Everybody Wants to Rule the World...

Except me! I'm not so much about in it to win it as I'm in it to finish it.

Julius Caesar, like so many other triathletes throughout history, had a choice: Leave his legion and retire into the background, or swim his legion across the Rubicon and show Rome he was too young to retire. I'm telling you, after seven years of fighting the Gauls, I would've been content to take it easy. Of course prosecution was likely waiting Caesar if he didn't show up in Rome with an army, but that's another matter.

I recognize that I could train harder, and I have a lot of excuses as to why I don't. Chief among them-I'm too lazy. This morning I was supposed to swim. Instead I slept until seven. Saturday I was out on a ride and I see that my average heart rate was 142 bpm. I normally hover around 168 when I'm running, so I probably could've pushed it a little more on the bike, but what the hey!

However, it's time to get a little more serious. There's a 70.3 in September that I'm signed up for. I have yet to develop all my goals for that race, but I know what the first two will be:

1. Don't die
2. Finish

Actually I would love to finish in the top half of my age group, but that'll be quite a challenge. (If Caesar had said that we probably wouldn't have the word "Caesar", or Caesar Salad, or Little Caesar's).

Anyway, since I was lazy this morning, I did hit the weights tonight. Squats and deadlifts. Tomorrow I'll run and bench press. There, I said it, now I have to do it. Veni, Vedi, Vici!

Pics from the ride along highway 54 between Collins and El Dorado Springs, MO:

Body Soup

The pool where I swim has at least six rules, I assume. I'm sure they have rules like "No Running," "No Diving," and "Speedo Must Fit Properly." But the only rule they post is Pool Rule # F, which says, "ALL SWIMMERS MUST SHOWER OFF BEFORE ENTERING THE WATER".

I don't know what Pool Rules #s A-E are, but I do know I'm supposed to "shower off" before jumping in the chlorine. And yes, it bothers me that they list it as "# F". Why not just "Pool Rule F"?

Though the syntax irritates me, I'm quite pedantic, so I always adhered to Pool Rule # F and showered before swimming. Then, dripping wet and freezing, I'd walk through the lobby to the pool (yes, you have to go through the lobby area to get to the pool from the lockers).

Then I noticed that hardly any of the regular, long time swimmers were showering. They said Pool Rule # F that and sauntered right to the pool and jumped in. It became apparent that Pool Rule # F was not enforced.

I think I know why THE MANAGEMENT would adopt Pool Rule # F. I assume it has to do with hygiene. The pool is not the bath tub. I personally wish everyone would "shower off", though I seriously doubt it's efficacy.

Sadly, I joined the crowd and quit showering before my swim as well. I'm embarrassed by that, but I'm a lot less inconvenienced. I think about it, though, every time I get a mouthful of water. Where else has this water been? Maybe that shower is a good idea (especially for everybody else).

Well, none of it is hurting my swim any. I took a minute and a half off of my 1100 yard swim today. My goal is to do it in twenty minutes. That may not be realistic for me, but that's where I'd like to be.

What do you think of showering before hitting the pool? (Oh, BTW, though I shower thoroughly after I get home, I still smell like chlorine the rest of the day.)

April is the Cruelest Month

That's what T. S. Eliot said, and he's right. I'm sure he wrote that in response to not knowing what to wear out on a run one spring day.

Saturday morning presented me with two of my least favorite weather conditions: wet and windy. It wasn't actually raining, so I had no excuse but to go run.

I planned on doing seven miles, but about a mile into it I realized the battery on my Garmin 305 had pooped out. Dang! Nothing annoys me more than when my GPS unit takes a holiday. So I ran out through the waste land to the point I know to be three miles and turned around. I can be quite anal about knowing exactly how far I run, so I wasn't about to do something so rash as guessing at where 3.5 miles fell.

Then, when I got back, just to screw with me, the weather got nice. Well, the joke was on April. The rest of my day was too busy to go running anyways.  Plenty of errands and then the Father/Daughter dance that evening. Here's a pic or two:

Boston Marathon, On a Monday?

First, why is the Boston Marathon on a Monday? People have to work!

Second, good run, Ryan Hall.

Ryan Hall, the top American in the race today, finished in 2:04:58. That time last year would've won him the race, and broke the record for Boston. This year it got him fourth place. That's just crazy.

The winner, Geoffrey Mutai, ran it in 2:03:02. That's a 4:42 pace! Impossible.

I recently tried to run last year's winning pace, 4:48, for even just a few yards. I'm not sure my legs move that fast, literally. And now the bar just got raised. 4:42!

I Need to Eat and Sleep...

Not much to say, except I swam well yesterday (for me). It was the first time I didn't think I needed the lifeguard to haul me out of the water. I only swam 1100 yards (but that's huge for me), which, incidentally, is the distance of the swim at the Shawnee Mission Triathlon. Who knew, besides me?

I judged the swim to be good not because my time was killer (it wasn't), but because I felt like I could go on even after the 1100 yards. It felt easy the whole time. There may be a couple of reasons for that. One, conditioning. Maybe I'm getting a little better at swimming via practice. Two, I had rested for a couple of days. I had felt wiped out for a couple of weeks, and finally this week I just got really lazy and didn't do anything Wednesday or Thursday. I think that rest helped propel me in the pool.

Which makes me wonder now, should I be taking more rest days? I don't feel like I train a lot or over exert myself (heaven forbid!), but lately I'd been doing something every day because I never know when the unexpected will arise and take a training day away from me.

The other thing I wonder is, should I eat healthier? I've said before that I pay little attention to nutrition. My wife makes good ol' fashioned rounded American meals and I generally have that for supper, and the left-overs for lunch, and some kind of smoovie or cereal for breakfast. I don't snack during the day, but at night I've been known to have a little dessert. There may be something nutrition wise I need to do.

Along those lines I've been losing weight again. I've gone from 168 to 162 over the last two or three weeks. I expect my weight to continue to fall. Last year mid-summer, after my races, I was in the lower 150s. I need a burger.

Well, this is quite a rambling post. How about a shot of the Lotus taken with my iPhone 4 (yes, I love it [the pone], and I'll gush about it later):

Blood on the Handlebars is Never Good

Went riding yesterday. It was the first ride of the season. It ended up being a short lucky 13 mile ride. It might have gone better, except I wrecked not even a mile into it.

On a side street near my house I looked back over my shoulder to check for cars. When I did, my front tire went of the road. Now this street doesn't have gutters. The asphalt just ends and the ground immediately drops into a ditch. In the next moment I was on my left side, lying on the street. I lost a bunch of cool points, but fortunately, I don't think anyone saw me.

My hands were bleeding and blood dripped onto the handlebars. Recently, to prove I'm approaching middle age, if not already there, I started carrying a handkerchief. But I didn't have one with me on the bike. It would've been nice to have something to wipe off my hands, especially after putting my chain back on. I wiped off the blood and grease in the grass the best I could, and resumed my ride.

I did graduate to bike shoes with cleats that attach to your pedals, and this was my first real ride using them, but I honestly don't think they were the cause of the wreck. If I did anything wrong after going off the road it was trying to get back on immediately. I should've rode down into the ditch, which is only about a foot and half deep, and regrouped. Rookie mistake.

OK, well, the wreck was embarrassing, so I thought I'd better blog about it and put it out on the internet.

Another Crack at 4:48

Running a mile in 4:48 is hard enough, what with the economy, the revolutions in the middle east, and me insisting on putting a comma before the word "and" though it seems like convention today doesn't call for it, but when you're as lazy as me, it is pert near impossible.

I mentioned the other day how I tried to get my Garmin to read 4:48 in the pace section of the display while out on a run. Unless the plaques and tangles in my brain are more numerous than I thought, I also mentioned that I totally failed.

So yesterday while running, I thought I'd take another crack at it. This time, I tried it early in the run, like at mile 0.6. My previous attempt resulted in a display that read somewhere in the mid fives. This time, however, I am pleased to report I got it down to 5:02, for like 10 feet or so.

But here's the thing: It totally felt like my legs were falling off. Plus, I'm sure I looked like an idiot. My 0.6 mile mark is in a park in town, and yes, people were there. I have no idea if they were looking at me or not, but if they were, they must have thought I was running from a tsunami.

The rest of my run was uneventful, except for one little incident when I gave it a kick at the end. I'm not going to say much about it except that it is quite a relief when you think that maybe you had an accident, but later find out you didn't, actually.

OK, I need to get to bed.

A 4:48 Pace? Maybe on the Moon!

The 2011 Boston Marathon is April 18th. I took the liberty of looking up the results from last year. The winner was Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot at 2:05:52. That's 26.2 miles in two hours and five minutes.

You know how every once in a while someone comes out and says the moon landing was a hoax? I've decided that a time of 2:05:52 is a hoax, and a far more impressive one than making the world believe you rode in a spaceship to the moon.

Robert's time mentioned above is a 4:48 pace. Today when I got home and went out for my run, I decided to run at that pace, if at least for a moment. So at about three miles into the run I busted into a sprint (at least for me) in an effort to get my Garmin to read 4:48. I don't want to say I failed, so let's say I sucked...wind, and didn't quite make it.

After trying and, yes, failing to run at a 4:48 pace for even a few yards, I am just amazed that someone can do that over 26.2 miles. But I don't see why I'm so surprised. There is no other field of play where I can even remotely compete with the world's best. But that's what's so great about multi-sport and running events; I can't compete, but they still let me go out onto the same course as pros! Could you get away with that in any other sport?