A Crazy Goal Realized

After a week spent on the couch, recovering from the Swine Flu, I was getting more than a little nervous about the Lake Travis Relay. I felt better, but the funny thing about the flu was how sneakily it sapped me of all my energy. I was terrified that I'd feel great, jump in the water and be a piece of driftwood after a dozen strokes.

Luckily, I was able to get in a few good swims with teammates Crystal and Tach at the new Sammons Park Indoor Pool. These workouts brought me joy on a number of levels. First, I had not yet gotten a chance to swim in the new pool since the Temple Parks & Leisure Services Department dedicated it a few months ago. Let me say, if you haven't given the new facility a try yet, I highly recommend that you do. It is really, really nice. Second, I was able to go healthy distances at a good level of intensity without fatiguing. Finally, this was the first time I had gotten to swim with Tach. Tach is a radiologist at Scott & White who had only been swimming for about a month. Yeah, you read that right. The dude had been swimming FOR A MONTH, and he was committed to swimming in a swim marathon. Obviously that dude is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Still, swimming in the lane next to him, I would have never guessed he was such a novice. His form was surprisingly good, and, more importantly, he was going several hundred yards at a stretch without huffing and puffing. Suddenly, I was feeling confident that our team might actually finish this thing in one piece.

The night of the race, I went to the captains meeting. This year's race was much smaller than previous ones. There were only 9 teams competing, down from 30 or 40. Still, we knew we weren't looking to win.

The morning of the race, we met at the dock and picked up our pontoon boat at about 6:30. The temperature outside was in the fifties. Luckily, I thought I was prepared. I'd brought multiple layers of hoodies and sweatshirts. I also had about 7 different towels. Unfortunately, though, none of that was enough.

We had to ride the boat for over an hour to the start at Mansfield Dam. My cousin Wesley, our ringer, was tasked with swimming the first 20 minute leg. I have never felt sorrier for someone that I did for him when he jumped into that cold water. You'd have never known he was uncomfortable, though, as he swam that first leg really, really well. I had expected to be in the back of the pack early on. Instead we were ahead of a few teams when my turn came up.

The rules of the relay stipulate that swimmers must tag one another out, so as Wes's leg came to a close, I steeled myself, jumped into the chilly water and swam out to meet him. All I could think of was how cold I felt. It took several seconds for me to warm up, and then I had to remember that I was here to swim fast. I did my best to turn it on, but all at once I was learning how swimming in open water is harder than swimming in a pool. As I turned my head to get a breath, a wave would bounce me up and down. Getting my wind was much more difficult that I imagined. It took all my focus just to keep moving forward.

That's the other way that swimming in the lake differed from the comfort of the pool. It turns out, I like lane lines. I enjoy seeing that line at the bottom of the pool. In all the years that I have swum laps, I have, not once, gotten lost or found myself swimming into the corner of the pool. My first leg, though, I found myself really struggling to go straight. I'd pull my head up occasionally, and get a look at another team up ahead. I'd use them as my lighthouse, but I needed to get my bearings a couple times a minute. The last thing I wanted to do was waste time and energy swimming off course.

Another way in which I missed the comfort of the pool was that I didn't have any idea how far I'd gone or how much time I had left. In the pool, I'm hitting a wall every few seconds. I know I've just gone another 25 yards, and, my extension, I know that I've probably swum another 20 or 30 seconds. In the lake, I had no concept of my distance, and when I heard my team call out, "Ten more minutes," I was shocked. I was only half way through my leg! WTF! I felt like I had been going for 20 already.

Luckily, I was able to stay mostly on course and finish up my leg. At the end of the twenty minutes, Crystal swam out and tagged herself into the race. After Crystal it was Russell's turn, followed by my dad and Tach the rookie.

Going into the race, I grossly underestimated how the open-water would affect our time. I had calculated all of our times and figured that we would be out of the water in about 6 hours and 15 minutes. That was not realistic in the least. In reality, the 12.1 mile course took us 6 hours and 58 minutes. This time might seem insignificant, but it isn't. You see, at 7 hours, our team would have been disqualified. This means that my team, my awesome team, swam its first open-water marathon, and finished fair and square.

To celebrate, we each enjoyed some beverages and fajitas at the finish line. We were cold and wet, but we were victorious!

That night we all went out together for dinner and, to my great shock, found ourselves talking about "next year." Sure enough, while there were moments of great discomfort, I am so happy that we did this, and I think I really might be up for doing it again. Hopefully next year the sun will shine.

Feeling Swine

First, let me apologize for being such a shoddy blogger as of late, but as you’ll see, I’ve had a pretty crazy couple of weeks. It all started two weeks ago when I found myself sneezing at the end of my work day. I’d had headaches and a sore throat, but it was this new symptom that had me nervous. Sure enough, by the next morning (a Saturday if you can believe it), I felt like I’d been in a 12 round fight with a rabid Hippo.

Overnight a family of warring lemurs had taken shelter inside my skull, and walking to the kitchen to make some breakfast, I discovered that I didn’t have the energy to make the 5 yard trek across my living room. Collapsing onto the couch, I took stock. I was congested, my brain ached, and I was completely devoid of energy. This felt a whole lot like the flu. I didn’t have a fever, though, so I wasn’t too worried…I was miserable, but not worried.

Still, my wife and I took precautions. With our new baby, we knew it was better to be safe than sorry, so, as painful as it was, I did my best to stay away from the cute little midget, and we put a temporary hiatus on our own PDA (I can’t imagine how trying that must have been on her, as attractive as I no doubt was in that state).

I spent that whole weekend on the couch. I limited my movements to those necessitated by my bladder and bed time. Based equal parts on the threat of contagion and the annoyance of my sick-induced snore (she might say sick-elevated); Tara spent her nights in our guest room. I offered to make the move, but she seemed to think that the bed was already contaminated by whatever evil had taken over my body.

By Monday I was feeling marginally better, and I still hadn’t ever had even a small fever. Speaking with a friend of ours who is a doctor at Scott & White, I mentioned the weird flu-like, feverless disease; she recommended I see my doctor.

“That sounds like what we’ve been seeing a lot of,” she told me.

I took her advice and made an appointment for the next morning. I left a message with my boss saying that if I got the go ahead, I’d try and be back at work after I saw the doctor.

I didn’t make it back to work that day. You see, that thing they’d been seeing a lot of, that was H1N1, THE SWINE FLU, and I had it. At my doctor’s suggestion, I spent the rest of the week wearing a mask and staying at least 6 feet from anyone I didn’t want to infect. It was awful.




My baby has just started reaching out to you when she wants you to pick her up. It’s the most perfect gesture in the whole wide world. It absolutely melts your heart. Imagine, if you can, the anguish of not being able to respond by taking her in your arms. I didn’t get to hug or kiss my wife or baby for 7 long days. This isolation was worse than any of the symptoms of the disease itself.

By the end of my quarantine, I was ready to climb up a wall.

Sufficed to say, this was all a pretty severe blow to my fitness regiment. Not only did I never work out for that whole period, but I pretty much blew off any idea of calorie counting as well.

What’s worse, even after I was feeling better, I could tell that my energy was still pretty low. With the Lake Travis Relay now just one week away, I was very, very nervous that I might not have the strength to compete.

Long Time Coming

Bless me, reader, for I have blogged. It has been almost two weeks since my last post. What's worse, it's not like I've been too busy working out to write something.

It all started when my beautiful little angel brought a cold home with her from day care. Generous little infant that she is, she decided to share that infect with my wife and I. Thankfully; I didn't get too bad a case. I never had to miss work, but it did affect me. I felt like I was smuggling a few liters of lead around in my sinuses, and I had a killer sore throat. The real problem, though, was that I woke up every morning feeling just awful. Upon getting out of bed, I inevitably felt like I was going to toss my cookies.

Here's the thing. It's hard enough to motivate oneself to get out of bed early and workout when one is a peak (peak for me at least) physical condition. Doing the same thing while nauseous...pretty much impossible. The result was that I honestly didn't work out at all for more than a week. I missed two weigh-ins at the Summit.

All of this would have been okay, if only I'd been smart and continued to track my calories on LiveStrong. Of course, that isn't what I did. Being sick I was able to rationalize all sorts of culinary evil. I was eating just as many calories as if I'd been working out consistently...without the part where I actually did work out.

Most unfortunate of all, though, I let all this just build and build. I could have started tracking calories at any point, but I didn't. I wrote off an entire week because I figured I'd already messed up to badly to redeem it. Then, even after I had recovered, I was scared to get back to work.

I haven't posted in the last two weeks not because I was sick, not because I was busy but because I was ashamed. I messed up, and then I let my embarrassment over the mistake keep me from getting back on track.

I apologize to those of you who have been so faithful about reading these silly posts and offering me such kind encouragement. Ultimately, it was the repeated comments from friends and family about my dearth of posts that initiated this one. This Monday, I started working out again. I did the same this morning, and I'm committed to keeping it up all week. Likewise, I'll be back on LiveStrong holding myself accountable to my eating decisions.

The lesson here is nothing novel, but it is still profound: it's never too late to turn things around. I don't know how much weight I may have put back on the last two weeks. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I found myself back in the 200's Friday, but that won't keep me from weighing in. I'm back, baby!

No, I don't think I can dance...

As I've mentioned before in this blog, I do a lot of my working out before sunrise in my living room. I've had some very positive experiences with workout DVD's. While the overly enthusiastic presenters often get on my nerves, I like getting pushed further than I would normally push myself. Still, watching the same videos over and over can get tedious. Rather than just buying a bunch of these things (which could easily stink), I decided last week to try renting some from Netflix. I'm a fan...of the idea.

Netflix has a spectacularly large selection of workout DVD's. You can browse through over 1,100 videos offering everything from prenatal yoga, kickboxing and boot camps to workouts featuring tennis and (I kid you not) aerobic striptease. The big question, where do you start?

I started with familiar territory. I'd had a great time sweating to The Biggest Loser: Fatburn Yoga, so I thought I might as well stick with discs related to reality programs I often enjoy.

This is the part where I point out that I watch a lot of football, own power tools enjoying camping. In other words, I'm a dude, a manly one. That said, Dad, if you're reading this, stop now before it gets ugly.

The first workout DVD I rented was So You Think You Can Dance: Cardio Funk. I know what you're thinking. Stop. I got interested in the show through my wife (a dancer from age fetus). I like seeing her respond to the performances. Those dancers are superhuman.

All that to say: I rented the video thinking it might be a fun way to get a really good workout. The reality, however, is that the workout was neither very fun nor very high impact. I felt much, much sillier trying to follow along with the "choreography" here than I ever did playing karate kid with the Budokon disc I tried a while back. At least with that disc I broke a sweat! I understand that they had to dumb down all the movements to make them achievable by non-dancers such as myself, but the result was a workout so diluted that it barely earned that distinction.

I like the idea of trying a workout disc out before I buy it. I'll definitely be searching the Netflix library again in the future. I won't, however, being doing back to this particular disc ever again.

Sorry, Dad.

Three Day Weakened

The past three days have been spent celebrating Labor Day. Is that why I felt the need to gorge myself until I felt like I was about to go into labor.

This weekend, we spent time with my wife and my parents and a group of their friends. We laughed. We played games. We passed around the baby. Oh, and we ate to the point obscenity. I took this photo of the desert table. Dontt adjust your scroll bar. You read that last bit correctly. They had a desert table, dedicated to itens that were rich with sugar, butter and evil...I spent a lot of time there.

What is it about spending time with loved ones that inspires us to do so much cooking and so much eating? Have you ever attended a really fun reunion in which people set out a table of fitness accessories or periodically engaged in group work outs? I haven't.

Something about the magic of an extended weekend seemed to lead me to mistakenly believe that calories didn't count and fitness was optional. This has me more than a little nervous about upcoming longer holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Now I'm left with four days to makeup for my bad behavior over the last three days.

Weekly Weighin: The More Things Change...

It's Friday, so this morning it was once again time for me to face the scale. I didn't make it to the pool this week, but I've been really good about doing morning workouts in my living room each morning. These are the weeks that I don't know what to expect.

According to the scale, my ambivalent feelings about my weight loss were completely warranted as I neither gained nor lost any weight. Once again the scale read 199. I guess I'm a little bummed to have not lost any weight, but part of me is just happy to have stayed below 200.

It's been a bit of roller coaster lately.

I've lost, gained and lost weight. Now I appear to be sitting still. This week I'm going to really step it up and make things happen.

Outside My Comfort Zone

Yesterday, I woke up at 4 a.m. and felt a little ill. Deciding that a little extra sleep might be a good remedy, I turned off my early workout alarm and went back to bed. After all, wouldn't bouncing around getting exercise make me a lot more likely to puke? Still, the instance got me thinking about how hard it is sometimes to push myself out of my comfort zone.

Even after four months and 20+ pounds, I still have trouble getting up early enough to workout. I still struggle with basic dieting priorities, too. My wife made some awesome chocolate chip cookies this weekend. Do you think I turned them down? Do you think I even passed the jar all weekend without eating one? I wish.

It's amazing how quick I am to revert back to my lazy roots. Sleeping in is still an attractive notion. Ignoring a few calories still smells like a good time.

In life, doing the right thing isn't usually the hard part; discerning what the right thing is, poses the real challenge. It seems to me, therefore, that getting fit is deceptively simple. I almost always know what the right choice is (except for my peanut butter fiasco). It's just that the right thing isn't always the most fun.