Training Cycles and Work

Doh. This always happens. I start training hard and forget to stop training hard. Then my body reminds me in increasingly unsubtle ways.

Periodization is hard because it means slowing down/doing less. For a chunk of time. The chunk of time that seems to work right now is 2 weeks on, 1 week off. By off I don't mean 'on the couch', I just mean that the runs stay easy and unstructured, and the mileage drops.

Coming back from my last off week has been hard. It coincided with a real motherf*cker of a week at work. Where I was going till 11pm, and not doing the fun stuff -- it was 11PM emails. I've got to change that. I've got fun stuff to do, but at 11PM I'm too fried to do it. Need to shift my schedule around so that my brain is good on the fun stuff.

What is the fun stuff these days? It's statistics, machine learning, making sure I touch Python enough to not need to google every other syntactical wrinkle. I swore (lividly) that I would never become a  manager again. That oath has been dropped -- the opportunity to scale an effort and succeed at that bigger scale was more tempting than the opportunity to go deep. But I've got to keep the things that got me to this point -- the love of making things -- around, otherwise I lose my way.

This is hard, with the amount of coordination this new group requires. But one key thing I've realized is that the work is never done. So chiseling out 'me time' to hack out ugly naive bayes algorithms in python with canned datasets beats the hell out of watching TV.

What's fun about management? Well, a lot of things, this time. I'm not a line manager anymore, I'm managing a very senior team of managers who get along and want to get things done. I get to set strategy and higher level tactics, and as a team we work out the concrete implementations. I get to do things in a way I would have wanted them done when I was an individual contributor working around severely flawed processes.

That stuff is all good, but without scratching the itch to make something, I will become a mid-level manager and stop there.

I had taken about 2 months away from coding at all, and decided to try an interview question one of our top guys used on a recent interview candidate. It's a simple question: given an integer, translate the integer to it's word representation. btw, simple != hard :) There are some interesting edge cases (the teens) and some harder variations (where do you put the word 'and'?), and an elegant solution is hard to come by. But I did (finally) grind out a nice way to do this using the mod and div operators.

The sad part is it took me a while. The good part is that I eventually cleared away the mental cobwebs. Hopefully I can keep them cleared out even as management duties accelerate.

Silent Running (in the dark fog, on the ice)

These days I start my runs in the dark. Its not easy to get excited about running in the dark, so I don't. I realized a while back that some things suck to start, but get better. Running is like that, especially in the morning, and especially when it's dark.

Lately it's been Dark, Foggy, and Icy. Before that, it was  Dark and Stormy. Both have their challenges. Dark and Stormy requires me to suspend my dislike of getting sprayed with cold water, because that's what happens the moment I step outside. The truth is that running Dark and Stormy is like getting into cold water in a wetsuit. It sucks for about 3 minutes. Then you feel good. Unlike a wetsuit, peeing on yourself doesn't make it feel better. But 3 minutes is doable even without the peeing option.

Dark, Foggy, and Icy is an altogether different challenge. No, I'm not getting spritzed by the Pacific NW's best January drizzle, but I am having constant, multiple conversations with myself about the quality of my footing. Yesterday, In a fit of profound wisdom, I realized that there can truly be no good answer to the question "Am I about to plant my foot on  moss,  ice, or icy moss?"

Dark, Foggy, and Icy muffles sounds. I feel like I'm underwater.  I can't hear my feet land, I can barely hear myself breathe. And that's saying something. I'm a registered loud breather, I can remember back in my mediocre bike racing days when one of the better riders remarked that I reminded him of an old train, going backwards.  I feel like a deep sea diver. Not a casual tropical vacation snorkeler, because that implies that I can actually see stuff, and that the water is warm. I feel like I'm diving at the bottom of the Puget Sound.  I can only see my feet, my immediate next step, and a tight cone of light that blinds me more than it  illuminates. And my nose, which, ethnically speaking, has a profound curvature that intersects the light cone and throws a proud shadow.

In that kind of environment, there are a couple of things that make the miles go by:

(1) I give myself all kinds of credit just for being out there. Hey, it's 6AM, and a normal person would still be in bed.
(2) I let the small details of the experience seep in. Yesterday, in the fog, my new headlamp was throwing out a tight cone of light, with very sharp edges.  I felt like a (slowly) moving geometry lesson.
(3) I focus on form. The ice doesn't lend itself to moving super fast, but the more I turn my legs over, the less likely I am to slip. So far, anyway. Running upright is another thing I pay attention to.

In any case, my 'hard day' with  pace and distance goals  was shelved for a totally hallucinatory running experience. Which, in the end, was critical in making sure the sucky part (starting) ended quickly.

Tomorrow I'm doing another 12 miler, just to confirm the first one wasn't a fluke.  Its the longest I've run in a couple of years and I want the legs to build into that distance and be comfortable.  No real pace goals, but if I'm feeling chippy I'll pick up the last 4 miles. It'll be a good birthday treat.

To LiveStrong or not to LiveStrong? That is the question

Torn over my LiveStrong wristband. I'm probably the last person in the world wearing it. I know everyone in South Park had theirs surgically removed :) 

To me the band has nothing to do with Lance, it has everything to do with remembering my father and friends I've lost to cancer, and honoring them by living fully, getting out and doing the rides, getting into the mountains, going on long runs, spending time with my family, watching killer sunsets -- the stuff they'll never get to do again. 

I always feel better when I see someone wearing the LiveStrong band because I assume they've been affected in the same way. We're the ones that have lost someone we loved to a complete motherfucker of a disease.

But now when I look at my wrist I think of an unrepentant asshole who gladly ruined other peoples livelihood and reputations to protect his gravy train, whose only motivation to confess is to get some kind of reduction in punishment and/or return to competition. I've been trying to maintain some notion of separation between Lance and Livestrong, but the two are blurring. 

Still, I'm on the fence. Cancer sucks.  In the last year of my fathers life, when I watched the toughest man I knew waste away, going on long rides and runs was the only thing that kept me sane. Drinking didnt work. Working didn't work. Talking about it to my wife and friends didnt work. Getting outside, putting my head down, and going until I dropped was the only thing that took the pain away.  And when I was gapping on a really long run or bonking on a ride miles from home, I would stare at that yellow piece of rubber, summon my dad's strength and courage, and rise above the moment. 

Yep, it's a dirty trick, and I still do it. But its the one that works, it gets me over the crest of the hill, to the downhill side with the tailwind. Every single time. 

I probably don't have to wear a yellow rubber band to remember my dad and honor his memory by pushing myself through the hard times. But it's an incredibly powerful way to keep him with me. 

This would be so much easier if Lance had just been a hypercompetitive, egomaniacal asshole. If he hadn't gone and done something so good, something that has helped so many people, including me. This is not a cut and dry kind of situation. Boolean logic does not apply. As far as LiveStrong is concerned, it's all shades of grey.  

Same Shit, Different Day? Maybe...

Wrapping up the first week of January, and once again wondering what...happened? It seems like I update this blog quarterly, hopefully that will change. Why? Because I think I'm going to have a lot more granular updates and 'deep thoughts'. How? Well, my fingers need to touch the keyboard more frequently. I think my updates will be shorter, more media filled, and less about quantity (training miles), more about quality (what's going on).

What is going on right now? Well, I've gotten my long runs up to 10 miles over the XMas break. That's 10 miles at 5000 feet, in low double digit temperatures (~20 degrees). Granted, all of this running was done along the Rio Grande river basin, so there was no altitude gain, but it still felt like an evil monkey was squeezing my chest the whole time, and every run started out as a 10:30 'shuffle'. I managed to put in a 34 mile week while I was at home, which is my longest week in a long time.

That's the good news. The bad news is after that week we were travelling and skiing, certainly not doing running. I was skiing for the first time in 20+ years (fun!), but doing it with the kids (not super hard).  And I ate and drank my way through the holiday. I've now got a spare tire. Sure, it's a racing tire, but it's a spare tire nonetheless.

More bad news: I've got some kind of nerve pinch in my shoulder that makes it hard to sleep, let alone turn my head. Agggh. Getting old.

This leads me to my conclusion: Nutrition and Stretching are as if not more important than the training miles. I'm coming up on 44, and the same mileage that would have dropped weight off of me like melting water off of an ice cube 15 years ago is....not doing that. Also, I'm running those miles a bit slower than I did 15 years ago. Because if I go faster right now...injuries happen.

So, what to do? It turns out I may have a corporate health benefit that I can apply towards being healthy. If that is the case, I'm going to apply it towards nutrition. I was doing pullups last Friday, and my shirt rode up to expose that tire and love handles. I always make fun of my wife for being motivated to exercise by vanity, but I have to say that shot of my gut was sobering, I'm hoping that image (seared to my eyelids) can be used to resist eating gut enhancing foods that are incredibly yummy going down.