with a glossy cover. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I've followed the path of many a first-time marathoner: I fell off the wagon. After the marathon, I didn't run a single mile for two weeks. I went for a few easy runs in November and December, and I completed a half marathon (my third, and my slowest) in January, but other than that my mileage has settled between 1 and 3 miles per week, if that. I did buy a bicycle and start attending semi-regular spin classes, to prepare for riding three days of RAGBRAI* this summer, but I haven't ramped up intensity nearly to the level of my previous running training.

A friend asked me if I'd run the marathon with her this year, and I declined because I didn't want to spend four months of my life obsessing over it. I will run another marathon -- maybe even in 2014 -- but this year, I decided to work on speed. Of course, that was before my running dropped off a cliff, and right now I can't run three miles without stopping out of discomfort/weak mindedness.

So, as I begin the laborious journey once again of getting my body and my mind into race-ready shape, I turn to this blog as a way to document the process and get my thoughts on the Internet, where they belong. I wrote the Hal Higdon Intermediate Half-Marathon training program into my planner, and it actually isn't due to start for two more weeks, so I tacked on the first two weeks of the Novice 2 running program. I'll have to make a few adjustments for the long bike rides and a couple events this summer (I am not running 9 miles on the third day of Lollapalooza, nosireebob), but otherwise I plan to stick closely to the program, a feat I haven't accomplished since my first couch-to-5K in 2010. (I cheated a lot on the marathon training program last year. That shit is arduous, the summer was hot, and I'm a complainer -- but I did finish alive, so it was not for naught.)

I'm running the Chicago Half-Marathon on September 9, and I want to complete it in under 2:10:00. My best time is approx. 2:15:00, and that was in October 2011 and partially due to the fact that my friend and I were late to the race, panicked, and ran the first half incredibly fast. It was also raining/hailing, which is a really good way to motivate yourself to finish. The entire time, I was chanting in my head, "Ann Sather cinnamon rolls. Ann Sather cinnamon rolls." This strategy also helped me through miles 20-24 of the marathon. Ann Sather is a goddess.

And that, dear reader, is a look inside my training regimen and motivation. If you see me along the trail, do me a favor and start whispering, "Cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rollsssss."

Let's do this.

*RAGBRAI is a party on wheels, once you forget the 60-90 miles of rolling Iowa plains you have to cover each day in order to claim your butter-slathered corn on the cob and rehydrating beers. This is a promise I made to my grandmother, who had knee surgery in December. I told her the day before her surgery that I'd ride RAGBRAI with her, something she's done about a dozen times, if she recovered in time. I'll be damned if she wasn't back on that bike six weeks early, giant scar and all. I will visit her and my grandfather in Texas in a few weeks, and we'll ride about 100 miles in two days -- the equivalent of the 20-miler about a month before the marathon. I'll be riding a recumbent tandem with my grandfather, and I'm psyched. Check out this post from last summer about my first ride on a recumbent.

Time to get a helmet

My Twitter* followers saw my retweet today of this article, which appeared in yesterday's Slate: All Men Can't Jump: Why nearly every sport except long-distance running is fundamentally absurd.

This is what I'm talking about.

Running is like water. It's pure health. There's nothing better. According to the article, humans evolved to be long-distance runners. Our bodies aren't covered in hair, so we don't overheat like most animals. Our butts are bootylicious because they contain big gluteus maximus muscles to aid stability on two legs. Our brains are wired to remember and record complex details, likely because our ancestors ran down their meat and then they had to remember where the water hole was, whether to take a right or a left at the fork in the mountain, what berries taste best with antelope meat. (Now playing: Rachel Ray Cooks with Cavemen)

It makes sense that humans are biologically evolved to be good runners. It is, after all, the most basic exercise. One foot in front of the other, no equipment but shoes (and even that's not necessary, according to the purveyors of barefoot running). Though it's fun to imagine cavemen dribbling skulls and swinging planks of wood for recreation, reality is that neither Michael Jordan nor David Beckham could directly apply their sport-specific skill sets to survival, namely hunting and outrunning predators.

Of course, any exercise is good exercise, and I'm relieved that cross-training is built into the marathon training schedule because I have no intention of running every day for the next four months. In Hal Higdon's plan, Mondays are designated cross-training days, which I've decided to achieve by biking to work -- a six-mile each-way jaunt from my northside apartment to the Chicago loop.

Previously, my cycling was confined to leisurely strolls down Lake Shore and quick trips to Target. But I'm hoping it's in my blood, as my grandparents are accomplished cyclists. They ride recumbent bicycles (see photos below) and are famous on organized bike rides, like Iowa's RAGBRAI, for having bubbles and bells on their handlebars, crowns on their helmets, and fake rubber feet hanging from their bikes. They have fun while cycling, which is the key to exercise.

From the backseat of a two-person recumbent bike with my grandparents last September.

That's Grandma leading the charge, with neon fake hair sticking out the back of her helmet.

 With Grandpa after my inaugural ride on the tandem recumbent.

Of course, I'd never strap a fake appendage to my bike. And I've also never ridden the 400-mile RAGBRAI or other such bike ride. My crowning cycling achievement occurred when I was 11 and I rode (almost all of) a 25-mile ride called "Hotter Than Hell" in Texas. (I got in trouble for wearing the "Hotter Than Hell" t-shirt to my fifth grade class the following week.)

But my work friend Jackie is a diligent bike-to-work enthusiast, and she offered to show me the safest route into the city yesterday. It went well, so when she texted me last night to say "Same time, same place?" I didn't hesitate to say yes.

It's like a revelation: My bike is a legitimate form of urban transport. I don't have to sit on the el in the morning, half-asleep, praying that my train doesn't get stalled (or worse, my entire line gets closed). On the bike I'm slow, and my legs burn after a few minutes of pedaling, but I know I'll get better -- just like I got better at running -- and then I'll have even more control over the speed of my commute and thus the shape of my day.

Next goal: Buy a helmet. I confess, I was playing fast and loose with my safety when I was only riding within a one-mile radius of my apartment, but this morning I got up close and personal with a CTA bus as we played leap-frog down Halsted. I didn't need any more convincing.

But if I did, this would do it.

Every sport but long-distance running may be absurd, but riding a bike without a helmet is, as we said in the '90s, downright whack.

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