I Want to See Where the River Goes

Posted by ookgirl on May 31, 2015
Posted in: Ironman, Ironman Lake Placid. Tagged: , , . 3 Comments

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Sometimes you find what you’ll need, even though you don’t know how bad you’ll need it.

Two weeks ago, my husband, Craig, and I went up to Lake Placid, NY, to preview the Ironman Lake Placid (IMLP) course. We’d been there before, and Craig’s done the race before. But I never imagined I’d actually do this race when we were there before. So, this was my time to see it with different eyes. We drove up on a Saturday and were there through Monday.

Having seen the area before, and now having seen it on the Computrainer several times, I started to get butterflies in my stomach when we entered the town of Keene. This race is so monumental to me. I’ve sort of built it up into something bigger than it actually is. Luckily, this trip allowed me to live and breathe it a bit, so I can now imagine myself doing it.

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We got checked into our hotel and made a stop at the local bike shop, Placid Planet Bicycles. We also went to the local Price Chopper grocery store and got food supplies for the next couple of days. The weather was perfect. We would ride one loop of the (two-loop) bike course on Sunday, and run one loop of the (two-loop) run course on Monday, then drive home. We didn’t bring our wetsuits for the swim, because we thought it would be too cold. But, remarkably, there were people out there swimming, even in mid-May.

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Our morning ride started out a little bumpy. I had changed my wheels out before the trip – to take the better gearing off my road bike and put it on my tri bike. So, in a way, I had calmly practiced changing my tires. And I felt pretty good about that. But riding down out of town that morning, I immediately got a flat on my rear tire. (So, out of the two tires, the rear tire is the hard one to change.) Anyway, I started trying to change it, and even though I’d practiced and felt like I knew what I was doing, I got flustered and frustrated. This made Craig frustrated also. I changed the tube out fine, and inflated it with the CO2 cartridge. But then I couldn’t get the wheel back on my bike. Craig finally took over and did it for me in about 10 seconds. This was definitely the low point of the entire trip. But we rolled on.

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Getting really underway on the bike helped clear our minds, and I resolved to practice changing my tires every day until the race. (It hasn’t been quite that often. But, I have been practicing!!!) Descending into Keene was really the only part I did not like. I’m not a good descender, and I really slow down on the downhills. It’s actually a little embarrassing, but I’d rather go up-hill all day than do a long, winding descent. The other thing was that the road surface was pretty rough in some spots. So, I was already braking for the downhill, and then I wanted to slow down even more for the potholes. Maybe, just maybe, they will be fixed by the time we race in July. The Whiteface Mountain section on the way back to Lake Placid was pretty challenging, but not as bad as I thought it might be. The Computrainer version of the course is an old course, so this part was different from what we’ve been practicing on at home. But one thing that is the same is the “three bears” section. There are three famous hills coming back to town: Baby Bear, Mama Bear, and Papa Bear. Someone has even marked the road, so you know when you’re on each one. I was so glad to get to Papa Bear and find out out it wasn’t ridiculous or impossible. All in all, it was a beautiful ride, and I look forward to doing it in the race. Having said that, doing it twice after a 2.4-mile swim will be a different story. But still, it’s doable.

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After our ride, we took in the fabulous views of Mirror Lake, where the swim takes place. We ate at the Lake Placid Pub and Brewery, which looks out on the lake. It was so good! And, our waiter is a triathlete who lives in LP year-round. So, it was fun to talk to him and get the scoop on what the town is like from his perspective. He is training for Ironman Wisconsin. So, he and Craig talked about that course, since Craig has done that race also.

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The next morning, we got up and drove down to the center of town to do the run. The first part is just running out of town. But pretty soon, you are seeing the Olympic ski jumps and running by a beautiful farm, and then… you run along a lovely, peaceful river for most of the course. I couldn’t believe how nice it was. And it’s mostly flat, except when you run back into town. That’s when the run really bites you – when you finish each of the two loops and have to run up the hills into town. But other than that, you have the most pleasant run ever. I really hope I get to do a lot of it in the daylight, because it’s so nice to look at! My pictures don’t even give you a sense for what it’s like. I’m sure it will be different in the afternoon/evening than it is in the quiet morning. But still, this is the kind of run I love…

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It really made me think about why I love to run, even though (as you’ll understand in a moment), it’s probably the worse thing I could be doing right now. In the simplest terms, it comes down to this: I love the zone-out. I love exactly what other people hate about running: the boredom. I love that it’s not about what is going on around you, but what is going on in your own head. Everything around you is calm and peaceful and nothingness, giving your mind the chance to go off and figure itself out. I’ve solved nagging work problems and complicated personal problems on so many runs. And this experience — of running the Lake Placid run course — helped me come up with my “theme song” for this Ironman.

As you may know, when you compete in something like an Ironman, you can’t run with earphones and a music player of any kind. I do a lot of run-training while listening to music (especially while on the treadmill). But I try to do some training without, because I know I won’t be able to listen to music in the race. So, instead, I come up with “theme songs”. These are songs I like to listen to, that get stuck in my head. That way, I can “listen” to them anyway (in my head), while I’m doing the race. I might have one song, or I might have several. But for this race, I’ve chosen the song “Boredom and Joy” by Jets Overhead. Aside from the fact that I can think about the boredom and joy of running in general, it also has the chorus, “I want to see where the river goes.” And I just think that’s so perfect for the IMLP run course! You’re following this lovely river for a good little while. Why not think of following it until you see where it goes? By the time I do it for the second time, I’ll probably be delirious anyway; so, maybe it won’t bother me that we don’t actually ever get to see where it goes.

Unfortunately, though, the week after we returned from our Lake Placid trip, I re-injured my hamstring. I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say that I know exactly the moment when I did something to it, and it took my breath away. And, now, there is no doubt that I need to let it heal as much as I can. I did nothing but swim for the week following that fateful moment. And, in our first race of the season, Rock Hall International Tri, I switched to the Aquabike division (where you only do the swim and the bike; no run). It was the right decision. Some think I shouldn’t have done the race at all. But, so far, I think I’m okay. And, as a bonus, I placed 2nd in the Aquabike! (Woohoo!) Of course, that was a much smaller field, but I have to be happy about it, because I don’t get on the podium very often 🙂

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Now, I have two weeks until my next race (Eagleman 70.3) and eight weeks until IMLP. I plan to swim a lot. I don’t know if I will run at Eagleman, but I do plan to try and do the swim and bike. Right now, I feel like my injury is such that my hammy can handle it. But I will take it day by day and decide as I go. Ultimately, each decision will be with IMLP in mind. I want to make it to the start line. And, when the day comes, I want to run down that river road and see where it goes.

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Here’s a playlist for a good zone-out run:

Boredom and Joy – Jets Overhead
Cult Logic – Miike Snow
Swimming in the Flood – Passion Pit
Aeolus – Freelance Whales
Never Meant to Know – Thieves
The Beauty Surrounds – Houses
Young Blood – The Naked and Famous
Woodland – The Paper Kites
Heart Beats – Hey Marseilles
Bloom – The Paper Kites
Teardrop – Massive Attack
Heartbeats – Jose Gonzalez
Weathervanes (In the Way) – Jets Overhead
Never Let You Down – The Weepies
The Longer I Run – Peter Bradley Adams

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Three Bananas

Posted by ookgirl on February 11, 2015
Posted in: Cycling, diet, Living Kidney Donation, music, triathlon. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

bananas

When I think of bananas, three things come to mind:

1. The “bananaaaaaa!” cheer that you can send to an athlete during a race if you’re using our friends’ race-tracking app RaceJoy. I mean, what runner or triathlete doesn’t want to think about bananas while they’re racing? 🙂

2. The fact that as a kidney donor, I can’t eat too many bananas at a time.

3. The banana stretch that chiropractor and physical therapist John Michie prescribed for me.

Allow me to elaborate on these… The first banana: RaceJoy is a super-fun and useful app for athletes and their supporters. It tracks you while you’re racing and shows your spectators where you are on the course in real-time. It also allows them to send you cheers during the race, and helps you all meet up afterward. Our friends left their corporate jobs to start this company… just two people working day and night… and they made it happen. I’m so proud of them. They embody “start-up” in every way. Plus, they’re just good people and they deserve to be wildly successful!!!!

The second banana:  Ok, this is all about how I shouldn’t really have a second banana. A kidney donor’s ideal diet is sort of askew from the latest dietary trends. You don’t want to eat super-concentrated protein, and while you don’t need to cut out anything completely, you should also watch your sodium, potassium, and phosphorus. So, as healthy as things like protein, bananas, broccoli, oranges, milk, and beans are… you shouldn’t binge on them. Don’t get me wrong, I still have protein after a workout to help my muscles recover. I just don’t have *concentrated protein*. This also means I try to limit myself to one banana a day. (I haven’t always been good about this, but I’m trying to be better.) It can be tricky if you like to have smoothies, because bananas make smoothies so good! The reason I thought I’d write about this is because one of my fellow kidney-donor-friends recently asked me about creatinine levels and how diet can affect them. I’m not a medical professional; so I can’t really advise anyone. But I did find this helpful article for people with concerns about high creatinine levels. I’ve been fortunate – in that my creatinine level has gone down steadily since my donation. Year on year, it has dropped from 1.1 in 2012, to 1.04 in 2013, and it was 0.91 at the end of 2014. I was once a vegetarian, though. So, I think that makes it easier for me to avoid tons of protein. On the other hand, I also tend to be anemic, and that is a drag when it means they turn me away from donating blood, which happened to me recently. Time to buy some more Floradix iron supplement!

Finally, to the best banana of them all… the Banana Stretch!  I mentioned in this post that I ended up with some minor nerve damage after my kidney donation surgery. Well, the good news is that I no longer notice that pain along the side of my left thigh. But I do continue to have a tightness in my left-lower back that I only started noticing after I donated. It gets worse when I do long bike rides or bike-run bricks. If you are a cyclist/triathlete who has this issue – or maybe if you are a kidney donor and your body reacted to the surgery by tightening up on that side – perhaps this stretch will help you as well. You do the stretch on a medicine ball, and it stretches out the entire side of your body. It’s called the banana stretch because you make a banana shape with your body. I was always thinking I needed to stretch forwards, to stretch my lower back. But it turns out that I need to stretch sideways. Dr. Michie prescribed this stretch for me last year, and it is simply amazing! So worth the money I paid for that appointment! Here is an article that describes the stretch. I hope someone else finds this helpful!

Well, that does it for this banana mash-up. It’s been a while since I shared a playlist, so I’ll include one below. Enjoy!

  • Do You – Spoon
  • Long Night – Guster
  • Breaking it Down – Ben’s Bones
  • Let Go – Frou Frou
  • Bait and Switch – The Shins
  • Endlessly – Guster
  • Circles – Dan Haas
  • Little Red Light – Fountains of Wayne
  • Apology – SafetySuit
  • Make You Better – The Decemberists
  • Black Sun – Death Cab for Cutie
  • Waiting All Night – Phish
  • I Don’t Believe It’s Through – Greg Laswell
  • Fool for Love – Lord Huron

Let’s Disco!

Posted by ookgirl on January 13, 2015
Posted in: Ironman, motivation, triathlon. Tagged: , , . 15 Comments

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So, I’ve mentioned my husband, Craig, from time to time. But I’ve never written a post all about him. And, truth be told, if I could choose the one blog post that I’d want people to read, this would be it. I mean obviously I’m partial, but I think he’s a pretty cool dude, and the world should know more about him 🙂

He and I will be training together for two tough Ironman races this year, and I can hardly believe it! However, if I had to pick someone to train with, who can help me get through just about anything, it would be him. He’s the kind of person you’d want to have in your foxhole for sure.

So, how and why am I lucky to be married to this man? Well, I really can’t sum it all up in one blog post. But I figured I’d focus on one of the most remarkable traits about my husband… and that is that he can talk to just about anyone. It doesn’t matter who he might encounter on a given day, he will talk to to them… make a joke, take an interest in them, take some time. He’s never too busy or too self-centered to just talk to people. (I am quite the opposite, by the way…) Seriously, in all the places we’ve lived and the things we’ve done together, I only know our various neighbors and many other people we’ve encountered because of Craig. We’ve had fabulous neighbors and remain friends with many of them — only because of him. How lonely and limited my life would be if not for him! And then, there are the people who work at the local market, or the people at our gym, or random people who work in his building that he just happened to strike up a conversation with. It’s really a gift, I believe. And it’s not just a gift that he has. It’s a gift that he gives. He jokes with people; he puts them at ease; he brightens their day.

And on top of just talking to people, he remembers stuff about them. We won’t have seen some of these people for months or even years, and yet Craig will remember something about their life or whatever they had going on and he’ll ask about it. It’s so easy to be too busy for other people, but he hardly ever is. And I benefit from all this in many ways. Not only is my life richer through knowing people better. But it also reminds me to try to be more like that… To try to encounter other people and celebrate life with them –even on the smallest level.

If you think about it, life is like a dance. We encounter people everyday, and we sort of do a dance with them. We say hello, ask questions, exchange ideas, thoughts, complaints, etc. There is a give and take there, but we don’t always make it a fun exchange, the type you look forward to. I feel like the dance I do with people on a daily basis is sort of like a waltz… very formal, not too exciting, nothing memorable. But I feel like Craig’s dance is more like a disco. It’s fun; it’s humorous; it doesn’t take itself too seriously. You look forward to it, if for no other reason than because it’ll probably make you laugh. I’d like to be more like that. Let’s disco, baby!

I Have a Hamstring (and a Kidney)

Posted by ookgirl on December 10, 2014
Posted in: Ironman, Living Kidney Donation. Tagged: , , , , , , . 4 Comments

In sports like American football, when a player is injured, the commentators often say something like, “[Player-X] has a hamstring.” … or “[So-in-so] is out with a hamstring.”  I always find it funny when they leave off the word “injury” — as if human beings don’t normally have a hamstring (two, even!)  You can do this with any part of the body… “PlayerX has an ankle” …. “PlayerY is out with a wrist.”  It makes me laugh… Until now, that is. Because now … I myself have a hamstring!

My friend Shelly likes to call it a hammy, which I think is cute. For some reason, it makes me think of a person running around with a big ham tied to the back of their leg, like in a cartoon. But this, my friends, is no laughing matter. Sure, I’ve had a strained/pulled hamstring before, and I would generally feel it whenever I started running. It would ache at first and then warm up and be okay. I could always think back to the moment I over-stretched it … maybe in a yoga class or while stretching after a run. But this time, it’s much worse. Sharp, searing pain, and not always when I’m running. I might just be walking into a store and YOWZA! An extreme burst of pain in my right hamstring — like it’s about to rip off. I hate it, and I’m embarrassed by it.

It also hurts when I’m driving. What’s with that? Somehow, they designed driver’s seats to put you exactly in the worst position for a hamstring injury. It takes me about an hour to commute to work (sometimes longer), and occasionally, I think I might have to pull over and take a rest because my hammy hurts so bad. It’s crazy.

I found this really great article that explains what’s going on with hamstrings and why they get injured. The problem is that they are actually over-stretched all the time, and the quads are stronger, so the quads just pull the hamstrings even more. Then, we feel like we need to stretch the hammies, but they’re over-stretched already. So, it’s like a vicious cycle. (The article explains it much better, but that’s the gist). My latest frustration is that I’ve been doing more strength training lately — which is what you are supposed to do to strengthen the hamstring so it doesn’t get injured. And yet! … The strength training seems to be aggravating my injury! That’s probably because I should have been doing more of it *before* I injured it. I know I need to ice it and rest it. I’ve been mostly swimming lately, so that’s good. (Swimming is awesome, because you can almost always swim – even when you’re injured.) But my work schedule this week has not made it easy to ice it. I will have to do better. And I may even have to break down and get an MRI.

I wouldn’t freak out over an injury like this normally. But this next year, I have two (yes, TWO) Ironman races on my schedule (Lake Placid & Maryland). So, I can’t afford to go into the training season with a big fat hammy. I just can’t. As much as I’ve been in denial over this injury, I’m going to have to face the facts and do the right thing with this one.

In other news, yesterday was my 3rd kidneyversary!  That’s right, three years since I donated my left kidney to my stepdad. I spoke to my stepdad yesterday, and he is still doing great! And, hammy aside, I’m still doing great also. I think about my little right kidney down there working away to keep me healthy, and I just have to thank that kidney for stepping up and taking on the full load! At the time of my donation, I had only done my first half-Ironman, and I wasn’t sure if I could ever do that again. I found it to be so hard. At that time, I couldn’t imagine doing an Ironman, much less scheduling two in one year! Ironman Arizona was so amazing, and I know that we trained diligently for it. I’m going to have to be even more disciplined this time. I have to think that I’ve put that lone kidney through a lot! Thank you so much, little kidney!!! This has been quite a journey!

It seems funny to worry that having a hamstring could derail my triathlon plans, whereas having a kidney (only one, that is) doesn’t seem to be a problem at all.

Secret Thoughts of a Triathlete

Posted by ookgirl on October 29, 2014
Posted in: Ironman, music, triathlon. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

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(This one’s for you, Mom 🙂 )

Today, I took the day off from work to clean my house… Yes, it’s THAT bad… Exactly what are you trying to say?

It’s true that my car looks like I live in it, and my house looks like no one could live in it. What the heck?! The sad thing is we aren’t even training for our next Ironman yet. This is definitely NOT ACCEPTABLE. I must rectify this situation!!! My mom would not approve of the clothes on the floor. No way. But, hey, at least the bed is made.

Yes, it’s the craziest thing, but even with the look of a recent tornado throughout the rest of my house, I can’t stand to *not* have the bed made. My husband, Craig, has accepted this obsession of mine and dutifully stands by the bed, ready to help me make it every morning — just as soon as we get up. It’s so sweet. But it’s pretty ridiculous when you look at the rest of our house. Why should the bed be different?

It all reminds me of what goes through my mind on most Mondays…  Here is a typical conversation with a co-worker on any given Monday:

Them: “Hi there. How was your weekend? Did you ride 100 miles or something?”

Me: “Well, actually, we rode 56 miles and then we ran 6 miles on Saturday. On Sunday, we just swam 3000 yards. It’s still early in our training plan…”

Them: “Wow, I can’t even imagine doing half of that!”

Me: “How was your weekend? What did you do?”

Them: “Well, the kids had three soccer matches and a birthday party on Saturday. Then, on Sunday, we re-landscaped our back yard,  and I changed the oil in my car.”

What they don’t know is that now, I’m thinking, “Wow, I can’t even imagine doing half of that!”

I guess somewhere along the way, as we got into training for triathlons more and more, I gave myself permission to, um, let’s just say … not always get all my chores done around the house. And, then, eventually, I just didn’t have enough energy to do all that stuff! Honestly, I’ll buy flowers or shrubs to plant in the yard on Friday evening, and that’s as far as they get. They’ll sit there in their plastic pots the rest of the weekend while we’re out training, waiting for me to put them in the ground. “Maybe next weekend,” I’ll think. Poor plants! Or, maybe I’ll actually pick up all the clutter in the house, but I’ll never get as far as sweeping and dusting and really cleaning once I can finally see the floors and the counters and the furniture. It’s about to drive me insane. Cobwebs, and dust bunnies, and dog hair, oh my!!!

I’ll get up each morning during the week, sometimes earlier and earlier, thinking I’ll get some of it done before I take the dogs for a walk and go to the gym… I look around and try to get a little done here and there. But, I have this sort of all-or-nothing feeling, like I can’t dive into a cleaning project unless I know I can do it completely. It’s very frustrating. Then, on top of that, I’ve gotten up so early that when I get home from work, I’m so tired, I can’t do anything either. At one point, Craig and I made this plan to do 15 minutes of cleaning every evening, and we haven’t even been able to do that. We are ri-DIC-u-lous!

What I think is funny is that we always seem to get the laundry done. I wonder if this is true for a lot of triathletes. If there are two chores that never take a backseat when you’re training, it’s laundry and grocery shopping. You’ve got to wash those stinky, sweaty workout clothes, and you’ve GOT to eat!  Okay, so maybe the laundry does not always get completely put away. But it’s clean. It’s piled up in the laundry baskets… or on the couch… or on the bed. But the laundry is CLEAN, and the bed is MADE, dammit!

And, I don’t even need to go to work on a Monday to feel the shame of my triathlon lifestyle … I’ll go to the gym, where other people are spending precious chore-doing time exercising instead of polishing the bannister… And I’ll ask them what they’ve been up to. They actually have the gall to have done something like replace their hardwood floors, or they’ve re-painted their guest room, or they’ve cleaned out their garage… IN ADDITION TO training. How dare they!

And, then sometimes, I’ll just walk outside my house and have a conversation with my neighbor about all the amazing stuff she has done inside her house… like dusting all her china or cleaning out her fridge. Mind you, the reason why I have to walk outside my house to have this conversation is because I couldn’t possibly let her come into my house. Not in the state that it’s in!

Sometimes, I’ll think to myself, “Well, I got the laundry done. Does that count?” I guess I better go clean now…

Oh yes, and to continue with the theme of my last blog post, here is some of the music to which I will be cleaning my house. No special theme this time. Just random music… Enjoy…

  • Here Out of Reach – Swivel Chairs
  • Bad – U2
  • Nightswimming – REM
  • Please Speak Well of Me – The Weepies
  • Light Will Keep Your Heart Beating in the Future – Mike Doughty
  • Counting on Karma – Will Dailey & the Rivals
  • Rainbow – Robert Plant
  • This is a Game – Nick Waterhouse
  • Southern Skies – Yuck
  • Dark Sunglasses – Chrissie Hynde
  • Only One – John Butler Trio
  • Another is Waiting – The Avett Brothers

 

 

Music Included

Posted by ookgirl on October 4, 2014
Posted in: Ironman, motivation, triathlon, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Oscar Wilde

So, my mom encouraged me to start blogging again (hence my recent post about doing Ironman Lake Placid next year.) And I’d like to be a real blogger, who posts often, with all kinds of interesting thoughts and whimsical comments … to entertain my massive following 😉

But the truth is, I don’t really have much to say that I think other people would want to read. Let’s face it: there’s a lot of crap out there to read on any given day… With email, and Facebook, and Twitter, and texts, and news, and dare I say actual work-related, school-related, or even book-related reading to do… we must all pace ourselves. If I’m going to throw one more thing onto your reading list, I feel like it should be worth your precious time and attention.

Yet, here I am trying to come up with something — so the Internet engine won’t mark my site with demerits for being dormant.

Therefore, I figured I’d start posting some stream-of-consciousness-like thoughts from my recent training runs (since that’s where I usually think of the little kernels of stuff to write about anyway). It’s like you’re getting the clay before it’s formed or the wine before it has fermented. Grey, lumpy matter and some grape juice; that’s what this is, people. Don’t say I didn’t warn you 🙂

“Dawn is coming. Open your eyes.”
–Jose Gonzalez

For me, the kernel of thought usually starts with a little music. So, I shall also share my running playlists just for the fun of it. Maybe someone out there will find that interesting. (Others will roll their eyes, but that’s okay. I can handle it.)

“I just saw the sun rise over the hill. Never used to give me much if a thrill. But hey, man, now I’m really living!”
–Eels

On one of my most recent training runs, I was listening to the playlist I’ll post below. It was also on this run that I twisted my ankle, scraped up my knee (see photo), and smacked my new iPhone flat against the paved trail when I fell. But luckily, my awesome phone case protected it, and it seems perfectly fine.

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I’m happy to say that my ankle was fine enough for me to keep running, and I am trying to be nice to it now – so it will heal completely.

Also during this run, I became preoccupied with stars, due to several songs included in this playlist… We recently went to see one of my favorite bands – Bell X1 – so they featured prominently in the list.

I have an extremely emotional and religious attachment to the Bell X1 song Rocky Took a Lover. It’s about a homeless person (Rocky) and his lover, and how Rocky is fascinated by stars. Which, if you have no roof over your head, is a nice thing to feel that you *do* have… God knows, those of us who are not homeless don’t look at the stars nearly enough. Rocky and his lover also seem to have a difference of opinion about Jesus (or at least that’s how I hear it). And the lyric, “He said, I’ll shine for you,” pretty much always makes me tear up. Sometimes, I think about it religiously, and sometimes I think about my husband and how we both want to “shine” for each other… Like stars…

“He said they’re like headlights in the rear view mirror – they’re closer than they seem. And from this gutter, we’re still staring at the stars.
–Bell X1

Another thing I was thinking about during my run was that the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii, are coming up. I think it was when we went there to see our friend James do that race many years ago, that we watched the stars at night, and I got to see shooting stars and satellites crossing the night sky for the first time. Last year, before Kona, one of my favorite pro triathletes, Linsey Corbin, posted a series of videos about her preparation for Kona. That’s where I heard the song Souls to the Coast by Joyshop. With the ukelele as the main accompaniment, it is such a perfect backdrop for a video showing a bike ride to the Hawaii coast.

“You’re in the gutter, but your dreams will turn to gold.”
–Joyshop

Now, I will be preparing for *my* version of Kona: Lake Placid … one of the most epic Ironman races in the U.S. … So, now, I am eagerly putting together my “theme songs” for training. And so far, one of them might end up being the rather lame but infectious song Sky Full of Stars by Coldplay. I was originally disappointed with a song that starts with the chorus and simply repeats it in various forms. But it has grown on me, and there was this obsession with stars during this particular run. So, we’ll see. It’s definitely not the Coldplay I used to love. But it has a good beat and you can dance to it 🙂

“‘Cause You’re a sky, ’cause You’re a sky full of stars, I wanna die in Your arms.” …”Cause You get lighter the more it gets dark, I’m gonna give You my heart.”
–Coldplay

So, now that you know some of my “running thoughts”, here is the playlist that inspired them:

Do It Now – Ingrid Michaelson
The Moth – Aimee Mann
Breathe – Alexi Murdoch
Sing Loud – Alpha Rev
Velcro – Bell X1
Holocene – Bon Iver
Middle Distance Runner – Sea Wolf
Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living) – Eels
Stay Alive – Jose Gonzalez
Careful What You Wish For – Bell X1
Souls to the Coast – Joyshop
Girls Chase Boys – Ingrid Michaelson
Rocky Took a Lover – Bell X1
Brill Bruisers – The New Pornographers
A Sky Full of Stars – Coldplay
Simple Machine – Guster

Feel free to leave a comment with your playlists or the random thoughts from your recent swim, bike, run, or other meditative activity…

Getting the 4-1-1

Posted by ookgirl on October 1, 2014
Posted in: Cycling, Ironman, Living Kidney Donation, team in training, triathlon. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

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“Lake Placid is going to be totally different from Arizona,” our friend James warned me, adding, “I just want to give you the 911 on that.” I laughed and said it was scary for him to be ‘giving me the 911‘ instead of ‘the 411‘. Indeed, I already knew that Ironman Lake Placid is a lot harder than Ironman Arizona. The bike and run portions are both hilly, and the weather can be rainy and even steamy; but the scenery and overall race experience promise to be spectacular. So, since I already have ‘the 411’ on it, my goal will be to make sure my husband and I won’t need ‘the 911’! We are both signed up to do Ironman Lake Placid in 2015.

That means we’re in for some more intense training and, hopefully, an even healthier lifestyle in the year to come. We’ve certainly taken things a lot easier in the year since we did Ironman Arizona together in 2013. And we could both stand to get even more firmly back on the healthy eating bandwagon. It’s going to be another wild ride!

In the meantime, I am wrapping up my first season coaching for Team in Training, which is a program that helps people train for endurance events while they raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The people I am coaching are amazing! They are driven; they set goals; they care about other people; they care about each other; and they know how to go the distance. They remind me every week that while we preoccupy ourselves with the challenge to go another mile; other people are battling for their lives. So, to just do an event is not enough. Let’s also raise awareness, raise funds, raise up these patients and their families. Let’s raise the bar. We can’t cure the diseases, but we can do something. And so we do.

My father is a cancer survivor. He didn’t have a blood cancer; he had colon cancer. But I still feel like helping LLS is helping people like him, because blood cancer research has led to treatments that can be used against other forms of cancer. I was able to help my stepfather by giving him a kidney. But I couldn’t give my dad a colon. That would have been so cool if I could have! Still, I think about him and how he has gone on to live fully despite what cancer took from him. He is an inspiration to me!

I’m keenly aware that things don’t go so well for all cancer patients. One of the Lymphoma patients that we consider an honored teammate with Team in Training just started a new chemo regimen in her five-year battle against cancer. It will mean the fifth time she will lose her hair. And yet, she faces it with grace. The other day, she posted a picture of herself while she was getting a treatment, and her beautiful smile told you that her spirit is still strong even if her body is tired. She is also an inspiration to me!

How does Lake Placid compare to losing your hair and parts of your body to cancer? I think that’s all the 411 I need to keep me going!