Tagged again

Aaarrggghh! Flatman got me!

Q: What are you training for now?
A: I'd like to run a PR marathon this fall. I'm doing both Baltimore (Oct 15) and New York (Nov 6), but I'm not sure that either one is a PR course, so I'll have to start really working if I'm going to achieve a new PR.

Q: If you are raising money for a cause, what is it and why is that cause important to you?
A: I'm not fundraising. To be honest, I hate fundraising. I'm happy to toss in a few bucks when friends are fundraising, though, if I support their causes. Here's a good one.

Q: What is the furthest distance you've run in your training and what is the furthest distance you will run before your event?
A: I'd have to look back in my logs, but I think I did a last long run of 21 miles before a marathon once. I probably won't do more than 20 this year outside of a race.

Q:What is your favorite flavor of gu? (or other sports gel)
A: I haven't found any that I truly like. I usually use Tangerine Powergel for the caffeine but it makes me gag. I'm totally serious. I tried a mango Clif Shot last weekend and it almost made me hurl too. Yeah, it's not food, it's medicine, but still....

Q: How many days a week do you run?
A: 3 or 4.

Q: Are you injured in any way right now? If so,what are you doing about it?
A: No, but my center toes on my left foot are feeling a bit odd (knock on wood).

Q:What is one item of running clothing/gear (shoes don't count) you can't run without?
A: CAN'T? The obvious answer is a jogbra (RRS Sportek). But DON'T? A better answer is RoadID.

Q: Do you have a talisman you are planning on taking to your event? If so, tell us!
A: Um, no, can't think of one. During marathons I always wear a waistpack full of assorted stuff (ibuprofen, Rolaids, a couple glucose tablets, etc.) with $20 in a zipock bag, just in case. I usually try to carry a course map, too. You never know. OH!! I almost forgot! I wear 3 purple heart beads on my running shoe shoelaces, one for each of my 3 daughters, that somebody special gave me, which made me cry.

Q: Share one thing about yourself we don't know.
A: Who is "we"? OK, I earned a PhD twenty years ago, and I'll probably never hold a job in my particular field of expertise (sports biomechanics) again. And I love to paint in oils.

I'll tag.... I don't know. If you read this, and haven't yet been tagged, consider yourself tagged. Karen. Dawn. *jeanne*. Holly. Ellie. Folks like that.

PR City!

For some reason my last duathlon post didn't show up properly and I had to re-post it. Hmmm. Is this blogger thing buggered up?

Anyway, on to my topic for this post: PRs! I just looked back at some of my records and realized that I set four personal records in one weekend! Woo hoo!

Bike split in a race: 16.2 mph
100 m run (unofficial): 23.0
200 m run (unofficial): 50.7
400 m run (unofficial): 2:05

I'm not trying to brag, because I know most recreational runners and cyclists can go faster than that - I just want to get them here on the record here for future improvements (hopefully)! It is just motivating to me to know that my performances are improving even if the scale has not moved in the direction that I want for a while.

Yay! Of course, it probably would help those sprint times if I ran them more than about once per year. My quads were KILLING me after those 100s!!!

Fun duathlon!

Left to right: Ellie holding Elisabeth, Dianne, me holding Catherine, *jeanne*.

We had a great time doing the Blackwater Traverse Duathlon in Cambridge, Maryland yesterday! A group of girlfriends got together for it and we ALL got hardware! Woo hoooo!!

The race direction was excellent, as I had expected from the well-organized group that also puts on the Columbia Triathlon and the Eagleman Half Ironman.

The weather at the 8AM start was overcast, 74*F, humidity 84%, wind east 6mph. While that doesn't sound too warm, in that kind of humidity we were wringing wet at the starting line even without a swim leg! Fortunately the terrain was as flat as can be so the course was relatively easy, though a bit monotonous (well, except for that nice plump possum and raccoon roadkill). And maybe I'm mistaken, but it sure seemed like the wind picked up a lot more than 6 mph when I was heading into it on the home stretch of the bike leg!

Here are my official splits:
Run 5K: 34:13 (11:02 min/mile pace)
T1: 2:13
Bike 30K: 1:11:03 (16.2 miles/hr pace)
T2: 1:45
Run 5K: 38:10 (12:19 min/mile pace)
Total time: 2:27:27.10

I brought home an attractive plaque for first place over-40 Athena. I was also the ONLY over-40 Athena, but hey, you can only compete against those who show up, right? There were only 2 entries in the under-40 Athenas, and they both beat my time. Um, by a lot.

My girlfriend Ellie got a plaque for second place woman age 50-54 (I'm trying to talk her into starting a blog, so maybe we'll see more of her around here soon), and my friends *jeanne* and Dianne got plaques for the first place women's relay. Way to go, ladies!

Also, Holly was able to come over too and it was great to see her looking amazingly fit and healthy! She was an essential part of our team since she kindly watched my girls during the race. They only had one or two little tantrums, she tells me, so I think it was a pretty good day for everyone!!!

Our Track Meet

We had our own little track meet on the school track this morning, just for fun. Names have been slightly altered to protect those publicity-shy individuals among us wary of the paparazzi. :-)

50m
Catherine Toby: 40.37

100m
Web Sphinx: 21.04, 21.93
Runbig: 23.00, 24.76
Goshawk: 23.45, 28.72
Chocoliq: 24.60, 30.73
Track Zygote: 25.66, 28.44

200m
Web Sphinx: 43.43
Runbig: 50.75
Track Zygote: 58.20
Chocoliq: 1:07.42

400m
Web Sphinx: 1:42
Runbig: 2:05
Track Zygote: 2:23

Catherine was the star runner of the meet and received the most applause from the crowds and also had the most fun, so she won.

The weather transplant was a success!

Suddenly we got new weather! Yay! What a nice surprise compared to the last two days of living inside a steam bath!

So Ellie and I went out for a long run (12 miler) early this morning in my lovely old neighborhood by the Miles River while Dianne was kind enough to watch my girls. We were so spooked by the hot weather that we went out at around 5:30 AM, but it really would have been cool enough today to run any time. Since I usually train alone, it was wonderful having a running buddy along to make those miles fly by!

That left us enough time in the middle of the day to pack up the girls and take them to the pool at the Yacht Club, which was deserted today. They had enormous fun getting spoiled and played with by their two aunties, and became exhausted enough to be sleeping now like little angels. :-)

Tonight is seafood in the open-air restaurant next to the harbor. Yum yum yum! They may go for the Maryland crab cakes, but (traitor that I am) I prefer the Alaskan king crab variety. Mmm, yeah, dripping with butter. I burned off those calories earlier, didn't I? Oops, maybe I "spent" those already on those superb Bernard Callebaut chocolates that Dianne brought here with her.

Dianne, true to her word, has STRIPPED my garden of weeds. It's a world-class weeding performance. She's like an Olympian of weeding. It's like poetry in motion - truly amazing to watch. From inside. Through the windows.

En fuego!

Normally that means good things.

This week it means we've had 2 days of 105*F+ heat indices and are basically huddling inside and hoping that we don't have another 2-hour power failure!

We did some walking and running yesterday and went to the pool this morning, but I didn't get much accomplished since I forgot my goggles.

But tomorrow is another day - and it's supposed to drop about 20 degrees overnight, which will put it right down into the "merely hot outside" realm. THAT I can do!!!

IF we can get up at 5:00 AM tomorrow we're doing a nice long run while it's nice and cool. And 100% humidity, but one can't have everything....

Fun week ahead!

We're having a fun Girls' Week at my place this week. My husband has gone up to NH again to deal with finishing up the sale of his sister's house, and I'm partying here with my girlfriends. Yay!

In an hour I'm going to pick up Dianne. *jeanne* was kind enough to pick her up at the airport yesterday, and now I get her! I'll give her a quick driving tour of the DC sights and then we're heading over to St. Michaels with my two girls. Then tonight Ellie will join us, and later in the week *jeanne* and Holly will be there too.

We're going to walk and run and cycle and swim and grill on the deck and drink wine and laugh our heads off. Then we'll cap off the weekend with the Blackwater Duathlon next Sunday.

I'll see if I can get the St. Michaels computer fixed up to post photos during the week. If not, I'll still try to blog a bit while they're here, just to keep my eye on the run/bike/swim part of this week. I've been trying to convince Ellie to start blogging, since she travels a lot and does some great photography, so maybe we'll get her set up and going with a blog this week.

Doesn't this sound like FUN!?!?

Links to here

Here's a nice little tool for finding out which blogs have linked back to your own, or commented:

http://www.technorati.com/search/nancytoby.blogspot.com is how I use it for this blog, but you can just enter your own blog URL and do the same. Cool, huh!?

My cuties

I bought these denim outfits at the Columbia Triathlon (they have a logo on the right side), but we think they look like prison inmate uniforms or what the poorhouse orphans would wear. ;-)

Lance

What more can anyone possibly say about this amazing guy? I was surprised that he still has the power to get me choked up when I see him on the podium with his kids around him.

From Martin Dugard's blog:

"Armstrong also stated that he is an athlete, and will still compete to keep himself fit. He specifically mentioned doing a few running and biking events in his hometown. Then he joked about maybe doing an Ironman in a couple years. He quickly brushed that one aside, but I thought it interesting that he’d been thinking about it."

I've heard Lance mention the word "triathlon" more than once in the last couple of weeks. Everyone knows about his start in triathlon. I'd be willing to bet that he's got an Ironman in the back of his mind for some time in the next year or two.

I love my workout log

I keep my workout records on my own little Excel file - no fancy calculations, just columns for running, biking, swimming, and body weight, plus some comments. I've got the last 2 year's worth on this computer, but some of my older files were lost in the massive crash of the last computer.

Today was my long slow distance (LSD) run day, which I've unfortunately managed to miss for a week or two. I was dithering about how far to go - I wanted to do 10 or 12 miles, but it was hot, and one of my advisors was telling me to do 12km (7.5 miles). So I compromised a bit and did 9.0 (or 9.5 if you count some walking distance too). I went along my usual W&OD rail-trail, which has mile markers conveniently posted every 0.5 mile, except for the first couple miles right near my house where the markers are buggered up.

I was feeling a bit discouraged, thinking that I hadn't made much progress in my fitness in the last year, since my mile run times haven't improved very much. But I jogged along and recorded my splits every half mile, stopped for water, kept jogging, repeat, repeat, repeat.

What encouraged me today was when I logged my splits on my spreadsheet after I got back home. My average time per mile was slow, with some walk breaks in there - 12:56 min/mile outbound, 13:48 min/mile returning. HOWEVER, I was able to compare the splits to a similar longer LSD workout from a hotter day last July and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that my times were 2 to 4 minutes per mile faster this year. It may be that I was taking fewer walk breaks on a milder day, but if that's documented progress, I'll take it!

I have some girlfriends visiting with me next week and we may do a mini track meet among ourselves just for fun. I'll report on that later, since I'll have lots of extra time on my hands now that the Tour de France is finishing up! Maybe I'll even be able to get in the pool and do some laps again if they watch my girls for me, too!

Near my house

I just found this photo from 3 years ago that was taken from the street about a block from our current house in St. Michaels, Maryland. Right now there's a 1/5-acre residential building lot a few feet from where this photo was taken on the market for $800,000 - certainly out of our price range!

Invention idea

This is a "Baby Vise". According to the listing: "This is a great item to have around the house or shop. The body is made from a high grade cast iron. The bottom of the vice is a clamp that will attach to any flat surface. The jaws have been polished and they open up to 1". Small enough to fit in your back pocket!"

I thought this would be a great idea for giving Catherine haircuts, clipping Elisabeth's nails, changing diapers, etc.

My main concern is that the 1 inch version wouldn't be quite big enough for them, and I'd probably need 3 or 4 strategically placed Baby Vises to secure all the arms and legs. Let's see, $3.99 each, plus $4.75 shipping....

Hey, it's not like I'm making a Bonsai Baby out of them or anything.

IRONM4N Shelley rocks!

Here's her profile for the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii.

We are ALL going to be cheering for you!!!

Shelley is "paying it forward" by raising funds for the Make A Wish Foundation. See her donation page and give what you can.

Here and here are a couple of other stories to inspire you.

Another jogstroller day

Back out again with the girls for 3.3 miles on most of the roads that we were on yesterday. I looked carefully at each object on the roadsides on the way - including lots of empty beer cans, cigarette packs, and a whole case of Miller High Life empties that somebody kindly dumped at the end of a driveway along Million-Dollar Riverview Drive, but no sign of the errant sandal. Oh well. I originally bought them on eBay for almost nothing - why pay $$$ for kids' shoes that they'll grow out of before they're worn out?

Another anecdote I told to Tri-Daddy earlier: Whenever Catherine sees a man, she yells out, "Daddy! Hi Daddy!" She will yell this at *any* man she spots. It's kind of embarrassing when we go past the construction workers at the building site.

Today we finished up with a little walk around the school track, just to give the girls a little exercise too. I let them both out of the jogstroller and we started on our way around. It was like herding cats. They want to wander off and pick clover flowers and shake the fence and go the wrong way and fall down and Catherine will go off running some other direction and they'll do everything except walk in the same direction that Mom is walking. We only got about a third of the way around before they started getting too hot. Sheesh! Only 93*F heat index today, girls! We headed back across the infield for the jogstroller. Elisabeth had quite enough and stopped in the middle of the grass in the infield and stood there and started crying, so I had to wheel the jogstroller back to fetch her and load her in before we could head home. Awww, the poor little thing only started walking in early April, three months ago.

Totally unrelated house note: After coming down with a severe case of Storage Envy gazing at Commodore's photos, I scheduled a professional closet service to come over and give us an estimate on whipping our storage situation into shape in the utility/laundry room. In our tiny house, we need to optimize storage. They offer a free computer design and estimate, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Jogstrolling

Today the girls and I did 5.0 miles around the neighborhood with the double jogstroller. I managed to get outside about an hour earlier than yesterday, but it was still 97*F heat index. Fortunately that high reading was mostly due to a very high humidity, since the real temperature was still only in the upper eighties. It was nearly comfortable in the shade of the trees.

I checked on the girls about every twenty minutes and gave them drinks of water and squirted them every so often to stay cool, but they were getting a little cranky towards the end.

With about a mile to go I realized that Catherine had decided to take off one of her shoes somewhere along the way. Perhaps that was her way of getting a little revenge against Mom. It's a white sandal - perhaps I can spot it if I go drive our course later today. Maybe on the way to the swimming pool, after naptime. Then again, the shrieking and raucous giggling I'm hearing from the bedroom doesn't sound like napping is a big success either....

I'm in trouble

This morning after breakfast I was catching up on my email. I hear clunks coming from the kitchen. Clunks are always a bad sign. I go out there to investigate.

Catherine has learned to climb up on the kitchen table. She was sitting amid a pile of newspapers and salt, playing with the glass oil and vinegar cruets. Salt was everywhere, deep in piles and layers all over the table. Fortunately I had recently neglected to fill the cruets, or she would have been marinating the newspapers in a fine vinaigrette.

I think it's time to put the glass cruets somewhere safe, along with the salt and pepper. Catherine has not yet learned to be responsible with her condiments.

Upcoming events update

Thanks, everyone, for your very helpful advice and perspectives on my training and event plans. Your comments have given me lots of food for thought. Don't you hate it when you give a lot of personal feedback on a blog and then never hear what happens? I try not to do that and leave my loyal readers hanging!!! This is the current update, subject to revision, naturally!

Last week I entered the St. Michaels Historic Century on September 10th (although I may opt to ride the metric century of 62 miles), and the full 100 miler at the Seagull Century on October 8th. That's in addition to the 2 or 3 marathons that I'll be doing between October 1st and November 6th.

I don't have any triathlons on the "confirmed" list at all right now. I'm still thinking. I have done very little swimming since Eagleman, either, so I'll need to get up to speed in the water first before I take on any more triathlons immediately.

I think the long rides and the marathons in the fall should tell the tale for me and will help me decide whether I should attempt a full ironman-distance triathlon in 2006, or instead continue next year just doing shorter triathlons and other running and cycling events. If I can't get myself within striking distance of some of my running and cycling performance benchmarks this fall, it seems prudent to postpone entering a full ironman-distance triathlon until I get a little faster and thereby closer to knowing with confidence that I can actually finish an ironman by the cutoff times. I don't worry at all about my mental toughness, or endurance - I'm confident in those, I've only DNFd two (running) races, and those only after 12 miles when I was actually getting injured. My total concern is my speed (or lack thereof).

A friend of mine on the other side of the world is helping me work out a triathlon training plan for the next four months, when we will have the 2006 Florida Ironman drop-dead entry date. Stay tuned and we'll see what he comes up with, and what kind of progress I make. Then again, there are several good prospects for non-m-dot ironman-distance triathlons out there that I could tackle in the fall of 2006 without having the expense and long-term advance commitment of IMFL06. But they wouldn't be as fun as doing IMFL06 with my fellow tri-bloggers, it's true. Ahhh, trade-offs.

Sauna cycling

Instead of watching the Most Decisive Day of the 2005 Tour de France this morning, I took Buttercup out for a ride before it got too unbearably hot. It was steamy, no wind and full sun, but a mild 90-95*F heat index instead of the 100*F+ heat index we will have this afternoon. I still had sweat dripping off the front of my helmet!

Our total distance was 23 miles. I did a 20.1-mile time trial, again in preparation for the Blackwater Duathlon coming up in a couple of weeks. My personal rule for my time trials is that I time myself for a loop and return to the same spot, stop and then check the gauges, so I don't gain any undue advantage of tailwinds or downhills. Today without any wind I was faster than my last time trial of two weeks ago: I managed a 16.7 mph average. That still won't get me to the finish line of the bike leg of my duathlon within one hour, for which I need an 18.6 mph average. That would still only put me in the middle of the pack, judging by last year's results. Oh well, I don't think I'll gain nearly 2 mph before race day even with a big effort - but I'll do my best, nevertheless!

My heart rate averaged 141. That's 20 to 30 beats/min less than running, but you're only using about half as many active muscle groups on the bike, so heart rates are generally much lower. My limiting factor still seems to be my position on the bike - after 15 miles or so my back starts getting achy, plus my crotch gets uncomfortable, and I have to sit up to stretch or stand in the pedals for a while, both of which slow me down. I know, I know, the solution is simply more miles in the saddle.

I was hoping to watch today's stage of the Tour this afternoon, but no, I'm doomed. They're not re-broadcasting it until tonight, which probably means I'll have to endure Al Trautwig and Kristin Gum. UGH. I've already peeked at the results, and it looks like it will be worth watching, nevertheless!

Sauna training

Sometimes when I get hot and slow down in the heat I think I'm "just slacking" and being lazy. On today's track workout I wore my heart rate meter for the first time in a long time and it convinced me that it's not mental, it's really physiological! Not that I don't slack at times, but today my perceptions of exertion level corresponded exactly with my heart rates.

I had intended to do five miles on the track (including 1 mile of walking), but I didn't get there.

The numbers tell the tale:

Environment: 87*F, 75%RH, 0 mph wind, full hazy sun, 100*F heat index (I didn't look at this until I got home, or I might not have even gone out there).

Begin: Quarter mile walk warmup.

First track mile (I'm trying to take it very easy, just warming up):
11:16 min/mile, 154 beats/min average

Quarter mile walk recovery.

Second track mile (I'm still just jogging, but starting to get HOT):
12:03 min/mile, 166 beats/min average

Ugh. Half mile walking, trying to cool down, searching for a breeze.

Third track mile (It's absolutely frigging sweltering):
12:45 min/mile, 172 beats/min average

Once I get to the point I can barely maintain a jog and I'm still going into the red zone, it's time to call it a day. End of workout, four miles total.