trade-off

I wonder if doing a 20 minute ab workout does anything to negate the chocolate I ate right before working out.

Also, how did it get to be March 15th already?

New Year, a month later...

No blog posts yet this year, eh? Well, it's been kind of busy. Plus when your laptop is on top of the lap of your four-year old and he's on your lap, it makes things a little more, shall we say, challenging. And you've just made dinner and cleaned it up. And you've just made muffins with said four-year old and haven't cleaned up that mess yet. And your eight year old is upstairs with his daddy, stressing out about his spelling homework. And your four year old wants to do a puzzle of the United States of America RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

On the exercise front: NO swimming (still too cold for me), a teeny bit of biking, some running (say, 2-3 miles, 2-3 times a week). Haven't picked my next event/race. I'm contemplating Bay to Breakers (early reg deadline: April 30th, race date: May 17th). I'm still practicing aikido twice a week and just found out that I should be testing for 3rd kyu sometime in March. Eeek! I thought I was all over test anxiety. Guess I was wrong.

I've got a presentation to do for work on March 6th that I'm already starting to worry about (hey, it's never to early for that).

In the meantime, I'm folding paper airplanes. Lots of paper airplanes. See, we (read D) got a paper-airplane-a-day calendar for Christmas. P is obsessed with it. Never let's me forget to fold one. It is February 5th. You do the math, that's a lot of airplanes and it's only the first week of February!!! But they are a lot of fun to fold and they are a lot of fun to fly. I bet it will make me popular with the below-5 set.

Ramble, ramble, ramble.

50 seconds to muffin time!

Got to go.

Vacation is Over

Tomorrow it's back to work, back to reality, back to exercise! I've decided that this year's challenge will be to beat the time that I posted in last year's sprint triathlon. I've convinced one of my new colleagues at work to do the triathlon with me and we're going to train together which is absolutely awesome.

This means, of course, that I need to step up my training and start swimming and biking again. Right now, I've been running 2-3 times a week at a fairly leisurely pace and a fairly short distance and going to aikido class twice a week. I'm back to swimming laps once a week. Yesterday, I finally wired up my bike computer (which I've had for five months!) to my road bike and went out for a six mile ride. Got to start slowly.

My training schedule, leading up to race day will look something like this:

Monday: run
Tuesday: aikido
Wednesday: run
Thursday: aikido
Friday: swim
Saturday: run
Sunday: bike

Hang on, when do I rest?

Curatrix, Thy Name is Sloth

Oh boy, one week of NOT a second of organized exercise (besides chasing the kids around, of course) and I can see how easy it would be for me to slip back in to my old sedentary lifestyle. Time for a leisurely lunch and a chat, what a novelty!

Oh so tempting.

Thank goodness I've got a full schedule planned for next week. Monday, back to running with the guys. Tuesday, back to aikido. Wednesday, time for a nice fall bike ride. Thursday, heading to the main dojo for class with Sensei. Then comes a three day conference which will probably mean no exercise again but I should be back to being hooked on endorphins again.

But what about today? It's already 4 pm. Game 7 of the ALCS starts in an hour and a half. Boston had an absolutely brilliant night last night and has tied it up. You know I'm going to be on my couch watching this game so that pretty much puts 5:20 pm onwards out of the running. M is working on the fence . Does vacuuming the carpets, hanging up laundry on the line and putting away groceries count as exercise? Hmmmm. 'Cause if it doesn't, I really need to get out of this chair and into my running shoes.

Swimming Stories

I learned to swim in my aunt's pool in Germany. She and my uncle have the most awesome house. Pool and sauna in the basement, huge backyard, lovely big fireplace, welcoming and warm dining room. I must have been five or six when I first got into the deep, deep water. Little water wings kept me afloat while my dad hovered nearby. They lived about a 45 minute drive from our townhouse in Hamburg so after a long weekend day visiting them and my cousins, my parents would bundle my brother and me up in our jammies, stick us in the car and head home. We'd be out cold by the time we hit the Autobahn. Years later, when I returned to visit them, I was so surprised at the size and depth of the pool. Somehow, it had shrunk and gotten shallower. But the water was still lovely.

Since those early days in Germany, I've always loved the water. Living in the Philippines, I fell in love with the ocean. The sound of it, the salty smell and taste, the certain heaviness that gets in the air on a hot, humid day, the cooling sensation of diving beneath the surface and the sting that you get when you open your eyes underwater just to see what's down there. Snorkeling has always been fun, drifting with the current, spying on the fish and the corals. Maybe someday I'll still get around to learning how to scuba dive. The couple of times that I've been on intro dives have been awesome. None of the claustrophobia that could have come but, instead, this elation at entering a formely forbidden and foreboding world. I don't think that I'll ever travel into outer space but I can imagine diving into the ocean and having a look around.

I haven't been swimming in the ocean in three and a half years. The Pacific Ocean here in Northern CA is just too cold! I guess I'm spoiled. But today, I got in a swimming pool and swam laps. It was a scorching day - 94 degrees outside. Getting into the cool of the pool at noon was absolutely delightful. Of course, I headed for the slowest lane out there and still found myself gasping for breath. Twenty minutes and I was done for. Everyone else in the pool was still busily churning away, steady as metronomes, lap after lap after lap. But that was just fine by me. I'd gotten some exercise, reassured myself that I did, after all, still know a couple of strokes and wallowed just a little bit in the feeling of buoyancy that you get in the water.

Next time, I'll need to figure out how to keep from bumping into the lane divider.

Pipe Dreams

This past Saturday, M and I watched a recap of an Ironman Triathlon on TV and I thought to myself: "These people are insane!"

Cut to that night and my inner musings:

Maybe they're not so insane. I wonder if they have shorter triathlons?

Google to the rescue. Yes, there are shorter triathlons! Super Sprint, Sprint, Olympic.

Hmmmmm. I couldn't run very far before, now I'm getting ready for 12K. I can ride a bike but I haven't biked long distances in ages. Not to mention the fact that my bike hasn't seen maintenance in years. Not to mention that it's not a road bike. I can swim but I've never really swum more than 50 m without stopping to catch my breath. But if I could conquer the running demon, why couldn't I do something like this too?

Where would I ever find the time to train for one? I am insane. If that isn't a pipe dream, I don't know what is. Got to go, I think I hear the paddy wagon on its way.