Why My Son is Better Than an iPod

     Imagine if I had uttered that title while working at Apple with Steve Jobs nearby.  I would have disappeared faster than a box of donuts near hungry teens!  Of course I love my son more than any type of mp3 player but I am referring to RUNNING with my 12 year old is preferable to listening to my favorite podcasts.

    When I ran in high school and after college I logged a lot of solitary miles-- sans music or podcasts.  But I also had a lot of people to run with on occasion.

    After starting to run again about 15 months ago, all of it alone, I am finally running now with my son and it's so great!  Running with others is soooooooooo much better than running with anything Apple could dream up.  Not only am I passing on my love of exercise to my son but I am relaxed and we talk about all types of horrific subjects in my son's eyes (and ears) including girls, love, peer pressure and even his favorite subject cars and his driver's license!

    Though I still start S L O W, after 10-12 minutes I am able to run faster with him than I know I would be able to do on my own.  Faster running and more relaxed, sounds like I have discovered the fountain of youth.  And maybe I have.  The youth of my son. Good times!

Holy Crap Batman, that was a HARD SPRINT!

Now if you are like me you think "third sprint tri, can't be that hard".  Yeah.  I.  Was.  Wrong.  Almost 2 weeks ago I went to Castaic Lake, just past California's Magic Mountain, and competed in the 1/2 mile lake swim, 14 mile bike, and 5k run. Looks good on paper but the problem wasn't the uphill 75 yard run to the transition area after the swim (dodging sandy bird-poop on the way), and the problem wasn't the hilly and convoluted 5k course at the end, so that leaves only one other suspect.

The 14 mile bike was an out and back course.  Meaning that the first seven miles meant climbing for probably 5.75 to 6 miles before descending on the same route.  I knew it was difficult when I passed 3 people walking their bikes BEFORE the 2 mile mark.  Being a strong cyclist I was out of my saddle riding pretty strong for parts of those 7 miles.  There were no cars to worry about as the road was roughly parallel to the 5 freeway that runs north all the way to Canada.  At times it was steep enough that I slowed to 6.5 mph pace, but even at that rate I could easily chat with fellow sufferers and an added blessing was cloud-cover.  Coming down should have been a blessing and it was but it was also a bitch (pardon my French).  The race director announced "no aero bars" on the way down.  Yes, I agree with that because the pavement which he had also deemed as "pretty good" was in fact pretty horrible.  Going UP you can avoid the broken pavement easily because of the slower speed, but going down- mainly over 30 mph (maxed out at 39.4), broken pavement can equal broken bones or worse.

I told the race director in an email that IF I do the race next year I will ride a mountain bike with 1.5" tires as to ride what I did (700 x 23 mm tires) is akin to suicidal behavior.  I heard of no casualties among the 104 participants but run that same course 5 years and I would guess one racer will suffer road rash and at least one more will be in the ER and/or hospitalized.

On a brighter note, my wife and sons ran in the 5k that began one hour earlier than the triathlon.  Of the 18 participants, my wife won it outright, my 12 year old son took second a few minutes later, and my almost 10 year old got 5th place.  Overall, a good experience for all and for me a 6 hour post race headache and a new record for my slowest time for a sprint tri-- 2:09:59. there's me in 58th place and there are my wife and son's results here-- so proud!

Darn, Wish I Had Kept Track!

My next triathlon is 8 days away.  "Honey, when did we do that last triathlon, March, April?"
"No, December, it was so cold..."
Darn.  I was looking through the exercise log I have kept daily since the first day of January this year.  I was hoping to see what I trained like and what I was doing in the previous 2-3 weeks before the last triathlon.

But I got nothing since I have no records earlier than January.

I continue to run on tired legs.  I played 2 hours of doubles tennis this morning and then tonight I was running once again on "tired legs".  With not much activity this week ahead I hope that they will recover some "snap" that they currently lack.

Time will tell.  Like eight days of time.

The Other Tin Man and California Chrome

Yes, sometimes Sprint Triathlons are called Tin Man Triathlons but this title goes back, way back to the original Tin Man.

My wife is a walker and a runner and even though I have competed in many more races than she, can tell a fartlek from a plain old fart, and have run in excess of 10,000 life time miles while she is still working on her 2nd grand, she nevertheless has some good ideas when it comes to the sport.  She walks a lot before, after and sometimes in the middle of a running workout.

I am not a walker.  I will take one of my sons bikes or one of their scooters 200 yards  to the corner to mail a letter rather than walk.

Today, after running only 5 times in the last 6+ weeks, I ran an entire 32 minutes without stopping.  This was huge for me, since my typical run has been only 16-24 minutes.  And why is this noteworthy?  I began with a 4 to 5 minute walk.  I generally start with a 20-30 foot walk so this was a virtual walking marathon for me before I ran.

When I broke from the walk into a slow jog, my immediate thought was the transition felt normal and relaxed.  My next thought was my left upper hamstring isn't hurting or pulling (it has off and more ON since December).  In fact in the next 32 minutes it didn't hurt at all.

Remember Dorothy's Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz?  At first it's just a soft, almost silent groan that emanates from his mouth.  The oil can then is applied to his jaws, crooks of his elbows, knees, etc and then he is able to move freely.  Walking for several minutes allowed me to move naturally and freely too.  

One of running and walking's unpopular cousins is called stretching and I still am an undisciplined stretcher.  I would always quip when others encouraged me to stretch before a run, "have you ever seen a race horse stretch?" What race horses do before their race is walk-walk-walk as their warm-up before the slow trot to ready their muscles for the strain ahead.

So leave it to Secretariat, California Chrome and the Tin Man to remind us of that old cliche, "you gotta walk before you can run."  It works for me and my guess is that it will probably work for you too.