Well, That Was Fun

No, seriously, it was.

I skated with a couple people from my new inline team today (well, one from the new team, one from my old team who is now, like me, on the new team).  We skated 11 miles, on a trail I've skated on in the past but haven't been on in several years.  And it was fun.

True, I was the slowest of the three of us; they had billed it as a "no drop" skate--that is, no matter how slow you go they won't leave you behind and skate off into the sunset--and I tested them on that a couple times.  I struggled to keep up in general, and a couple times was much more cautious on downhills than they were, thus causing them to have to hang out a bit waiting for me after they finished their descent.  They set a pretty brisk pace, and it was definitely not my usual weekend "recovery skate" (I don't think one customarily hits a max heart rate of 197 on a "recovery skate"), but that's OK since I'm currently in a state of "I don't have any idea of what my area of focus for my skating will be this year, so I'm just out to have as much fun as I can."  That, and I didn't actually do any workouts this week that I would have needed to recover from, so a recovery workout would have been kind of superfluous anyway.

So I skated, and it was fun.  So far, so good.  I'm still not sure what I plan to do with this week's upcoming dryland workouts, though...

The Dryland...

...has not been happening this week.

Thanks to the foot I bruised by dropping my slideboard on it, and the horrible cold I came down with just when my foot started feeling better, I've done no dryland this week.  Zip.  None.  Nada.  In fact, I've done no workouts at all this week, except the stretching and back-strengthening stuff prescribed by my chiropractor.

And the scary part is, I'm perfectly happy with that.

Normally, if I had missed a week of workouts, even this early in the season, I'd be frantically trying to figure out how that might affect my racing next winter, and doing everything I could to get back on track.  In fact, I doubt whether I'd have taken these days off--I probably would have tried dryland in my bare feet (since the pressure of my shoe on my instep is what really hurt), and as for the cold...well, it's a nasty one and I feel crummy, but this wouldn't have stopped me before.

This time, though?  This time, I've been perfectly happy sitting my lazy butt on the couch every night watching baseball (go Twins!), and managed to easily banish the few tiny twinges of guilt that I felt for skipping workouts.

So clearly, my mind is not where it usually is with skating.  I'm not sure if it's the "need something new" that I mentioned in my previous post, or a natural waning of my obsession, or a simple "I'm getting older and I've been working at skating very hard for the last 10 years...maybe my 48-year-old-body needs a little break."  Whatever it is, though, I find myself in the position of the kid who wants to get good grades but can't make herself study, or the dieter who truly wants to lose weight by can't put down the cookie--I know that, come next November, I'll be very upset if I turn in some horrifically slow times in my first races, but I just can't get motivated to do what needs to be done to prevent that.  And I'm not really sure what to do about it.

For now, I'm going to play it by ear.  There's a group trail skate set up for tomorrow (barring the predicted rain) with my new inline team, Max Muscle, so I'll try to get to that.  The oval is likely to open next week for inlining, so I'll get out there and see how I feel.  Maybe the skating will rejuvenate my attitude in a way that the dryland couldn't...or maybe I'll end up taking it easy and focusing on fun and technique all year and giving my body a break from the hard work...or maybe...?  I truly don't know where this year is going, skating-wise, and coping with uncertainty is not one of my strong suits...but that seems to be where I am right now, so I'll try to roll with it.

The Real Whine

The laundry is folded, and I'm back.  So, in addition to being out of shape and somewhat bruised (at least on the top of my right foot), what's my problem? 


I think my skating is having a mid-life crisis.


Don't get me wrong--I still love skating.  It's my sport, my thing.  It fits my anal-retentive-obsessive-compulsive-control-freak (yes, someone actually called me that) little personality; it keeps me in shape and (usually) happy; and it's one of the few sports that I'm actually somewhat good at.


All of that said, though, I think that I need an injection of something new into my skating.  I guess, when I look back, this is the longest I've gone, in my skating career, without something major changing.  I first skated from '93 to '96, and it was all new and exciting. Then I quit for a few years because I had just gotten married and the Hubster and I were playing broomball several times a week year-round and dirt bike racing almost every weekend in the summer, and I just didn't have time or energy for skating.  I started skating again in 2001, after a back injury in 2000 forced me to quit broomball and dirt bike racing.   After a couple years I was starting to get frustrated with my lack of progress and inability to find a coach and then, in 2004, I discovered Barry Publow, an inline and ice coach who offered online coaching.  Getting coaching from him rejuvenated my skating and allowed me to improve my ice and inline times in almost every distance--skating was new and exciting again.  Still, there was a problem--Barry was a great coach, but he was in Ottawa and I was in Minnesota, which meant that there was really no opportunity for him to coach me on technique.  And I really needed coaching on technique.  After a couple years, I started feeling a bit frustrated again.


Then, in December of 2006, I found Coach TieGuy.  Again, my skating was rejuvenated--I finally had someone who could watch me when I skated and tell me exactly what (100 or so things) I was doing wrong.  I think 2007-2008 was my best season ever--I achieved the goals I had set, I was excited about becoming faster, and I wasn't yet frustrated by my inability to change certain key parts of my technique.  


And now? Well, my thyroid seems to be behaving itself now, but my heart is being unpredictable (at least, I'm assuming a heart arrhythmia is my issue--so far I've been unable to prove or disprove this hypothesis).  I had a huge technical breakthrough last season, and consequently I had lots of personal bests last winter--but didn't achieve any of my big goals.  Coach TieGuy, after being out of state for a year and a half, is back in town but is insanely busy so I try to limit my whining for help to the occasional email about workout questions.  In short, there are some ups and downs, but it seems like my skating is just...kind of "there."


So now, despite last winter's mostly successful season, I find myself feeling like something is lacking in my skating.  Basically, I guess, new is fun and exciting, and there's nothing new right now.  As great as it is when you're in your "best season ever," as I was back in 2007, it really sucks to be in the stage when you realize that you've passed that, and are now in a ho-hum phase with nothing new in sight.  I've been reading other bloggers with envy; inliner Christine, of "My Inline Skating Journey," commented in this post "This is by far and away one of the most exciting periods in my life! I know I'm a late bloomer - here I am at 41 - in the best shape of my life and gearing up for an intense year of competition. These are really awesome times indeed.."   And triathlete Mary Eggers, in this post, talks about reawakening her desire for speed and shorter races, and ponders the exciting implications of changing her training focus.  I remember being there, I envy them for being there, I want to be there again.


Maybe I need to skate more with other people; my friend Mel is back in town, some of the  Masters long track boys that I skated with last winter have expressed interest in inline oval workouts this summer, and I'm on a new inline team--surely some of the almost 50 skaters on the team would like to do an oval workout or two now and then.  Or maybe I need to try some inline races again...I did one road race with Energizer Bunny last year, with less than spectacular results but it was kind of fun.  Sort of.  Not as fun as an exciting season of long track ice, though...


I guess I find myself in the position of someone who, although they know they've found the love of their life and they don't want anyone else, still laments the passing of the early, exciting phase of the romance.  Anyone know any good ways to rekindle the fire??

Let the Whining Begin...

Bear with me; I've been feeling a bit whiny lately.

First, it seems that I am, indeed, in worse shape than I usually am at this time of year.  After last week's inaugural and pathetic first-dryland-of-the-season, I had three more dryland workouts--6 minutes, 10 minutes, and 14 minutes.  They went OK, but I realized that, at that point, the sum total of my dryland this season--36 minutes--is exactly the number of minutes that next Monday's dryland workout is supposed to total, as well well as being just 5 minutes more than my first dryland workout of last April.  Only this time, it took me 5 workouts to total those 36 minutes.

I don't see 36 minutes happening in one workout on Monday.

Then, I went for a quick skate at my favorite local trail today.  I'm hoping to skate with my sister Energizer Bunny tomorrow, but the weather is supposed to be iffy so I figured I'd hedge my bets and do a short skate today.  6.2 miles, 27 minutes--and a heart rate way higher than I usually record for this trail at this speed.  Both average HR and max HR were about 20 beats per minute more that what I usually hit (and how many 48-year-old women do you know who can hit a HR of 193 on an "easy" trail skate?  And that wasn't even on one of the many hills--it was on a nice flat section where I got down into "speedskating" position and tried to skate "right," although not necessarily "hard.")  Clearly, I'm out of shape.

Then, to top it off, I dropped a slideboard on my foot.

A two-foot-by-eight-foot, plywood slideboard.

On the edge.

On my bare foot.

I'm blaming it on the Hubster, although he wasn't even here when it happened.  Last winter--when I was skating on ice as well as shirking my yoga-and-stretching, and thus had no need for my basement slideboard-and-stretching space--the Hubster moved his broomball-broom business into our basement.  I have no problem with that--he needs a place to assemble the brooms, the basement isn't used much, and I think it's really cool that he and his business partner have started this successful broomball broom business from scratch. But, as this spring has progressed, I've been finding myself needing an exercise space--my sadistic thorough chiropractor has me doing stretching/strengthening exercises twice a day, and I see the need for some slideboard in my near future.

Here's the old workout room...clearly, no exercise will be taking place in here anytime soon..

That's "Evil Slideboard of Doom" leaning up against the bookcase in the foreground on the right.  Looks heavy, doesn't it?

So today, I decided to move my exercise operation upstairs, to the "family room" that's really only used when one of us wants to talk on the phone and the other one has the TV on too loud in the living room.  I needed to rearrange some furniture to make room for yoga mat and exercise ball and slideboard.  I managed to move the ginormous book shelf and the humongous couch without help, then went downstairs for the slideboard.

Here's the new space, with said ginormouse book shelf and humongous couch (on the left) already safely moved, and that nice bare spot on the right wall just waiting for a slideboard...

If memory serves me correctly, I moved this slideboard--which I got a while ago from another skater, to replace my vast 4-foot-by8-foot slideboard--into the house myself.  I figured I could get it up the stairs with a little effort.

I carefully slid the board out from behind a stack of brooms-in-progress, then lifted it up.  I knew immediately that I'd need to set it down and re-do my grip, so I did...but I accidentally set one edge of it on a box of broomball something-or-others.  My brain just had time to caution "that slideboard is gonna fall off that box and right onto your foot" before the slideboard did, indeed, fall off the box and onto my foot.

I don't think I broke anything, but it's sore, and I'm thinking that skating tomorrow and dryland on Monday are going to be interesting.

So that's the first part of my whine--the superficial part.  There's more that's been nagging at me in my skating life, though; something more global and all-encompassing, which I'll have to get back to in a bit...I need to hobble downstairs and get some laundry out of the dryer now...

It's Official: I'm Pathetic

Or old.  Or out of shape.  Or possibly all three.

Dryland for the 2012-13 season was scheduled to start today, Sunday.  Well, what I actually mean is "I decided I should start dryland for the 2012-13 season today."  Since I'm writing my own workouts this year (subject to Coach TieGuy's approval), I figured I'd plan a start date that fit into my schedule--so the day after returning from my parents' place in Arkansas seemed like a good first day.  And, since last year's dryland got off to an extremely painful start--even though I divided Coach TieGuy's workout in half and did it over the course of two days, I was still so sore after the first half that I had to wait three days to do the second half--I decided to start really slowly this year.  I planned the first workout to be 12 minutes of down time--"down time" being the time you are actually in a low, quad-and-glute-agony-inducing skating position.  A long dryland workout might take close to 2 hours, but about 50 minutes of "down time" is as much as I've done; the balance of the time is "rest minutes" between exercises.  So 12 minutes of down time didn't seem too excessive for a first workout.  Still, last year's "first workout" had only been 15 minutes, and it had led to extreme glute pain the next day three days.  Since Coach TieGuy had said that muscle soreness is related not only to the volume of work done, but to whether or not the exercise is something the muscles aren't familiar with (regardless of the volume), I figured I'd get the muscles re-acquainted with the down position before today's 12 minutes.  (By the way, for any of you who haven't yet hit your 40's, this is something that you will notice when you do: "being in shape" becomes a very muscle-specific thing.  To a 40-year-old muscle, if you haven't done that exact exercise very, very recently, the muscle will throw a hissy fit when confronted with the "new" exercise and will make you pay,  for several days, for doing the "new" exercise).

Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I decided to ease into dryland with a couple of super-short workouts before today's 12 minutes, just so my muscles would remember that they have, indeed, done dryland before.  Last Tuedsay, after an easy 6-mile skate on a local trail, I did two, 1-minute sessions of dry skating (simulating skating, but in shoes rather than skates).  Excellent--no soreness the next day.  So I decided to do 6 minutes on Friday--one, 1-minute set of each of the exercises that I was planning for today.   I was at my parents, though, and time kind of got away from me; before I knew it, my dad was messing with the charcoal grill and I knew that I would need to do the dryland immediately or risk having to do it post-steak-dinner.  So I forwent (forgoed?) any type of warmup, and threw on some shorts and headed to the patio for an "easy" 6 minute workout.

Here, Keira demonstrates what might have been a better use of the patio:

The first minute of the workout, dryskating, went well.  A one-minute break, then on to the next exercise: squats.  Sunday's workout would call for one-legged squats, but I figured I'd take it easy in this "warm-up workout" and do two-legged.  Now, these are easy squats; they involve no weight except what I've grown through judicious use of PopTarts and cookies.  These squats simply involve assuming the skating position, then standing back up, and in the past, 2-3 minutes of these two-legged squats have not been a problem.  So I did my one minute confidently, then wandered around the patio for my one minute of rest.

Then I tried to do another minute of dryskating.

Usually it takes a day for muscle soreness to set in; that's why they call it "delayed onset muscle soreness."  There was no delay this time, though; as soon as I tried to assume the skating position my quads started screaming all kinds of unpleasant names at me.

I ended up doing one more (painful) minute of dry skating, then one minute of a fairly easy exercise (at least the way I do it!) called Cross-Backs.  And then I quit.  After a whopping four minutes of dryland.

And the next day, I was sore.  Very sore.

Four minutes.  Four.  Stinking.  Minutes.  That's apparently all the dryland I'm currently capable of.

Now, granted, I didn't warm up before the dryland.  I didn't cool down afterwards.  I had an 11-hour car ride the next day, followed by 3 hours sitting at the Wild game (thanks to some last-minute tickets from friends).  But still.

Four minutes.

I'm pathetic.

And sore.  Very sore.

What's New

Since it's still "recovery month"--at least for another 5 days--not a whole lot is new in The Long Track Life.  I did finally get to have a nice long phone conversation with my Mayo cardiologist (the guy must have no life beyond work...I left a message for him at 8 am yesterday, when his secretary said he was already seeing patients.  He called me back at 8:30 pm.)  Anyway, he was very reassuring about the PVC's he saw in the stress EKG and the Holter monitor; said they're nothing to be concerned about unless they make me lightheaded (which they never have).  Nice to hear...but I pretty much already knew that (although it was nice to hear that the sudden change to "exercise induced" wasn't a big deal).  I had to remind him that the PVC's that I felt in the stress test and when I was wearing the Holter were not the reason I'd gone to the cardiologist...it was the whatever-I-felt during races and workouts, that was different from the PVC's I feel, that had sent me to the doctor.  I've referred to the sensation (in this blog and in real life) as "PVC's", but only because I don't know what else to call it and I wondered if it's maybe a different pattern of PVC's--more of them in a row, or closer together, or whatever--but it feels totally different from what regular PVC's feel like.  And I didn't experience it when doing the stress EKG or when wearing the Holter.  So, Doc said he needs to see an EKG of it to comment on whether it's anything to be concerned about.  Which I also knew, and which I was hoping the stress EKG or Holter would catch, but oh well.  I'm hoping that, when I start skating again on the oval in May, the symptom just never reappears (why yes, yes, I do have my fingers in my ears and I'm humming and chanting "la la la I can't hear you."  Why do you ask?).  If I do get the symptom again, though, Doc wants me to get another event monitor and keep wearing it for workouts until I'm sure I've captured the symptom, and then we'll go from there.  So no answers, but I do have a direction to go and I'm currently firmly in a state of denial and am just assuming that it will never happen again.

In other news, I have my April workouts planned, and they've gotten the Coach TieGuy seal of approval so apparently I didn't mess up too badly when trying to plan my own workouts for the first time in about 10 years (of course, I pretty much took TieGuy's workout plan from last year and just tweaked it a little, so I'm not sure I can really claim to be writing my own program).  I start dryland on Sunday; hopefully I've planned a low-volume enough first day that I'll still be able to walk on Monday.  Also, I've finally found a way to lose the weight that I gained last spring when my thyroid levels went low again--it's basically a diet-every-other-day plan.  On Down Days (lower calorie, that is), I eat pretty much what my sports nutritionist recommended last summer, only less of it.  On Up Days...well, let's just say that an occasional PopTart or Little Debbie has made an appearance on Up Days.  The diet is very successful, though--I've lost almost 7 pounds in 3 weeks--and it accommodates my inability to control my eating for more than 24 hours at a time.  So that's good.  Maybe next winter I can even fit into my SwiftSuit again!

The inline team that I've been (loosely) skating with for the past 10 years or so, Media Machine, has decided to  merge with a newer team, Max Muscle.  I'm excited about this because no other Media Machiners have skated much at the oval in the past few years, but the Max Muscle team has several that skate the inline race series on the oval.  I'm hoping that, between my long track masters friends and my new Max Muscle teammates, I'll have people to skate with on the oval sometimes.  Although I like to skate most of my laps with no draft, it's fun to have other people around--and it's easier to intimidate the Skate Park Punks Patrons into following the rules and keeping their boards and bikes off the track if there a lot of us speedskaters out there.

Next up for recovery month is a quick trip to Arkansas, where my parents have wintered for the past 10 years.  They're selling their place down there, though, and moving to their cabin in Grand Marais year round next month, so we're going to help them move some stuff back.  Keira will go with us, of course, and she's been busy resting up for the onslaught of 2 MinPins and a Jack Russell mix. I'll leave you with a photo of her charging her batteries for the upcoming stressful trip: