To Freeze or Not To Freeze

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This morning I got an email from Big Shoulders saying the water is a delicious 78 degrees right now, but “forecasts call for heavy rain this coming weekend due to the remnants of Hurricane Isaac” which could churn up the lake and drop temps significantly.  Participants have until the 5th to change their entry from the non-wetsuit to wetsuit division.

Despite the fact that I wear a heavy jacket in the office 365 days a year and regularly lose feeling in my feet from cold, I’ve never seriously considered wearing a wetsuit for an open water swim, even though you do go faster.  Part of the reason is because I still kind of feel like wearing a wetsuit is wimpy or something.  Another is that so far it just hasn’t been necessary for any of the swims I’ve done.

But also, in my mind at least, dealing with the conditions is part of the sport.  Pool swimming is for shaving down and wearing high-performance gear and nailing your technique and having everything. go. PERFECTLY. so you can out-touch your opponent by .0001 seconds.  Open water is where you fight for clean water and sight and navigate through seaweed and (hopefully no) animals and…deal with the elements.  That’s what makes it different.  And fun.

So, whether it rains or not this weekend, no wetsuit for me.  (We’ll ignore the fact I don’t own one, so there’s a problem in and of itself.)  Lucky (?) for me, I’ve spent the past few weeks (unintentionally) putting on an extra layer of blubber.  In the past, I have done shorter swims (30 minutes) in the low 60s and even low-50s during the few months that I swam at the Dolphin Club up in SF (like, 5 years ago, but still).  So I’m hoping 75 minutes or so in temperatures closer to 70 will be fine.

Regardless, I will most likely need a little flame sax before I hop in the water.

Old Spice Muscle Music from Terry Crews on Vimeo.

MUSCLE.  MUSCLE.  MUSCLE.  FLEX.

Thanks to Joe for the video.

Facecake and Bourbon

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I’ve been in a funk for a while.  Today, I decided to attempt to break out of it.  How?

Step one: bake a cake of someone’s face.

…and then proceed to eat the whole thing by yourself over the course of the workday.

That is my coworker and his facecake.  Today is his last day of work, which is the actual reason that I baked the cake, even though his departure and the consequent onslaught of work crap that is rapidly heading my direction is probably contributing directly to my level of funk.

Coworker’s departure also means a new cube addition.

Yup.  Fish abandonment.  At least my tree has a friend now.

Onward.

Step 2: Make up a new training schedule.

Despite being signed up for 2 races in the next month, I’ve been doing completely unstructured, haphazard training since Hawaii.  And while I’m not looking to go back to 17 hours of training a week, a little structure sometimes helps keep you going.

That’s right.  You know who to turn to when you need some structure.

I have been talking to J and my sister in law about potentially running a half marathon sometime this fall.  So this morning, 3 pieces of facecake deep, I decided to brush off the good ol’ Hal Higdon training guide and integrate it into my current schedule of yoga and swimming.

I’m seriously considering shooting for a full marathon sometime in the spring (my sister and bro in law just signed up for the Catalina Island Conservancy Marathon, which would be hilly and brutal and AWESOME), but with all the running injuries I dealt with this season I’m going to stick with a halves for now and see where they take me.

catalina

We also just received our leg assignments for the Bourbon Chase.  I’m leg #12, which means I get to carry the team across the finish line in dramatic fashion.  Score.

In handing out the leg assignments the race directors also let us know that they had to change the route for two legs of the course due to the Burgoo Festival in Lawrenceburg and the Ham Days Festival in Lebanon, where they auction off grand champion hams.

Bring on the burgoo.

Jammin

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It’s starting to look like…

…like Spike got a new football jersey!  (because his old one was too small).  And he is HAP-PY.

School’s back in session, the football stadium PA system is back up and running (you can hear it from our house, Spike flips every time, so that’s fun), and on Sunday I ran for over an hour with J and didn’t even feel like I was going to keel over and die from heat.  I put a SWEATSHIRT on Saturday morning.

You know what all of this means.  Fall’s coming.

And what do you do during the fall in Kentucky (aside from chase bourbon and line up for Midnight Madness so you can live in a tent on campus for a week before the acutal event)?

Make jam!  (I know it’s still August, but Paul’s working 24 hour shifts and I figured it’d be good practice.)

So, full disclosure, these are not our strawberries.  Our strawberry bush in the back of the yard suffered the same tininess problem as our raspberries this year.  So these came from the farmers market.

First step was to pull out and dust off the country living bible.

It has about 30 recipes for various types of jams, jellies, and preserves.  Of course. Strawberry jam had 2 ingredients and 4 steps.  Decision made.

We already had all the gear (big pot, lids, tops, jars, tongs, rack, etc) which had been used for a lot of pickling.  But no preserves yet.

First, wash.  Then hull.

First attempt I tried to hull with the apple corer.  Stupid.  Don’t do that.  Use a butter knife.

Then you take the berries and you mash ’em, you mash ’em (Molly, name that song.)

Then it’s time for ingredient #2: sugar!  Mix some of that in.

Try not to lose your spoon in the mush.

Then comes the fun part: dump the whole thing in a pot…

..and start stirring.

Stir and stir and stir some more, so it doesn’t burn, until it starts to boil.  Then…keep stirring!

During this time I started sterilizing the jars and lids.  Also started boiling the big pot of water for the final sterilization process. Also realized why this is a cold weather activity (I was sweating profusely.)

Then, when the jam was thick (almost an hour and a half of stirring later….seriously.  Fortunately my sister in law gave me the password for her HBO GO so I could watch Girls the whole time), I pulled the jars and lids out of the oven, dumped the jam in them jars, screwed the lids on (but not super tight), and threw them in the boiling water for 10 minutes.

The water should be about 2 inches above the top of the jars (so ignore that big one sticking out).  Then took them out for the REALLY exciting part, where you hear the jars suction themselves shut as they cool.

Then…jam.

It looks a little…foamy.  Maybe I was supposed to scrape that off the top?  Reading directions has never been my forte.  We’ll find out when we taste it.

For those of you who don’t own The Book and want more sophisticated instructions than “mash the berries and stir”, there are a million recipes online (like here and here and here, from my friend Neeley.)

Just keep swimming… + a wedding

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So it turns out August might not be the best month to really ramp up your swimming regimen in Lexington.  With the UK pool closed and half of the outdoor pools shut down because school has started, and the half that are open usually jam packed with 3 club teams sharing 4 lanes…it’s ugly.  So the only real option is getting up at 5 to go to the Y…which, seriously, I’m just not going to do during the one month of the year that I don’t coach.

But guess what’s just around the river bend.

Training started out ok…I was good about swimming at least 3500-4000 every day when we were out in SB in July, and when I got home from that trip I shocked myself by coming up with long sets and doing the whole thing after work BY MYSELF, including a few 3K swims straight for time.  Like, what?

But last week work got super busy with travel, and this past weekend I was out in LA for my cousins wedding, which calls for a…SIDE POST:

the beautiful bride and father

part of the paternal side of the fam looking so sad because we missed molly so much

a classy granny…i can only hope that this is genetic and i look that good at 86

…and my dad in a yarmulke

So the wedding was wonderful and the bride was stunning and…it was in LA!  So all of my time was spent either with family or in the ocean, or with family in the ocean.  No complaining there.  But none of it training.  Even though I sometimes count body surfing as a swim workout.  Almost.  Because it’s my favorite thing to do ever.

When I got back, crazy work schedule + Paul’s 24 hour shifts continued, along with a peeling forehead from forgetting to put on sunscreen (really great for client meetings.)  But I did finally manage to hop in on Thursday and squeeze a 2000 “for time” (really I just tried to hold a steady pace and feel comfortable) into my workout.  But that’s all I’ve done in almost 3 weeks.

Got another longer swim on the docket for tomorrow morning (anyone who wants to join…call me) and I’ll continue to do my best to cram for the next 3 weeks, but I’m pretty sure things are going to be touch and go until UK opens up again in September.

Moral of the story: might be best to start preparing for a painful swim in Chicago.

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P.S.  Good luck to Joe who is running the Old Farts Marathon this weekend up in Michigan, a marathon that sounds brutal, is full of hills that appear to be named after my father and his brothers (Ed, Chuck…), and that you apparently don’t have to be an old fart to race in.   GO GET EM

Speckle

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So, turns out no training life is boring life for the blog.  What is NOT at all boring is what has been happening in the chicken coop.

Yes. That’s right.  On a rainy Sunday where I stayed  in the kitchen for 6 hours cooking two meals and baking zuchinni bread so I could pretend like I was being productive while I watched 10 straight hours of Breaking Bad (don’t think this story can get more exciting?  Just wait. ) I went out into the coop to get the eggs, and found that one of the chickens had finally…laid an egg in the doghouse!

Victory.  Paul: 1, Chickens: 0.

The egg I pulled from the house was way more speckled than usual.

I thought that was weird and was wondering what might have caused the change.  After some extensive research (Google) I came across this National Geographic article that suggests that the speckles on the shells of bird eggs may be caused by certain compounds known as protoporphyrins, which often shows up in eggs from birds that are calcium deficient to assist in strengthening the shells.

The birds discussed in the NG article were great tits (serious), so I tried to see if it’s the same for chickens.  There actually isn’t a whole lot written about that, but the little I did find points to the same answer.

Time to start spiking the chicken feed with One-A-Day Women’s multivitamins.

Feed the Birds

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While in Mary Poppins feeding the birds will get you smiling saints and apostles, in our yard it gets you…

a mini cornfield in the middle of the lawn!  This is the bird feed we use:

It’s probably hard to tell from that height, but obviously there is some corn in there.  Most of the stuff that ends up on the ground gets eaten by birds and chipmunks, but apparently they don’t get all of it.  So after a few days weeks of not mowing…ta da!

Paul, still feeling the bitter sting of our corn not surviving last year, now refuses to mow it down.

Speaking of feeding birds, we have a new addition to the family.

That would be a meal worm farm in our guest room.  Why?  Good question.  I had the same one when Paul called me when I was in DC and excitedly told me he had set up a meal worm farm.

Apparently chickens love meal worms.  On BackyardChickens.com, there is an article that starts with the sentence, “Everyone who has a small flock of chickens should raise mealworms.”  It also says that you should “Use only the larvae (worms) to feed your birds.  The pupae and beetles should be left alone for reproductive purposes and never removed from the colony.”

Originally the farm was located in the backyard, so I was like fine, worms, whatever.  But then “the weather got too hot” so they were relocated to the guest room.  I am less OK with any sort of pupae or beetle breeding inside the house, and am pretty sure that at some point the dog (or I) will knock it over.  So…yeah.

These eggs had better be AMAZING.

Sucking Air

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You may have noticed there hasn’t been much on here lately about exercise.  That would be because, aside from watching the Olympics, I haven’t been doing much of it.  And while it’s nice to know that I still have no problem whatsoever embracing time off to participate in other activities, I have also learned that my perception of my personal fitness level is not always in line with…well, reality.

Over the past 2 months I’ve been running about 2 times a week, usually no more than 4 miles (usually closer to 3), and always in the morning at a nice easy pace.   That being said, I ran the Bluegrass 10K on the 4th just fine, so I took that as a sign that I was maintaining my fitness level just fine…even though my motivation has been super low and I wasn’t really training.

Then this week my aunt Barbara who works at StrideRite sent me and Paul some REALLY FRICKIN SUPER AWESOME shoes.

These combined with the Mizuno Elixirs that I bought a few weeks ago, because I had to leave my stinky mcstinkster Brooks in Hawaii after the 70.3, got me kind of amped about getting back into running (because few things get me more excited about working out than getting new gear).  Plus, I am signed up for the Bourbon Chase again, so theoretically at some point I do need to start training.

So yesterday I got excited (for the first time in a long time) about doing an easy 5 miler after work then making a nice healthy dinner for Paul (who has had a pretty busy first week).

The super intense heat has mellowed out a little bit, but it’s still pretty warm…as in 91 degrees with 60% humidity at 6pm when I went for a run.

Again, relative to what we’ve been experiencing, it felt pretty good when you walked out the front door.  So I figured it’d be hot, but doable.  So I found a solid This American Life podcast on my phone, laced up my Kinarvas, and headed out the door.

Turns out I was wrong.

The first mile/mile and a half felt great.  The shoes are amazing.  Then, around the 10 minute mark, I started to hurt.  Like the kind of hurt where your chest burns and you feel like you’re going to ralph.  After 10 minutes.  And no matter how much I tried to slow down my jog, I couldn’t shake it.  First I blamed the heat (which was probably part of it), then the pollen (allergies have been bad lately)…I mean, really, what else could it be?

And then it hit me: I’m just out of shape.

I haven’t struggled like that in a long time.  My heart rate was through the roof.  Even switching my podcast over to One Direction on my RUN FASTER playlist couldn’t get me moving.  I walked twice.  I was super hot and super thirsty.  I felt like I may have a GI disaster at one point (but didn’t, crisis averted).  It was ugly.

My red-faced self got home from the debacle (not like the flushed, healthy-looking I-just-finished-working-out red, but the people-stop-what-they’re-doing-to-ask-you-“oh-my-god-are-you-ok?” kind of red), chugged a gatorade, and lay on the couch moaning while Paul chopped the veggies in the kitchen and kept asking me, “did you still want to make dinner or should I just do it?”  After about 15 minutes before I pulled my melodramatic self off the couch and re-engaged with the world.

The moral of the story: time to get back on the wagon.  Shooting for ~15-20 miles over the next week.  Quasi-regular training starts this weekend.

One final, sad (for me), relatively unrelated note: on Monday Allison hopped on a plane to Scotland to start vet school.

While, as with Kristin, I am happy for her to be moving on to something bigger and more exciting than sitting in Lexington coaching me for free (if that exists), my long rides and long runs won’t be the same without her going as slow as she possibly can giving me instruction while I struggle to keep up with her.  She will be sorely missed.

Enjoy your weekend.

What’s up

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My coworker is out of town for a week.  Me and my XXX cubetree are fishsitting for him while he’s gone.   Come back from traveling to all sorts of responsibility.  Life is rough.

In other news, guess who passed boards and started rotations.

…and guess who doesn’t care in the background.  His first round is OB/GYN, so he’ll be getting to deal with all sorts of prolapsed whathaveyou and whatnot.  I’m hoping his notes from boards that I found laying on his desk one day will help him out.

This has been a busy summer for me.  The past few weekends have looked something like this:

my namesake on the dancefloor at my cousin’s wedding in boston
denver
san diego
carmel
ben’s chili bowl, 3am, washington dc

I am not complaining.  At all.  This past weekend in DC celebrating Kristin’s 30th was amaze.  But I am tired.  And the Olympics won’t let me go to bed before midnight.  But there’s nothing that can be done about that, it’s just going to be a minimal sleep week.

Speaking of the Olympics, I am really hoping that Lochte getting trounced on the anchor leg of the 4 x 100 free relay and again in the 200 free will be enough for him to ditch the grill on the podium.  Bring the tool factor down a notch.