Fat Lip

I know I'm an annoying morning person but that doesn't make it okay to take a swing at me!

Okay, I might be sensationalizing. Today was butterfly day in masters and when you have a crowded lane of swimmers all doing fly someone's likely to connect. And connect we did! I ended up with a fat lip and Rod walked away with bite marks on the back of his hand. Luckily triathlon has got me used to being kicked in the head (explains a lot, don't it!). The lip will go down, although I am hoping it's thoroughly impressive at tonight's club spin, and my TM joint will get back to normal soon so it's all good.

I think it made the lifeguard's day - he insisted on checking for concussion and making sure my neck was okay. We definitely added some excitement to the morning.

20/20

I haven't aged a bit! At least my eyes haven't changed in the last five years. I visited the eye doctor this afternoon to find that out. I also got the drops that made my pupils dilate so I looked like I'd just dropped acid. Fun stuff.

Tomorrow the excitement continues - the dentist!

Somewhere along the line I decided that mid-February was a good time for appointments and this week is full. Thursday is a (desparately needed) hair appointment and I'm worried that there is some other appointment I had to book three months in advance that I've forgotten about.

Aside from Thursday's run at least the week long appointment-aganza isn't going to affect my training. I did a spin tonight and tomorrow should have no problem with a post dental strength workout.

Interuptions aside, training is going well, I'm in a rhythm and am enjoying myself. As I've mentioned before, I'm loving the longer swim sessions. Yesterday we did a crazy version of a distance swim - worked in pairs drafting of each other and every 100m switched the lead and, just to make sure we didn't get complacent, every 100m (when we weren't switching) we did a 12.5m sprint. Confused? So were we. But it was great to swim 1500m (mostly) continuously.

My legs were a bit tired after the swim, on the run afterwards I tripped and did my group running free fall for the year. Glad to get it out of the way early. Seriously, I've done a spectacular layout dive while running with the club once a year since joining the club. Luckily the only damage was to my $0.99 stretchy gloves, my tights, running jacket and um, oh yeah, me were all okay. I may have never laid out for a disc when playing ultimate but at least all the practice taught me how to fall.

Diet

I'm working on my diet. No, don't mean diet in terms of restricting food intake to lose weight. I mean diet in terms of the overall overview of what I eat.

My big diet/eating success came sometime last year when I realized that having breakfast everyday had become a habit. Until last year I hadn't regularly eaten breakfast since high school and only then because my mother had made it a habit when I was growing up. When I moved out, eating breakfast everyday went out the window as quickly as vacuuming weekly did.

Strangely enough it was my early morning swims that got me back into eating the "most important meal of the day." I realized I had way more energy if I had something to eat prior to swimming. There was trial and error - gels, energy bars and anything with lots of dairy proved to be very bad ideas while oatmeal was perfect. Oatmeal had the added benefit of needing more time to make thus requiring me to get out of bed in time to make it, thus making me more able to catch my bus (don't ask me to explain Alison Logic, just accept that it works for me and move on).

Then it occured to me that if I could make and consume a bowl of oatmeal in time to leave the house at 6am I should be able to do the same when I was leaving at 7:30. Voila, a habit was born!

My second diet project was to spend less money on food. No, I didn't start dumpster diving or coupon cutting, I stopped buying lunch. For those people who are lifelong brown baggers this may not sound like a big deal, but for someone who is organizationally challenged and also happens to work in the midst of the lunchtime Mecca that is downtown Vancouver, this was a challenge. I stocked the work freezer with bagels, the fridge with veggies, made mega slow cooker meals and other dinners that produced lots of left overs and so far have managed not to buy lunch once in 2009. Not only have I been saving money, I'm eating far healthier meals.

Having had success with the no buying of lunch I decided to cut back on other unecessary dining out. You know, the take away Thai on nights when I just didn't want to cook or delivery pizza because I survived Tuesday. I'm giving myself one dine out meal a week (no carry over from past weeks and no borrowing from future ones), be that lunch, brunch, dinner, what have you so I can't waste it on something pointless. Exceptions to accommodate events such as the March/April birthday-o-rama (I have too many friends who're Aries) will have to be made but in general it's working to get me to spend a bit less. Oh yeah, and eat healthier food.

So my new dining challenge is fruit. I need to eat more. I've been trying to incorporate two fruits per day but haven't had much success. I manage lots of vegetables, just not so much on the fruit front. I'm not quite sure how to get this campaign to work, maybe I need some good Maoist sloggans or a serious incentive, I'm just feeling a little uncreative. Suggestions are welcomed.

Training Interupted

Tonight's spin isn't going to happen. I got a call on my way home - my friend, sounding very quiet, asked me what I was up to and if I could hang out with her. Oh s#!#, she's been dumped was my immediate thought. One of those times that it sucks to be right.

My dealing with the freshly dumped solutions are alcohol and/or ice cream, neither of which are likely to be wanted so I've settled on dinner and renting a really dumb movie (Tropic Thunder). Maybe not the best solutions but my friends are almost as chronically single as I am so I'm not very practiced at this. Maybe getting her to pick up the food wasn't terribly sympathetic?

So, apologies to the men out there but tonight I will likely be cursing all mankind and listing off your shortcomings and failures as a gender. I don't really mean it!

I'm back into working with the coach on the personalized plan - today was the first workout from him of '09 and my reaction to Alan's plan was "What is he thinking!"

The workout was:

15E
10 x 1SL(quick change)
5E
2 x 2SL(quick change)
5E
8 x 1SL(quick change)
10E

where 1SL is one minute pedalling with one leg and 2SL is two minutes. NO WAY I could do 2 minutes single leg pedalling, I wasn't sure I could do 1 minute. I phoned Alan to confirm that he did indeed want me to do this and to explain to him the absolute impossibility of it.

But, brave and disciplined triathlete that I am, I set out to try my very best to do this insanity of a workout, knowing that failure would be an undeniable result but I would adapt and soldier through. And then I did the workout. As written.

One day in and I've already lost all credibility.

How Was Your Weekend?

Most of January was very anti-social for me but I certainly made up for it this weekend.

I saw the Wrestler on Friday - great movie but very, very depressing. When it ended most of the theatre sat unmoving and silent through the credits, staring blankly at the screen. We ended up laughing because the four of us looked at one another, looked away, then did it again a couple of times, not knowing what to say. As I said, it's a great movie but I wouldn't recommend it if you can't stomach movies about unhappy people with messed up lives.

On Saturday I went for a spin at Teresa's and caught 3.85 episodes of Battlestar Galactica - I'm trying desperately to catch up on the current season so no one wrecks any of the surprises. Of course Saturday was the nice day on the weekend, but I'll have many weekends outside this summer so I'm not feeling guilty for staying in and watching BSG. That evening I went for dinner at Marie's and watched Mama Mia. The movie was actually really fun, I didn't expect to like it. I'm not sure how comfortable I am admitting I like it, sort of up there with being caught reading People Magazine (not that that would ever happen).

Sunday was swim and Super Bowl. It was the last day of our easy week so we didn't do any epic distance for the workout, I think it was 2300m for my lane. We finished the practice with a crazy relay where we had no idea who was winning but it was fun. That was followed by a run in miserable wet snow, luckily it was short (40min).

That afternoon was the big game chez Team Pink - football and a potluck tailgate feast. The theme for the potluck was Tex Mex so one of the guys decided he'd deep fry a turkey. Not sure how that fits the theme but what man is going to say no to deep frying a turkey? No one died and the building didn't burn down, which surprised some of us but made everyone happy. I went against the theme and the spirit of Super Bowl/tail gate partying by bringing a salad - everything else on the table was meat or fried or a dessert. I ate way, way too much but it was a fun day.

As usual, the team I decided to cheer for lost. It was a surprisingly close game and quite an exciting finish - I actually watched significant portions of the second half, possibly a first for me!

I haven't logged my training for the past week yet so no idea what the totals. I'll get around to that sometime soon.