Water girl

I could be described as being many things during my adolescence, but “athletic” would not be one of them. While I participated in a range of sports, including t-ball, soccer, and softball, my participation was usually limited to a year or two at the most. I was never particularly coordinated or skilled and I could never run very quickly. In Grade Eight, I tried out for the volleyball team to be with my friends; the coach, in an effort to be encouraging, took pity on me and gave me a spot on the team, but I spent most (80%) of the season as a benchwarmer. In Grade Nine, I wised up to the fact that I wasn’t especially talented on the court, and instead decided to concentrate my energies on other important matters -- namely, boys. I convinced the boys’ basketball coach to let me serve as the water girl, and I traveled to all of the high school meets with the team (on which my fourteen year old boyfriend was the star player) to ensure that fresh, cold water was always on hand. With that, I concluded the sporting involvements of my youth.

The only sport in which I participated for more than one season was competitive swimming. Somewhere around second or third grade, my mom enrolled me in a top competitive swim club (which has produced a handful of Olympic medalists and with which my own niece and nephews are now swimming). I didn’t last for more than three years because I wasn’t, in fact, a very talented swimmer (no surprise there). In retrospect, I probably should have stuck with it, because I now appreciate that success in athletics (especially during adolescence) can sometimes take many years to cultivate. Nevertheless, I always enjoyed being in the water, and what I lacked in speed and technique I more than made up for in endurance and determination. I recall a few times in the pool swimming lap after lap, sometimes long after my team mates had already showered and gone home. There were fringe benefits, too: I enjoyed the early Saturday morning workouts if only for the McDonald’s Egg McMuffins that we picked up on the drive back home, and after I actually placed in a meet in Grade Three, my school principal announced it over the PA system to the entire student body.

In the past 15 years, though, the number of times I’ve swam dedicated laps for exercise purposes has probably numbered less than twenty. In the last two years alone, I think I’ve been in the pool a handful of times -- despite the fact that one reason Zdenek and I pay for an exorbitantly priced gym membership is to have access to the only 25 meter pool on the UWS. Part of the problem is that swimming today seems much fussier than it did when I was a kid. Back then, I’d get out, rinse off, put my clothes on over my wet bathing suit, and be driven home to a find a hot dinner waiting at the table. Today, I have to either haul all of my toiletries to the gym or be forced to shower a second time when I get home, my skin feels tight and flaky from the chlorine, I worry about wearing flip flops on the pool deck and in the shower lest I pick up some funky foot disease, and if I get home too late then dinner will consist of a bowl of cereal. Running is infinitely less cumbersome, and even the preparatory work required for cycling is minimal by comparison. Combined with the crowded lanes and too-warm water of our gym’s pool, the thought of staring at a black line for 45 minutes or more is never very appetizing when Central Park is only 1/2 mile from my doorstep. (For Zdenek, who was once a mighty competitive swimmer, the prospects are even worse: he finds the pace of the lanes at our local pool to be a tad on the slow side, and he’s been reprimanded by the lifeguards for everything from going too quickly to doing the butterfly stroke (his specialty).)

Yesterday afternoon, however, Zdenek and I headed to the pool for our first swimming workout of 2010. Today, he hurts in all the places where he used his muscles to power him through the water, and I hurt in all the places that I stressed my joints from poor technique. This said, I’m going to try to make a commitment during my current marathon plan to devote more cross-training days to swimming. For one, it will make better use of my gym membership. Secondly, it will (hopefully) develop new muscles and upper body strength with limited injury risk. Thirdly, I am married to a former competitive swimmer who also happens to be a great coach, so I have hours and hours of free instruction at my disposal.

All things considered, it’s time I tried to become a water girl once again.

Necessary evils

Over the past week I made the decision to up my training a notch (or two) and put all of these hard miles towards a concrete goal: I'm planning on running my eighth marathon this May.

On Monday I kicked off Week One of training with a solid six miles in the Park. My pace was good, my heart rate better than expected, and I finished feeling strong and refreshed. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Tuesday's workout, which called for 43 minutes and 44 seconds of aerobic cross-training (at an average heart rate of 150). Indeed, Tuesday morning's trip to the gym was a bit of a debacle.

To be sure, I despise cross-training (unless it's cycling, which is unfortunately not possible this time of year), and it's definitely the worst part about a marathon training plan: the elliptical trainer may be the dullest exercise machine ever invented; the stationary bikes in the gym are not positioned at all like real road bikes; swimming takes too long when you count the extra 45 minutes it requires to get to and from the pool. I've yet to try that seated thing that works only my arms, but someday if I suffer a serious leg injury I may have to consider giving it a go.

On Tuesday I picked the lesser of all evils and settled in on the elliptical (with upper body levers) for 44 mind-numbing minutes. To keep myself semi-distracted, I plugged my headset into the Today Show, which happened to be showing a story about a golden retriever named Angel who saved his 11 year-old master from a cougar attack in British Columbia. Watching this adorable puppy with all of his wounds being lifted on to the operating table and hearing how he almost gave his life to protect the little boy was a lot for me to handle while my legs whirled round and round. Suddenly, without warning, I felt an enormous lump in my throat, and then I was shedding tears on the elliptical machine in the middle of the JCC gym.

Fortunately, my allotted 44 minutes were almost over, so I was able to dab my eyes and get off the machine soon after my emotional meltdown. I then proceeded to do 2x20 lunges around the gym -- a workout I haven't done since last year's marathon training. It was somewhere around the third and fourth reps of the second set that I appear to have pulled all of the major muscle groups in both legs, and I figured this was the signal to get out of gym altogether. As a result of my pulled muscles, yesterday morning's six mile tempo was anything was pleasant.

All of this leads me to question whether exercise really does reduce stress like common theory would suggest. On further consideration, though, I don't think I've ever cried while doing a loop in Central Park (although the wind does cause my eyes to tear incessantly), and I rarely pull muscles during regular runs. This morning I had the perfect four mile fartlek around the Central Park reservoir: a quick, satisfying workout in clear, cold weather. I can only conclude that it must be the indoor gym environment that stresses me out. (At the very least, I could be subconsciously stressing over the fact that I go to the gym so infrequently and pay so much for my membership that every single visit averages to about $50). As if I didn't have enough reasons to dislike cross-training.