Triing - A Fat Guy's Journey To The Wildflower Triathalon

It was not my intention to do this, but I took a week off last week; life just got in the way.  But the week before that, Zoe (my 3.5 year old daughter) and I went to Lake San Antonio toodle around the lake with some friends in their boat.  While we were moored up on a beach to let the girls play in the sand for a bit, I swam in open water for about 15 minutes.

This was my first time in open water; boy howdy, am I glad I did that once now before the event.  Open water swimming is SO different than pool swimming.  I've always done by best in the pool to not use hard surfaces at all, but what can't be simulated is the movement of the water.  Wakes are a real problem swimming in an open active lake.  Good to know.

This morning, I was woken by work at 3:30am and didn't finish until about 6am so I just stayed up, made myself a (couple) cup(s) of tea, and went to the pool.  (I wasn't PLANNING to go to the pool today, but I'll take what I can get. :-)   As the joke goes, "boy are my arms tired."  It's been two weeks since I've swam.  I did 10 laps, 500m.  The first 8 laps were done in 15 minutes without stopping very much (lane traffic made me stop briefly on my 4th lap to let someone pass without collision.)  I think that's an improvement, though to be honest I'm not really sure.

What I need to do:

• Keep going. AT LEAST once a week.  More would be good.
  
• Get goggles and a snorkel.  I'm still swimming on my back, and I'd really like to start working on free style.
• Keep working on kicking with my legs.  Man, that's hard to keep up.  I can do it when I'm thinking about it, but it hasn't become muscle memory yet.
  

Go Space Shuttle Atlantis go!  Your last flight, STS-132 started today.  Safe travels. :-D  Anyway.  Back to triing...  :-)

Dave, my neighbor, and I went on our 3.5mi walk tonight.  Took a little longer than usual.  I was wearing long pants, not shorts, so I was sweating more than usual.  Also, we took a short break to watch the ISS fly overhead.  Man, I will never stop being amazed by that.

One more thing:  http://www.triing.org/ is now working.  :-)

We're not quite to jazz yet, but we _ARE_ at coincidence.  I went swimming again this morning.  10 laps without stopping, a small break, then another two(ish) laps.  Man, were my legs wobbly getting out of the pool.

My neighbor and I went for a walk again tonight.  Confirmed with Google Maps that it's 3.5 miles. In just under an hour.  Not bad!

Our other walk route, when we feel lucky, is 4.6 miles and a lot more hills.  We didn't do that one tonight, though.

The good news is, my target of being able to do each individual event 3 times by itself is pretty close with walking.  After 4.6mi through hills, I'm pretty sweaty, but I could keep going.  I should probably find another 1.5-ish mile loop I could add to this.  Hmm.

Swam 450ish meters Tuesday morning, walked 3.5ish miles Thursday night, walked another 3ish miles Friday at lunch, rode about 7 miles Saturday morning.  No where near a triathlon, but better than I've done for the last several years.

Good: I was in bed early enough last night (11pm) that I woke up (5am) a full hour before my alarm (6am).
Bad: I think I woke Cindy up. It was either me, or the dog licking, but I'm sure I didn't help.
Good: Getting my arse out of bed at 5am meant I was able to get to the pool by 6am.
Bad: Damn, I'm an idiot. Went in the wrong door, didn't bring underwear (was wearing my swim trunks under my pants) or a backpack or other means of carrying stuff, generally made an arse of myself asking questions and looking like a fool.
Good: Everyone at the pool was very kind and understanding of the old fat guy who's new here.
Very Good: I swam (a modified back stroke, so I didn't have to worry about the breathing issues yet) a whole 5 laps: 4 laps without stopping, a 2-ish minute break, then another lap during which my whole body got a little wobbly, so I stopped.  I wasn't paying exact attention to the clock, but the whole thing took about 30 minutes, so I figured I averaged about 5 minutes a lap.
Holy Shit Good: The website claims this is a 50m pool, meaning I swam (nearly) 500m this morning, 400m of which without a break.
Bad: I'm so deathly afraid of slamming my head into the concrete wall that I usually turn around at the flag line, which is probably 2 to 3m short of the whole pool.  Do that on both ends and it's more like a 45m pool.
Good: That means I also am not kicking off, which I won't be able to do in open water anyway.  Besides, 45m/span * 2span/lap * 5 laps is still 450m.  Google tells me that 450 meters is .28 miles, and that's without training up to it at all.

I just might be able to pull this thing off...

Bad: My whole body is like jello right now.  If you told me to jump on a bike and ride 10 miles, I'd tell you precisely into which of your orifices you could shove that bike.  If you then told me to follow that bike ride with a 2 mile run, I'd tell you which orientation to hold that bike while pushing.
Very Bad:  Granola and a cup of tea, a workout breakfast do not make.  I suspect I'll be hitting F. McLintocks for breakfast around 9 or 10am, assuming I make it that long.

So, I've still got a hell of a lot of work to go.  But the swim was my biggest scare, and this morning has proven to me that it might be more in reach than I thought.  This is good.  This makes me happy.  And a little wobbly.

I often tell myself that if I tell the world that I'm doing something, it's more likely to happen because The World (who are you, anyway?) will keep me honest and to my word.  So far, this has never ACTUALLY happened.  So I'm going to try something new this time.  I'm just going to write my blog as a journal for myself and by myself with no immediate intention to publish.  This may change, of course, as I progress.  If I actually make some progress, maybe I'll publish things.

I mean, I've already registered the domain name...  ;-)

I've been a volunteer for the Wildflower Triathlon doing communications with the Cal Poly Amateur Radio Club since 1995.  I missed the first two years after my daughter was born, but have otherwise been doing chase on the bike course for both the Long and Olympic courses for 12 of the last 15 years.

Last year (2009), one of the guys from communications goaded me into promising him that I'd at least try to train for the Mountain Bike course in 2010. I didn't.

I've been thinking a lot about my personal health lately.  I hurt. A lot. (Not in the Emo-The-World-Doesn't-Understand-My-Pain sort of way.)  I'm 320lbs right now (weighed in at 318.8 this morning), the heaviest I've ever been.  My joints ache, my feet hurt from carrying so much weight, I have sleep apnea (for which I've recently gotten a CPAP; more on this later), I break chairs, I have to see a chiropractor at least once every two to three weeks.  It's not good, and I want it to change.

I know I have a very addictive personality, which is why I've never drank alcohol in my life, why I don't smoke, why I've never really done drugs (the two times smoking week in college don't count. ;-)

I'm addicted to food. Not certain foods, but food in general.  If there's food on my plate, I'll eat it until its gone.  When it's gone, I start looking at other peoples' plates for things they're not going to eat.  I'll keep doing this until all the food is gone, or until I'm stuffed to the gills.  I have an irrational fear of leaving food behind.  Don't ask me to explain it, because I can't.  But I recognize it.

All those other things, I have the willpower to avoid entirely and somehow that works for me.  But I can't do that with food.  I need food, we all do.  Imagine trying to tell a heroine addict that they need to take just a little tiny bit of heroine three times a day, just enough to tell the brain that The Good Stuff(tm) is coming, but that they can't have enough to actually get high.  There's no effing way they'd be able to stay clean.  Cutting it out entirely, letting the body get used to its absence, is easier and more effective than just decreasing it.

I don't have the will power to just eat less.  I've accepted this fact (for the time being, at least.  More on this later.)  So if I have any prayer of losing weight, I need to adjust the other half of the equation:


Besides weight loss, doing more exercise has several benefits for my particular situation: More movement means more flexability means less pain.  More muscle mass means better support means less pain.  More muscle mass means burning more calories means more weight loss.  And, to be honest, I just feel good after exercising.

I've been trying to walk at night with a friend of mine, but we haven't been as good about this as we should be, and honestly I need to burn more calories than that to make a dent in 320lbs.  But unless I have some specific exercise goals, something less nebulous than "Exercise more," history shows that I won't do it.

So, here we are, another Wildflower Triathlon down, and I've still not done anything about it.  This is the year that changes.

I used to go on long bike rides (my longest was 65mi, 15mi was typical), so with a bit of training, 10 miles doesn't scare me.  (Yes, I know I'm going to need a mountain bike and I only have a road bike.  Let's start on the hardware I've got.  When I can prove to myself (and my wife) that I'm actually going to go through with this, I'll get a real mountain bike.)

I (somewhat) regularly go on 3 to 5mi walks with my friend Dave through the hills near our houses, so a 2mi walk doesn't scare me.  (Yes, I know it's supposed to be a run. In the interest of just finishing the damn thing, I'm going to plan on a walk for the time being.)

This leaves the swim.  I know how to swim, but I've always had a problem with breathing.  While learning as a kid, every time I'd turn my head out of the water to take a breath, I'd get a lung full of water. Consequently, I have a fear of breathing while swimming.  I can hold my breath for maybe 10 yards, stop, breath, then go again.  This isn't going to work for a quarter mile.  I basically need someone to teach me to swim again.  So, I'm looking into my options there.

All three of these activities, when taken on their own, are obtainable.  It's just a matter of a bit of training (and figuring out what I'm doing wrong with the swim-breathing thing), but I could easily do each of those individually.  The next question is whether I can do all three consecutively on the same day, and whether I can get ready to do that by May 1st, 2011.

Come with me, won't you, and find out.