New Bike Day!

I made the drive to Huntington Beach this morning and picked up my new (used) bike. I didn't get back until after noon and it's 90-ish outside so, of course, I took it for a spin (because I'm an idiot). Here is me right after its shakedown cruise:



It's a Centurion Diamond Back somethingorother. The bike guy, Mike, estimates that it is from the early 90s, which lines up with what I could find out about it on the net. It is much lighter than the bike I have been using, which is nice and disconcerting at the same time. It is a 14-speed with Shimano 105 shifting and the levers on the downtube, which isn't nearly as nice as those STI setups but it is better than the straight friction shifting that I had been using and for $280, I'm not complaining.

If you're looking for a used, not high-end bike in Southern California, drop Mike a line and see what he has in stock.

Flipper, I'm Not

Started the day off tired but went to swim anyway because it was Flip Turn Day! Turned out to be a total disaster. I didn't count on how much effort it would take to flip my much heavier legs over. Then I actually got dizzy (!) doing them, and dizzy, for me, is bad news. After 100 yards of warmup I did half a dozen flip turns (which, despite being a bit disoriented, I actually pulled off correctly) when I threw in the towel. I swam 400 more yards but I was feeling pretty funky from the dizziness and the fatigue so I wussed out and left early. I'm still kinda feeling it (like I said, bad news).

No more flip turns for quite a while and I may not swim next Tuesday. Depends on how tired I'm feeling. I hope to pick up a bike on Saturday, which means a bike ride on Sunday (at least) so we'll see.

Four Hundreds

Swimming workout of 1100 yards. I did four 100s in a row (with another one a couple hundred yards after that). That means this Thursday I will be trying flip turns (again, for the first time since 1979). Hope I don't drown.

Training Goals

Way back when I read a book on running by Jeff Galloway. In his training programs for marathons he said that people hit "the wall" at 20 miles because that's usually the farthest they trained so he had his long runs end up at 26 miles or longer to prevent hitting that wall. I don't know if that works or not but it struck me as making a lot of sense so I am going to put his idea to the test in my triathlon training.

The first triathlon I am training for is the Hansen Dam Triathlon. It isn't scheduled yet but I assume it will again be held in August 2009. The swim is 500 yards in a man-made lake, an 9mi bike ride, almost all of which I cover during my 10mi weekend loop (the page says the course is 11 miles but it isn't), and a 3mi run. A few weeks after that should be the Los Angeles Triathlon. The sprint consists of a 700-yard ocean swim, a 20mi bike ride, and a 5k run. I want to do both.

With those distances in mind, here are my training goals:

Swimming:

1000 yards non-stop in a pool with flip turns.
1/2 mile ocean swim.

Cycling

30 mile rides.

Running

No running until February so I can lose weight.
3.5 mile run with hill training (because of the CECS I can't go more than this).

Those 12-week triathlon training programs you see out there are to get you to finish. I actually want to finish strong. Not place or anything but do better than stagger through the finish line. Actually, I do have a goal of beating the winner of the 70-year-old category--don't laugh, that's actually a pretty healthy goal.

Cheaper But Still...

Went to another bike store, this one aimed at the average person rather than the enthusiast. I eventually got to the Mongoose Sabrosa which, I must admit, is a pretty cool bike. More of a serious urban bike than a road racing bike, it was great. It was $735, which is cheaper than the Roubaix but still more than I want to spend now (a lesson I learned from trying to start a business: if you want to spend a bunch of money on something, you probably haven't thought hard enough about how to spend less money on it). There are a couple of interesting bikes on Craigslist that I want to check out next weekend (things aligned to prevent me from going this weekend) so I am hoping to be back on a bike by next Sunday.

Bronchitis

A few years ago I had my first bad case of bronchitis. I was coughing so much and so hard that blood vessels were bursting in my eyes and I was not able to sleep for days in a row. Strong drugs let me sleep that time but the next time it happened I could not get in to see a doctor before it had run its course (and I had already lost sleep). Some internet research turned up that exercise can help turn a common cold into bronchitis. Thinking about it, I realized that this bronchitis did not show up until I had started jogging. So, the next time I had a cold I cut out jogging and no bronchitis...well, at least it wasn't as bad. So far so good until earlier this year when I caught another cold. I was cycling instead of jogging so I cut that out. The cold did turn into bronchitis (not so violent, though) but it stayed around for months. Sigh.

This is the other thing about my training that I worry about: that bronchitis will sideline me for two or even three months. A year is a long time to train and I should be able to absorb even a delay like that but my plan involves a lot of small increases in volume, which a long layoff would really mess with. We shall see.

Chronic Exertional Compartment Syndrome

The first time I took up running after college was around 1990. I bought a book by Jeff Galloway and was trying to follow its training program (which included long runs on the weekends). Things were going well for a while but then I had to stop. My calves were not recovering from the workouts. They weren't just sore, I couldn't flex them. It was like something had taken all the fuel out of my calves and they couldn't push anymore. I had to walk funny for a few weeks (stepping up onto a curb while not pushing off sure felt funny) and then they recovered. I ran again but the non-recovery happened again. This time I stopped working out for a few months but the same thing happened again. At the time (I was in my late twenties), I figured that I just could not jog anymore.

Fast forward to 2002 or 2003 and I decide to take up jogging again. I weigh more and am a lot slower but things go well. I can only jog once a week (due to my aforementioned time constraints) but I notice improvement each week. Excellent! I jog on the big street I live on, which includes a good hill at the turnaround for a 3.5 mile jog. I do that for some months and all is well; no problem with the calves (though sometimes I get what I call "floppy foot", which is a weird thing where one of my tibialis muscles wears out and I cannot lift my foot up so well). Then I decide that I am feeling good enough to push past 3.5 miles. As soon as I go past 4 miles, my calf problem comes back. I take a few weeks off and go back down to 3.5 miles and the problem goes away. Hmm. I try a 5k on my birthday in 2006 and, while my calves are just fine, I got floppy foot 2/3 of the way through. Sigh.

This time I do some research on the net and it looks like I have a name for my pain: Chronic Exertional Compartment Syndrome. In a nutshell, the fascia surrounding my calves is not as flexible as it should be, so when my calves try to fill up with blood during exercise the fascia keeps my calves from expanding, which restricts the blood flow to my calves, which keeps nutrients out and waste products in. Treatment? Surgery that slices open the fascia to relieve the pressure. I have not found much information on the downsides to such a surgery but my sister, who used to coach volleyball, said one of her athletes had the surgery done and it helped so much. We'll see.

A bit more digging told me that jogging was particularly hard on calves and that bicyling might be a better exercise. It seems to be so far, though I have yet to go bicycling much past 60 minutes (which was how long 3.5 miles was taking me--I said "a lot slower", remember?) so I don't know how far I can push myself yet (hence my hesitancy to lay out big $$ for a new bike). Now the episode in the nineties made sense because it wasn't until I started doing the much longer runs on weekends that this problem showed up.

In my training schedule for the upcoming year, I want to both bike and swim farther in training than I will in my races. I won't be able to do that with running, though, until I have surgery and I am not planning on looking into that until after the races to see if I am dedicated enough to make it worthwhile. So for now I am just going to deal with it the best I can. That means no running until February, when I have dropped a bit of weight (knock on wood). Then only running once or twice a month and no longer than 3.5 miles. Hopefully putting some hill training in there will make up for the lack of mileage. I do worry how a bike ride followed by a run will affect my calves but I won't be able to find out until I actually do it.

This thing with my calves is the most worrisome part of my training. I really have to monitor them carefully or my training will make them hit the wall. I hate hitting walls.