Humbled in the Pool

No, I didn't go swimming naked. I showed up on a tough day. Which to this point has been every day for the past month.

There's a master's swimming group at the university. For $50 a semester ($20 for students, higher for faculty/staff, like me), we get an hour at the team's pool four days week, and a coach with a whistle and a clipboard and everything. Karl works in campus recreation and has a pretty good handle on what it takes to coach swimming. We've only been doing 2,500-3,000 meters because that's what most of us can handle in one hour. The hour we get starts after the UW team leaves and before an open swim, so we've got to be efficient with our time.

Those workouts have been as intense as any I've done. My high school coach stressed quality and technique over quantity; while our opponents boasted of 5,000 yards-plus five days a week, sometimes twice a day, we topped 5,000 yards once in my four years on the team, and that was largely because we swam like shit at the conference meet and coach Stanoff wanted to make a point.

No, this time around the 2,500-meter workouts feature lots of stroke work and hard intervals. We swim 300 breaststroke in 4:30, then go straight into 5x50 freestyle kick on 1:20. Then we do a 200 IM. That's just an example. For the sake of perspective, I had no problem with 4,000-5,000 yards in my hard Ironman training cycles.

Apparently, that was because I didn't challenge myself. If I extrapolated the current workouts over two hours, I would stagger home and go to bed without dinner most nights. The last of the intervals are done with Karl yelling at us from the pool deck to push ourselves, and my arms completely numb.

This is all to say nothing of me gasping for every breath of air. Behind my office once stood a pair of outbuildings. Both were razed during September, as was a classroom building across the alley. That meant about a fourth of the air I've breathed for the past month has been dust, which turned my nasal capillaries to mush. Since getting back from Wisconsin I've been congested and (stop here if you're squeamish) expelling a good deal of blood with my snot. Only after I'd been back a couple weeks did my boss mention that she and another co-worker on my side of the building had missed work with respiratory distress brought on by the construction and moving of earth behind us. Lo and behold, there's a thin layer of dust on everything in my office, including me.

With limited breathing capacities it's no wonder I've felt alternately lightheaded and short of breath during the past couple of swim workouts. I even shortened one of them because not only was there no way I'd finish the workout in the time allotted, I couldn't lift my arms for the last interval, much less for the 200-meter cooldown. And yet the guy in my lane, who appeared to be around my age, steamrolled right through it.

Not even during the first couple weeks of high school swim practice did I feel this out of shape. To think I finished an Ironman five weeks ago...

• In a semi-related item, I made the first payment on my new bike, an Argon 18 E-112. Because Adrenaline Tri-Sport sold their last frame the day before I got fitted, Roger the ace bike fitter had to order it directly from the company. As this is the time of year to buy 2009 bikes and cars at a discount, the company was more than happy to jettison one of its models with a fairly nice price break. My ceiling was firmly set at $3,000 and we'll come in a shade under that (which means I won't eat out the rest of the year). The bike should come in this week, though I won't pick it up until the 30th — aka my next payday. The over-under on the number of times I'll get outside with it before winter sets in permanently is six.

• Tiffany wondered if the dead person floating in Lake Monona ever surfaced. Well, at 2 p.m. on Ironman Wisconsin Day, about four-and-a-half hours after the last swimmer cleared the lake, the body surfaced. That's all I heard, and that's all I cared to know.

Change in Plans

The good thing about taking a week of vacation after an undertaking like an Ironman is you have all the time in the world to truly recover. In my case I had two days to myself before I had my friend Mindi come to visit before a weekend of wedding revelry with some mutual acquaintances in Denver. That said, I didn't run, ride or swim during that week, the better to give my body a complete break before potentially getting back at it.

The bad thing about taking a week of vacation after an undertaking like an Ironman is you have all the time in the world to ruminate on whatever the race was. Aside from my first one, which I just wanted to finish, I don't think I've truly been happy with how I did. My PR for the distance (11:42:40) stands from that first one. The next year I did Ironman Canada and was 4 minutes, 33 seconds slower on a much tougher course; very frustrating to be that close. The third one, and slowest, was Ironman Wisconsin, where I went 13:59 on a brutal day when a fourth of the field dropped out. Still, I wish I would have handed the heat better. The fourth one was Ironman Coeur d'Alene, which I finished in 12:49, three weeks after moving cross-country for a new job.

Three-and-a-half weeks ago I did Wisconsin again, this time on a slightly more favorable day. And I still came up 21 minutes short of a personal best despite having a better training cycle and a stronger nutrition plan for the race. This is what weighed heavily on my mind during my time off, especially on the long trip home and during those two days I had completely to myself.

Then thoughts turned to the future. No question, I want to toe the line at the world championship in Kona someday. I don't have a timetable, though if the doomsday scenarios are to be believed I'd like to get it done before the world ends in 2012 (hee hee). Regardless of how long it takes, I have at least two hours I need to drop from my overall time to get it done. That's about 10 minutes from my swim, 20 minutes from my bike, and 90 minutes from my run (no lie there). I can gain some time back in transition but most of it I have to get on the roads.

So then I started thinking about why I do this shit. I want to see where my body's breaking point is. I want to see what I'm capable of. And for one day, I want to toe the line with the world's best. My performances to now have been mediocre by elite standards, decent by age-group standards. I need to shed that mediocrity if I'm to make my way to Kona, and I'm convinced I'm the only thing standing in the way. The space between my ears might as well be a thousand miles, and short of seeing a sport shrink I don't know what to do.

At mile 16 in Madison, when I could feel my legs tightening, I had the same feeling as when James Loney of the Dodgers homered to tie the Cubs 1-1 in the sixth inning of Game 1 of the division series in 2008 — "Not again." Right then and there I was done. There was no way I could even jog the remaining 10 miles with a minimum of walking. It hurt less to walk, but the best athletes run anyway, knowing it takes less time and will hurt less later to run. That logic never permeated the shroud of mediocrity and comfort that hung from my psyche like a parachute. The best swear by affirmations and shit like that but I don't buy it. There's got to be something else I need to master to rid myself of the irony of having been a psychology major.

So that's what I'm going to work on next year. Originally I thought I'd do the full Vineman in Sonoma County, Cali, in early August, then do the full Silverman in Vegas 12 weeks later. But what's to be gained from plodding through two full distances within 12 weeks when I can't even truly race half that distance? Instead, I'll master whatever mental tricks I need to master at half-ironman distance. There are four points in the year where I'll race but I'm eyeing several different races. The only givens are the Pacific Crest Triathlon and the Harvest Moon Triathlon. Beyond that I'm looking at early August (four or five weeks before Harvest Moon), and late October or early November (a season-ending "A" race).

Again, I just want to get to a point where I can truly race that distance, like stay on the big gear for the majority of the ride and run an entire half-marathon off the bike. Also in 2010, I'll sign up for Ironman Coeur d'Alene 2011 — and I think you know what I'm hoping to accomplish at that race. But that's almost two years from now. Part of the change in mental focus is to worry about the now and forget about the later. As I'm fond of saying, be in the moment. Too bad I suck at taking my own advice.... another thing that must change.