The triathlon training group will meet on Thursday evenings this spring; tonight we got together for a brief run followed by a meeting. Do you remember last summer, when I felt overwhelmed by the outdoor long runs? After 10 weeks of them, I had the long run prep list down pat. But...that was six months ago. I'm out of practice making space for exercise in my life, for one thing. I didn't leave myself enough time to get everything together and I was scrambling to get there. On the way there I was thinking, "...oh, yeah, I forgot a rubber band for my hair" and similar thoughts.
Here is something you can't know from reading my blog: I have a bouncy gait. I bounce when I walk; I bounce when I run. When my watch tries to calculate my pace on a treadmill, it tells me I'm covering a lot more ground than the treadmill tells me I'm covering. I hypothesize that it's because so much of the movement that the accelerometer is picking up is in the vertical plane. (It could just be bad at estimating; I don't know for sure.) When I run with untrammeled hair, it goes everywhere. I feel like Sweetums in that scene from the Muppet Movie where he's boinging away from the used car lot. (YouTube is letting me down but here's a .gif.) Next time, a rubber band for sure.
Thankfully there are no coiffure police out there on the running paths, and no mud police either -- I am good and spattered after our jaunt through the puddles. After the run we met up at the store again, where the store owner gave us an overview of the program and a pep talk. She is quite an athlete -- some double-digit number of Ironman finishes and scores of marathons under her belt -- but she was joking the whole time about how she's a bad swimmer and it doesn't stand in her way.
I am curious about what it would have been like for me to do this group last year. Would I have relaxed into the girl power vibe? Or would I have worried that I was secretly the very worst swimmer (in the WORLD!), and so none of her encouragement would apply to me? It's hard to predict exactly when that flavor of crazy will strike. It is not hard to predict, however, when sleepiness will strike: time for this mud-spattered wild-haired triathlete-in-training to head to bed.
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