foodfoodbodybody

I’m up at the beach for a little holiday this weekend, so I have to miss out on the team workouts. I had two good swims with Lily this week – one at the fancy shmancy Claremont Resort & Spa (thanks to my buddy Mel who is a personal trainer there- we had a very luxurious swim and Jacuzzi afterward!) and one at Mills College pool. These were both new venues for us and it was good to get out and experience other pools.

Today was bike/run day. I felt myself putting it off all day. I even managed to take a crazy two-hour nap this afternoon that I could NOT pull myself out of. I kept dreaming that I was getting up, walking around the house, but in reality I was sleeping hard the whole time. I guess I really needed it.

Late this afternoon I took myself over to a big parking lot for Stinson Beach Park. There were a bunch of teenaged guys hanging around their car and I was all embarrassed that they would laugh at me for doing loops around on my bike. But finally I just decided to get over it. I went to a little corner of the parking lot. I clipped my shoe onto the pedal. I did this many dozens of times and it was interesting – sometimes it just went “click” right away and sometimes it took up to a minute to get it in there right.

I just wanted to feel like I could stop, start, clip and unclip without having a heart attack or standing there like a deer in the headlights for half an hour while the rest of the team pedals off into the distance. So I practiced. And practiced and practiced.

It was really, really good to do this by myself. I think I have worked myself into a froth of self-consciousness doing this while other people were watching and waiting.  So it was good to just do this with no eyes on me, just me and the bike. I needed it. And after a good period of this practicing I think I can safely say I feel a lot more comfortable, especially with the stop and start. I’ve been watching YouTube videos about bicycling this week and one of them really impacted me – this guy said, “Put down your favorite foot.” Now that made sense to me. I DO  have a favorite foot (my right!). And I realized that I’d been attempting to stop on my Unfavorite Foot last weekend, and that may have been a factor in my extreme discomfort and discombobulation. At any rate, I think I have a few more of the basics down.

Since we were supposed to go for a longish ride and a shortish run today, I switched it up. After my remedial parking lot self-taught bike class, I went for a run. At first it just sucked. I had to go to the bathroom after about 50 yards. I stopped at the house and took care of that. Then my feet and calves felt like they were made of concrete. THAT wasn’t very good. My Runkeeper was telling me that my average pace was a 27 minute mile, which made me laugh it was so ridiculous (this is because of the bathroom break which I took AFTER I started the app).  But finally, finally the achiness and stiffness went away, and I got into my stride, and it felt good good good and I ended up going a total of 3.6 miles in 55 minutes. When I checked my mile splits, I saw that I’d done mile 3 at a 12:15 pace. Not bad, little turtle!

So it turned out to be a very good, very productive and very tailored-to-me workout. I posted about it on our team Facebook page and our head coach commented: “This was the perfect workout for you. It’s not always about fitness, it’s also about confidence and skill. Well done.” YAY!