Bu-Bye Back Pain

One day, I think I was 12 years old, I walked off the tennis court in tears. My lower back hurt so much that I couldn't even rally in the service box. Weak from little to no strength training combined with absolutely zero stretching produced a chronic back ache that had me off the sport for three months and in and out of massage therapist and chirporacter offices. Nothing seemed to do the trick however. I rolled on baseballs, raquetballs, had my dad use his elbow, but nothing could get into my muscles/tissue deep enough to release the tightness.
Eventually, after some time off, the pain subsided, but the underlying problem remained. It flared up again bad 2 years later to the point where I had to be carried out of a match. Then, back to therapy and once more it hid.
When I started triathlon I had already developed a decent strength training program that helped a lot in supporting my new training style for swim, bike, run. Soon enough though, after months of summer running like I never had before, the pain was back. Thankfully I found a massage therapist at a race, Pauline Hetherington, who after a couple of sessions had me back running. Pauline has been my friend and massage therapist since then (2006), and I haven't had any serious back problems since. I thought it was gone for good.
Today, however, I realized it was still there waiting for me to screw up (either by slightly overtraining, making a wrong move, lifting something I shouldn't, etc) and needed some major breakage to really work out the tension that has accumulated over the years- not only in my glutes/low back, but shoulders as well...
Due to traffic and driving distance, and recommendation from Ahmed, I started seeing Donald Mullins for massage about a month ago. Today's session was an awakening. The 250+lb NFL looking dude got his elbow and broke through muscle tissue like a hammer through jello. I know I'll be sore tomorrow after gritting through the best pain in the world. It was worth every second of pain knowing that finally I was getting deeper than anything I could have imagined and will, eventually after a couple more sessions, bring my body to full recovery since that first day I walked out of the court.
That, along with the cold that is compressing my head and causing me to sneeze every minute, will surely have me passed out very early tonight. I regret not running on the treadmill today. It was somewhat sunny and 60s, rare for January, so I decided to do my hour run at the lake. But the wind was incredible and the cold air made my throat burn and I think will prolong my being sick :(
Otherwise, my legs felt really loose and my turnover efficient, which is why it would have been much better health and fitness wise to get on the treadmill and run without sinus misery.

Yet another reason I dread winter, especially January

Since I can remember, every January I get sick- sometimes a simple 3-4 day cold which is uncomfortable but I can train through, others a miserable flu where I lay in bed and wish to sleep for eternity. Winter and I just don't mesh well. It got so bad when I was little that I finally got my tonsils removed at age 7.
After a pretty heavy training week last week, and then crazy jump in temperatures...from upper 20s for this Tuesday's race to 70s yesterday through tomorrow...my body started to let me know it was not happy. Suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon yesterday my throat started hurting like hell! But since I didn't feel bad at all (no fever, cough, runny nose, chills, etc) I thought it may be allergies or just irritation from the weather.
Now I'm afraid it has happened once again- I'm sick in January. It sucks!! Now I'm sneezing after ignoring the bad throat pain all day. I took all the Vitamin C, Zinc, Echinacea, etc etc that I could these past 48 hours, but nothing seems to do the trick. I really don't like going to the doctor as I like to try everything homeopathic/natural before buying into doctors' prescriptions.
It wouldn't have been so bad to go through this week, as it has been mainly recovery, but next week is intense training again and a 5k race Saturday..GRRR!!! Hopefully it will go away soon.

Meet "London"

My new road bike is home! I'm gonna get fit on it today and can't wait to ride it Sunday. I've been wanting a road bike for over a year now, and it was worth the wait!!

London will be going with me to the training camp in Hawaii at the end of this month so I can put some heavy mileage on it. I won't be racing it until 2009 so I have plenty of time to make pedaling on it second nature.

How exciting :)

First Race of 2008! 5 mile Run

I woke up at 5:30 this morning. As predicted, I was in bed by 8:30pm (nerd!). So i made breakfast and heard the weatherman speak of the frigid temps outside- 27!! Hopefully it would warm up by the 10am race start. An hour before, I picked up my brother at his friends' house, as I knew how long it would take him to get in the car, and we headed over to the race. It was still in the low 30s with pretty heavy winds. We did a little warm up and then were off racing. My legs felt good, I thought they would feel a bit stiff, and my HR was staying right where it was supposed to, 160-175, race pace but not an all out effort. I lost track of mile splits, only to clock the first one at 6:20.

I had no expectations of time for this run, since other than track workout times, I'm pretty unsure about my run fitness since Ironman. One thing I do know is my asthma kicks in heavily in cold temperatures (it was the worst when I played ice hockey in elementary school) so breathing got quite wheezy by mile 2. Anyway, per coach's orders, I was to stay in that zone until the last mile and then let it go to above race pace. At the last mile, I picked it up, or at least I think I did, but my HR wouldn't get above 176. I held onto that effort, the hardest I could go for that moment, and crossed the line in 33:49.

I'm pleased with that time, as I can only continue to gain speed for when the season arrives. I managed to win my age group and get 5th female. My brother did awesome- running a 39:23, 2nd in his age group ;).

We stuck around for the awards and to chat with friends, and then went home to shower and eat some good lunch. Now we just returned from the movies- National Treasure: Book of Secrets- entertaining yet exageratingly uncanny, and will for sure be hitting the sack early again.

Happy New Year's!!!

It has been an amazing 2007...last year, I never would have imagined the great places I would visit, the experiences, and awesome friends made along the way! I'm ending the year on a happy note- family is together and healthy, I have caring and supportive friends, school is going well, and I'm extremely pleased with how I've developed as a triathlete and am optimistic about my future in the sport.
Today's a day OFF so I'm plannning on staying in bed watching the Myth Busters marathon on Discovery Channel, only to leave for a short trip to the airport to pick up my brother in the afternoon.
Everyone in my family is a 'homebody' so our New Year's, like most holidays are spent modestly at home. Tonight my coach's kids invited my bro over to play so we'll hang there a while and then call it a night- who knows, maybe I'll make it to watch the ball drop on MTV...haha, not likely as my eyes usually shut automatically by 9.

I hope everyone has an awesome 2008!

"Some people dream of success while others wake up and work hard at it."

coaching my brother

Tomorrow afternoon my brother will be coming to stay for a week before he resumes school. I'm really excited because when he comes alone, I treat him like my little training experiment- sort of boot camp for the kid- hehehe (evil laugh)...I made him a training schedule where he'll be doing some things that match my routine and others where I'll be able to watch him and tell him what to do.
So, New Year's day we'll both be running the White Rock 5 mile race, and then I'll be dropping him off at masters. He'll do two weight sessions with me and then this week, ironically ha, I don't have track so it will be awesome to sit on the sidelines with Ahmed and see him and the others hamster-around in the cold. Sunday we'll both do masters in the morning and run drills in the afternoon. He can't bike because the road bike he got like 3 years ago for some "kids- tri" he outgrew dramatically. In fact, he's taller than me and obviously a bigger shoe size so I can't even lend him mine.
Aside from training, we'll definitely be hitting the movie theatre- there are a bunch of movies I want to see and we both have similar tastes so that works. Also our favorite pizza place, Campania is a must and a new gourmet burger joint downtown that I'm dying to try called Twisted Root!

Music-less

I'm an IDIOT!...Yesterday I decided to clean out as much crap from my computer files as possible, thinking that would somewhat solve the problem of it running so slow. Well, inside "my documents" was a folder titled "my music", I deleted that folder thinking it was the music data that comes when you buy the computer and did not relate whatsoever to my actual i-tunes files. WRONG!!
This morning (at 3:30 haha cuz I went to bed at 8) I got up to hop on the trainer and set my computer as always, on the table nearby to crank my playlist from i-tunes. Well, to my lovely surprise I had zero songs :( Immediately I rememberd my genious idea from the day before so I went to the trash can but, as I suspected, it had been emptied.
My solution: YouTube! Every 3-4 minutes for 2 hours i would stretch out my right hand and as best I could, would type titles to play another song haha...all while trying to maintain my cadence and power. This was ok for the first 30-45 min but after it became terrily annoying.
I don't know what I'll do after hundreds of my favorite songs have disappeared. I definitely won't buy them all again so that will probably leave me with asking a friend to burn me a cd or let me download from their files onto my nano.