emptyage

Failing In Front Of A Crowd

I posted all of these resolutions in an attempt to publicly shame myself into keeping them. It's a great precommitment method, but it's also a good way to fall on your ass in front of a lot of people. Three blog posts a month? Yeah, I'm a little behind there. But this is the one that leaves me feeling like I came away with ripped shorts and my ass hanging out:

2. Complete a Half-Ironman in less than 5.5 hours
This year, I finished my first half in 5:34. I think I can get it under five and a half hours simply by doing better in the transitions. I took a lot of time transitioning at Vineman, because it was my first time out and I more or less used them as breaks. But one area where I can certainly shave some time this year at Wildflower is my swim. I'm a crummy swimmer. Which leads me to:

That was a totally obtainable goal for me. I began the year training harder than ever. I even took a swimming lesson, which made a tremendous difference in my form. I was running somewhat faster, swimming much faster, and holding steady on the bike. I was ready. But then, everything collapsed. Rather, I collapsed, and pretty much quit training in April.

I can blame a lot of things, but the fault is mine. I just didn't feel like putting the hours in and so I didn't. It was the pool, in particular, that filled me with a sense of dread. Despite my gains (or maybe because of my gains, which entailed a lot of time in the water) I was sick of swimming this year. Correction: I was sick of swimming in a pool. And swimming in the Bay, which I love, is too much of a hassle for me to pull off three days a week.

And more than any one event, I was sick of training plans and periodization schedules and watching what I eat and staying hydrated. I think some of that's because I was tri-training nine months out of the year last year, and the three intervening months off just weren't enough. But whatever the reason, I fell off. I would typically still do some long, hard activity on the weekend, just for fun, but I wasn't getting up every morning and heading to the pool, or the track, or for a spin on the trainer, or all three.

And so I dropped out of Wildflower Long Course, and had them swap me into the Olympic Distance. Even that seemed a little daunting, given how little I trained over the last month (perhaps 3 hours a week, down from a high of 12 the month before.) It was ridiculous.

But I drove down to Lake San Antonio, camped with friends, drank a lot of beer, didn't worry about a thing, and... had a blast. My time was pretty crummy--my worst ever in fact at 3:07--but I didn't really care. I was just there to have a good time, and I did, which I suppose is as it should be. But quite honestly, I often have a hard time having fun doing the thing I love to do.

Right now I'm running and biking for kicks, again, not time. I'm overhauling my mountain bike--putting on an entirely new drive train and bottom bracket--and I'm sure when I finish I'm going to want to be on trails not roads. I'm enjoying going out and running or biking without a set distance or time or pace.

This sounds counter-intuitive, but I think I failed because I tried too hard. I was so focused on getting fitter and faster that I forgot about enjoying what I was doing. So that's what I'm doing now. I still plan to run a marathon this year, and Harper and I have a mountain bike trip planned in October in Bend, Oregon with so much long distance climbing that it's probably going to make my teeth fall out. And while I may do a few sprint distance events over the next 18 months, I think 2010 is largely going to be a tri-free year for me. It's definitely going to be a training plan free year.

I mean, unless I get into Alcatraz again.

Should I Be Worried About Swine Flu

I've had a few people suggest I change the "No" on http://shouldibeworriedaboutswineflu.com to "Not Yet." This post by steelopus encapsulates precisely why I don't want to do that.

When someone tells you that you should "not yet be worried" or that you should "maybe" be worried, it's the same thing as telling you to worry. You should prepare for worry-which amounts to worrying about being worried.

Of course we should be concerned about any new strain of flu, especially one we know very little about, but the media (and, okay, I'm the media) and Twitter (and, okay, I'm the Twitter) are fueling hysteria. Unless you are a public health official, or hospital worker, you need to just go about your business the same as ever. And if you fall into one of those former categories, you should be taking precautions and preparing for emergency situations--but you still shouldn't be worried.

A personal digression: I hopped on a plane for South East Asia the day after the Bali bombings. I headed right into the maw of what the popular news media and public opinion was telling me I should avoid. During the six months we spent backpacking there, we caught Dengue Fever, which is a pretty nasty mosquito bourne illness. By the time we were getting ready to leave to fly back to the States, SARS was a full-blown media clusterfuck. Everywhere we went in Bangkok in those last few days, we saw people wearing surgical masks. The case fatality rate was a stunning 9.6 percent. We received frantic phone calls from the States urging us to get on a plane now, to fly back now. To get the fuck out. We did not. The interesting thing was that we did not panic, or come close to panicking, until we saw the Western cable news industry in full effect in the airport in Bangkok. Our flight to Tokyo was filled with hacking, coughing, disease-spewing people. We,  in fact, asked to be moved from our initial seats, located immediately behind a passenger who had a wet, productive cough and sneeze. It was wise for us to leave when we did (and of course we were planning to anyway). But there was never a cause for us to panic.

We as humans are hard-wired to worry. We evolved as thinking creatures given to assessing and reacting to not only immediate but also long-term risks. Yet I think in the West we tend to lead such comfortable lives that we allow much nonsense to trigger our natural tendencies towards risk aversion. The things we should truly fear (heart disease or obesity, for example) we tend to ignore as they are constants. But something new comes along and, blammo, there's a run on dust masks at your local Walgreens. Now, clearly a novel strain of flu is something some people should be worried about. But the odds are you aren't those people.  Those people work at public health agencies; you more likely work at a public relations agency.

When it comes time to worry--rather, if it comes time to worry--that signal will be loud and clear. Until then the thing to do is to be educated about what's happening, wash your hands and take other sanitary measures you should be taking anyway, and go about your daily business as usual.