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Saturday was another milestone day – I did the route I’ve been meaning to do ever since we moved into this house. Left the driveway, ran to Old Mystic, hung a right down River Road, ran towards downtown on the Groton side of the river, hung a right up Cow Hill Road. Over the hill past the fire station and back to the house. Wonderful. Oh, and forgot to mention the 1/2 mile of trail run. Beautiful.

Tough, tough run – from River Road up Cow Hill Road is pretty much straight up hill. Ouch. Especially after three plus miles and the long run on Tuesday.

So I took today off.

In hindsight, I’m kind of disappointed – I ended up with the same mileage (give or take) this week as last week. But I think it was the right thing to do – I do not want to end up sick, I do not want to end up injured, and I’m still on track mileage-wise for building to a 20 mile base.

2005 has been a year of change not only fitness-wise, but lifestyle wise, too. I’ve always been able to get by based on testing slightly smarter than the average bear (not that I actually am, I just learned to guess “c” earlier than the rest of the kids taking the SATs). The folks over at 43 Folders have been godsends, and I’d like to share a bit that they posted on Wednesday:

        •         action almost always trumps inaction
        •         planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan
        •         things are easier to do when you understand why you’re doing them
        •          your brain likes it when you make things as simple as possible

They finish by focusing on what’s become kind of my mantra: Small changes stick. That, and the secret is progress.

From this afternoon’s run. Banged through work (and lunch with the boys – I’m down in Waterford today) and hit the access road loop near the office at 4 PM. Beautiful day – a bit on the cold side, but I ran without a hat or jacket and didn’t feel I was going to lose any limbs.

I really like this loop. Starts off with about .2 miles downhill, then about a half mile on a pretty steep hill. Next half mile is downhill to the turn under the interstate. Once under the interstate, it starts a nice, gradual three-quarter mile climb that (hooray!) gets steeper near the top. As I’m typing, I’m imagining that it’d be a cast iron bear on a bicycle… The last bit is pretty flat over the overpass and back to the office. It’s scenic – the highway is behind either brush or a small berm most of the way, and our complex is about the only construction on the access road. There’s a bunch of scenic New England Stone Walls (TM), trees, and a field in which there are ALWAYS Odocoileus virginianus grazing.

(n.b on stone walls: I swear you can’t walk 200 yards in any stretch of woods up here without tripping over one. But I laugh because every stone in the walls is a memory of a Puritan farmer uttering a four letter word as yet another rock came up under his plow. Not that Puritans are funny or anything, but because I continue to harvest a new crop each spring.)

Anyways, today’s stats are 3.3 miles in 27:43, an 8:26 pace.

I finally got around to reviewing the Forerunner from Tuesday’s epic, and was shocked. I’ve been riffing on “Finish Strong” for a while, at least in my head. Dig these mile splits: 8:49/8:32/8:34/8:07/8:17/8:07/7:45 (Last is pace for .2 miles of downhill) The course was out-and-back, the wind was a cross wind, and it’s not more uphill either way. So the splits represent nothing but pure joy.

Mark’s been pushing syncronicity for a while. I wasn’t buying it until I read his entry today about Emil Zapotek. One of the quotes he gave was “It’s at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.”

Which echoes yesterday’s post on one of the turning moments of my life.

Sign me up.

So I’m sitting here tonight wondering why the evening’s swim took almost a complete hour to do a mile – a set of 5 laps of breast stroke to warm up, then four sets of ten laps of freestyle, then a set of five laps of breast stroke to cool down.

(A nautical mile, that is – 2,000 yards. 2 kilometers for y’all north of the border types.)

Then I add it up and realize there’s an extra thousand meters in there. Crap. No wonder it took so long. Go figure. Good thing I’m long past being paid to do math upon which people might live or die. Mostly now, I just deal with money.

Wow. I feel much better now. Tonight’s swim was another microcosm of my life. Warmup was great. The first set was in-frickin’-credible. Dunno what it was, but every stroke was stretched out, straight arm and fingers close together just like a canoe paddle cutting through the water, the kicks were powerful, rhythmic, and straight-legged, and the flip turns were quick and powerful. Probably I shouldn’t have stopped to catch my breath after ten.

The second ten were painful. White boy got no rhythm. Knees were flailing, arms splashing, breath gasping. Just ugly. Third ten were kind of better – started bad, but I concentrated on improving one part of my stroke with each lap – first my left arm, then my right, then breathing, then straight-legged kicking, then pointing my toes, etc, until the last lap of that set felt smooth.

The final set – zen. Focused on the tiles slipping by underneath, took a breath as soon as the cross at the end entered my field of view, flip-kick-twist-stroke-breathe. I counted half-laps: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. And I finished strong. Good stuff.

If you’re down in the Houston area and interested in cycling, you could do a whole lot worse than to ride with the CC Riders. Their big gig is riding the Houston-Austin MS 150, and they do it up right – big tent, refreshing beverages, and interesting people. I cannot recommend them highly enough, and hold a special place in my heart for Ish and Cynthia. Aside from my actual family, leaving this community of cyclists was the hardest thing about coming back to New England.

In any case, they all rock. And the MS Society does a bang up job for a disease that can strike anyone at almost any time in their lives.

I’m not Catholic (big C – though the church I go to does do the Nicene Creed and honors the “holy catholic church”, meaning all Christian believers), but I dig the idea of introspection and self sacrifice during Lent.

So for this Lent, I’m giving up eating crap. No more food out of the gee-dunk (say it out loud, first syllable high pitched, second syllable low) machine, no more food from convinience stores, no more pre-packaged cookies, etc. I’m not giving up candy – high quality chocolate is still OK – or dessert – again, only the good stuff. But what I am giving up is the sort-of tasty; the convinient, and the deadly.

The produce aisle at the local groceries is my new snack-food stop.

Amen, and amen.

When I started Officer Candidate School after 4 hard years of drinking beer and chasing women, I was soft. As in soft and over weight, soft in the belly, and soft in the head.

I was also going into a “kinder, gentler” Navy; one that was recovering from Tailhook, adopting to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and moving women onto fighting ships of the line – Destroyers and Cruisers. As such, the Navy’s training commands had instituted the “Training Time-Out” – any trainee, during any evolution, could bring their participation in the evolution to a halt by calling a TTO.

The first or second week at OCS, I was getting worked pretty hard by one of the Navy Senior Chiefs who were usually the “good cop” to the Marine Corps Drill Instructors. I was soaked, panting, had limbs trembling from exertion, and was pretty much done. So, seeing as how we’d gotten a dozen or so briefs detailing TTO procedures, I called one.

The Senior Chief immediately stopped yelling at me, and ran over to me. “Son, I need you to look deep in your heart right now. If you’re calling a Training Time Out because you really need help, if you are in actual, honest to god pain, then just let me know and we’ll have all the help you need in a heartbeat.

“But damnit, boy, if you go through with a TTO because you’re experiencing some discomfort, even serious discomfort, then God help you, ’cause I’m never going to let you get commissioned.”

It was at that instant that my OCS experience became transformed; that I realized that all the shouting and sweating and exertion was stripping the fat from both my psyche and my body. And at that instant, I felt lower than I’d felt in the twenty-one and a half years I’d lived to that point. I dropped back down into push-up position, and the Senior Chief gave me a little more personal attention until I couldn’t push no more.

Since, I’ve seen much the same point made in a lot of training books – with exertion comes some discomfort, and even serious discomfort might be just a result of serious training.

But pain is another animal entirely. Pain is a sign of something gone seriously wrong, and a reason to call off training and get attention.

I learned a lot about life that day, and more about myself. I did not like the guy who wanted to quit, and worked (and am still working) on keeping him out of my psyche.

Pshew. Back to running:

2 miles on Wednesday. Two easy miles on Wednesday.

And much discomfort as my legs worked out the residual effort from Tuesday’s six miler. But no pain :)

It’s funny how things work out some times. Yesterday’s swim debacle (too strong of a word, true) got me questioning the efficacy of the whole training program, and wondering if I’d really lost everything I’d gained at the end of last summer. Turns out, no, not quite, but I get ahead of myself.

After the missed goal with Monday’s swim, I went to bed early and slept slightly late, figuring that I’d better get an afternoon run in while the current batch of nice days lasted. Good day at work, and while I was talking with one of the other runners in the office it hit me: I did two five mile days last week, and I couldn’t remember the last time I hit two fives in a week. Or, more to the point, hit two fives in a week and didn’t feel like I wanted to die.

So, I tied up things in the office, and skedaddled on over to Jamestown Island. I hadn’t run or biked on the island since September or October (again, too lazy to read my own blog and find out). I parked at the beach in the center of the south half of the island (Think it’s Manatee Beach, but somehow that doesn’t sound very New Englandy). Today’s goal was 3 miles, so I programmed the old forerunner for 4 miles (feeling jaunty) and ran on down the road.

The course for today has been instantly moved to probably my favorite that doesn’t require much of a special drive. Parking at Manatee Beach (for lack of its real name) starts the run at sea level, and the road climbs up from there. My guess is that max elevation on the island is somewhere around 50 or so feet. But the road goes straight up that within the first half mile from the beach. Crested the hill, mile 1 – 8:49. I’m pleased.

Keep on trucking down the long false flat on the way to the low point before I start the climb into Beavertail State Park. Look at the forerunner and road, and guestimate I could turn the run into a nice 5 miler by extending out to the lighthouse at land’s end. Sure, fine, I take a quorum in my mind, and finding no objections decide to go for it.

Success! My iPod pooped out and needed to be rebooted (good as new after that). AND it turns out that it was 3 miles to the end of the island, not 2.5 like I’d thought.

No worries, though: you can do it!

The short story (about which hopefully I’ll elaborate later): 6.2 miles, 52 minutes. Yeah, you read that right: Average of 8:32. AND I still had miles left in my legs.

Chris asked for it – here it is, complete with overly cute kids.