Monthly Archives: June 2009

I don’t want to jinx myself or anything, but man, does it feel good to be back into my running routine!

I missed the camaraderie of my group runs. I missed the ability to get my daily outdoors fix while relieving my stress. I even missed my favorite music — Eminem isn’t my artist of choice while I’m sitting in my apartment working, but there’s nothing quite like running your heart out to “Shake That.”

And I missed having the Marine Corps Marathon to look forward to. I signed up to run it after a successful performance at the National Half Marathon in March, and all but put it aside while I was nursing a sore IT band. Now, I’m starting to get excited about it again, printing out my training plan and considering my warmup races.

I’m following the FIRST plan, which calls for three days of running per week, plus some hard cross-training the other days. In particular, I’m following the beginner’s plan, a fairly straightforward plan that calls for just one 20-miler before the race.

It’s been almost a month since I made it to my beloved Pacers Silver Spring Fun Run, thanks to a scary-sore hip. After a 30-minute “test run” last week, I braved the five-mile hill loop my running group did last night.

And you know what? I was fine! Tired and nervous the whole time, but fine! My hip’s a little sore this morning, but it’s nothing like the throbbing, terrifying mess it was reduced to after my standard five-milers a month ago.

We did the Grubb Road out-and-back I trained on frequently before the National Half Marathon in March. The run features several leg-burners through the gorgeous Colonial Village neighborhood near Rock Creek Park. (Need more hill-route suggestions? Check out my Examiner post for today). It just felt so good to return to my running routine, which I rely on to keep me honest about my workouts and sane for the rest of my days.

Next up: A BOSU and swim workout today. I’m thinking of reverting to an old favorite swimming-wise, a timed 1,650, followed by 5X200, then 10X25s, half of them sprint, half of them no breath (this last part is new, but in the instant-classic kind of way).

My husband called me beastly the other night.

I look a little beastly here, and I think that's awesome.

This was, of course, a compliment. He was telling me that our running group had seen pictures of me from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Swim last Sunday, and that they said I looked beastly. I questioned this, and he acknowledged that beastly was his word, not theirs, which led to several minutes of him describing how pretty I am.

I know he thinks I’m super-hot, and that it’s a great thing that he thinks of me as just another dude when it comes to working out. But it’s one of several comments that sparked an old insecurity: That when I’m training hard, I cross the line between powerful femininity and — well — beastliness. More importantly, that raises the question: Why are we, as women, so afraid to be beastly — in other words, strong?

It’s not just me. Check out the poll in this pieceby trainer Leigh Peele, in which 41 percent of 200 women surveyed reported that they never find muscles attractive on a woman. Twenty-six percent said they find muscles on a woman attractive ” sometimes, in small amounts.” Only 4 percent responded with an unequivocal “yes.”

Really, ladies? Muscles? Like, the ones that allow us to move? When I read the survey results, I thought about the way a male Sports Illustrated reporter described members of the U.S. Olympic Swim Team recently: “The image of powerful femininity.” How come that dude sees us as powerfully feminine, while a huge percentage of us would rather be too skinny than too muscular (according to the Leigh Peele poll)?

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand what this was about. For me, my love-hate relationship with my shoulders started in eighth grade, when I saw a picture of myself for the first time after I started swimming with a club team. As an eighth grader, I had biceps. And I didn’t like them. My friends noticed, too. At pool parties, they’d tell me to flex, my little 13-year-old arms a party trick to rival the pool toys.

In high school, my swim teammates and I joked that rather than breasts, we had pecs. But by that point, I had learned to be proud of my weirdly muscular arms, with the focus on what they could do, not how they looked. We weren’t totally immune to the body-image issues that besiege most high-school girls, but we strived for rippled abs, not model-skinniness.

So what happened between then and now? I stopped swimming for a good decade, until some running injuries forced me back in the pool. During that decade, I should have become more at home in my body, and more secure in myself. And I am — it’s just that the fact that I’m even writing this blog post makes it clear that feeling perfectly comfortable in one’s body is a lifelong struggle, not a simple fact.

Most days, I still believe it’s not about how my shoulders look, but what they can do. And since they can cut across what I swear were 4-foot waves in the Chesapeake Bay, or make me glide through the pool faster than the dude in the lane next to mine, I think they’re pretty awesome.

One of my favorite things about running is its amazing portability. You can run

The outdoor pool near my parents' house is beautiful, but HOT.

anywhere, so long as you have your shoes, making it easy to squeeze in while you’re traveling.

I’m writing this from New Port Richey, Fla., where I’m visiting my parents for the week. I have been taking some time off from running to nurse a sore hip. The portability is sorely missed.

There’s a beautiful outdoor public pool near my parents’ house, and I almost always try to squeeze in a swim while I’m here. The outdoor pool is ideal in the winter, but not so great in the summer, when it’s so hot midday, it’s literally hard to breathe. So I headed out at 6:30 a.m. Monday to try to squeeze in a workout before things got really uncomfortable. Perspective on “uncomfortable:” When I left the house, it was 91 degrees, 99 percent humidity. The pool temp was the same, making the workout feel a bit like doing step aerobics in a hot tub (not that I’ve done this. I’m just sayin’).

Making things worse, a club swim team kicked me out of the main lap pool and into a 20-yard kiddie pool. I’m not so great at math on a normal day, but converting all my normal sets from 25-yard laps to 20-yard laps was about all I could take before sunrise.

However: The coach, a fit-looking middle-aged man with a booming voice and a stopwatch, apologized for the situation, anc invited me to swim with his masters swim team this morning. At 5:30 a.m. Because I’m a little crazy, I decided this was a good idea.

I’ve never felt super-comfortable with masters teams. There’s something awkward about meeting a bunch of strangers in your bathing suit. My last experience involved a big group of snooty patooties who informed me that theirs was “kind of the fast lane,” and an older dude who said, without a hint of kindness of humor, that I could only swim in his lane if I didn’t run him over. It felt like the middle school lunchroom all over again, except I never had to wear a bathing suit while searching for a table in seventh grade. Then again, I also never got to blow past the so-called “fast lane” in seventh grade, which I did at that practice.

So. This morning, I headed out for the workout. Last night’s hail storm had cooled the pool temperature to 88 degrees, and I was one of only a few swimmers to join the coach in the water, meaning I had my own lane. It was GREAT. He prepared a workout tailored to the heat, with lots of sprints followed by a decent amount of rest (why didn’t I think of that?).

Here’s the workout, if you’re interested in replicating it. It would work for any ability, if you adjust (or forget about) the intervals, make the whole thing freestyle and/or skip some of the sets as you see fit.

Warmup set: 10X100 w/ 5 seconds rest

20X50, first 25 stroke, second 25 free, on 1 minute

21X25, in sets of three, with first 25 easy, second medium, third hard, on 40 second (kick it up to 30 seconds if you’re not battling heat exhaustion). Stroke or free; just keep it the same stroke for each set of three.

I added: 5X100, first lap non-free

4X25 sprint, 4X25 no breath

In other news: I hit the treadmill for 30 easy minutes yesterday (only chance to run was midday, which is seriously dangerous here), and it felt OK while I was running! I kept it to about 8:40-minute miles except for the last two minutes, when I just had to kick it up. Hip hurt a little after, but it felt amazing to run again. In a desperate attempt to make it feel better, I have been taking glucosamine again, and also my mom’s fish-oil pills, which allegedly help knock down inflammation.

The weird thing: The pills might actually be helping! Then again, I could just be desperate. Has anyone else tried these with good results, or heard any evidence to suggest I’m not just crazy?

I’ll continue to blog/Tweet/etc. when I can grab a few minutes of Internet access, but will be back to normal next week.

*Editor’s note: This report was filed from Florida, where I’m spending a week visiting my parents. I’ll have spotty Internet access, so don’t be alarmed if my blog posts/Twitter use/communication in general are a bit sporadic.*

I don’t want to brag or anything, but I sorta kicked the Chesapeake Bay’s butt yesterday.

I set out to break 30 minutes (I finished in 31 and change last year), and to place in my age group (I placed third last year) in the 1-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Swim Sunday. I finished in 29:54, placing second among 24-29 year olds.

More importantly, I had set out to swim harder than I did last year, when I finished smiling, happy and feeling like I had energy and muscle power to spare. This year, the guy in the medical tent asked if I was OK as I stumbled across the finish line. Mission accomplished.

The start of an open-water swim of this size will always be a bit jarring, I think. The roughly 600 swimmers competing in the 1-miler are broken into four waves, differentiated by cap color. Swimmers start in the water, and spend the first a third of a mile accidentally kicking, scratching, groping and smacking each other as they angle for position – or try to get out of the way. Last year, I accidentally grabbed someone’s butt (ha!). This year, someone accidentally kicked me directly in the right goggle (ouch!).

Then, the writhing mass of bodies thins. The cap colors start to change as you creep into the wave in front of you.

For me, the best part of the triangle-shaped swim course is after the first turn, when a glimpse of the buoy ahead is accompanied by the sight of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The sight of the bridge looming over the silver-blue glitter of the Bay is as powerful a symbol of my love for this region as the monuments, memorials and museums in Washington, and has come to represent the most comfortable and euphoric part of the swim for me.

Except this year, I made a point to not get too comfortable. I swam the crap out of it, actually grunting into the water from the exertion. I felt like the waves this year were a little bigger than the ones last year, though that could just be selective memory. At one point, I was startled to see a swimmer a few feet below me when I took a breath at the crest of a swell.

Only one swimmer passed me from the wave after mine, and I’m pretty sure he won the race in a time of 23 minutes and change. I drafted him for a good minute, effectively using up any ounce of juice my triceps had left. By the time I finally lost sight of him, the shore was in sight, and it was just a matter of hanging on for the finishing kick.

After the awards ceremony, we sat on the deck of Hemingway’s and watched the swimmers competing in the 4.4-mile swim inch across the Bay – a reminder of my goal for next year.

But that’s next year. For the moment, I was content to dig into my crab soup and chill out.