It was not to many years ago that I use to blame the winter weather for why it was so hard if not impossible to keep in good shape and keep the weight off year round while living here in Spokane. I mean for at least 5 months out of the year its cold, wet, windy, snowy and plane crappy outside. I used to talk about how much easier it was to keep in shape when I lived in California where we had 300 days of sunshine every year! It seemed simple to me, that the bad weather was the reason I had packed on a couple of extra pounds every winter. That pretty much justified why I had put on an extra 25 pounds over the past 13 years. The weather prevented me from getting out to do my workouts! I so hate to be cold!
Then I had this great idea that I needed to run a Marathon, so I signed up with 3 other girlfriends for the Portland Marathon. We picked it because it was perfectly timed to avoid our local crappy winter weather. The Marathon was in October so we started running in the spring after the weather got nice and we were all ready for our October Marathon. It was a perfeact plan that worked. All 4 of us earned Finisher Shirts!! Victory was Sweet!
Then in the aftermath of my "Finish Line Euphoria" I had this great idea to collect Marathons! The next one I decided to do was the Las Vegas Marathon, sounded like fun to me and my family was excited about getting to go to Las Vegas in Januray and escaping our cold winter weather for a week. Opps, to do a Marathon in January anywhere it would mean that I would be putting in my long training runs in November and December, the middle of winter snowy, rainy, windy & some very cold crappy weather. Hmmmmmmmm What was I thinking???
This put me in a do or die situation. I was faced with either having to put in my long running miles before the race in the cold, rainy, snowy, windy and crappy weather or face the consequences of metaphorically dieing in the race!
This experience taught me some lessons that were instrumental in transforming my attitude in a critical way that would prepare me for what the World of Triathlon would demand of me!
So what did I learn?
1) I learned that there is a HUGE difference between "working out" and "training"! When you are working out it is easy to come up with 100's of excuses, especially weather, as to why it is o.k. to skip that work out, and that decision will go un-noticed by those around you and can take years to show up in a negative way on the body.
2) Training however is much different, it means you have committed to a race, it is on your schedule, it means that you have paid $ for that race, it means you have told people, it means that in your near future you will face the "starting line" and a "finish line" of that race and every mile in between will either reward you for the training you did or make you pay for what you did not do.
3) Winter weather is what you make of it... the 20/80 attitude rule applies here. 20% is what the weather dishes out to you and 80% is how you choose to react to it.
4) Proper clothing and equipment is key to your success in training..... I now have clothing that allows me to swim/cycle/run in most any kind of weather conditions, I even have snow studds for my running shoes!
5) Any weather condition presents it's own challenge.....I now choose to see it not only as a fun challenge to overcome but also as a fun and different training environment, and I enjoy how it breaks up the monotony of running or cycling the same routes or courses over and over.
6) I love to run in the rain and I can do it without getting cold and I know that I won't drown
8) I have a "trainer" for my bike and can now get all my cylcing hours in no matter what the weather
9) I have equipment to swim indoors or outdoors so no excuses here
10) Training is far more fun than working out and provides constant accountability which is motivating to me!!
As you stare the 2007 New Year in the face, if you find yourself having difficulty with coming up with a Resolution for yourself or you are struggling with staying active year round, I would encourage you to spend some time pondering the difference between "working out" & "training" for yourself. It will apply to any physical activity you choose to pursue! Trust me there are races, games, matches, and tournaments for every activity you could possible think of, so find your activity of interest and hold yourself accountable by getting a date on the calendar of your life. I promise it will inspire you!
p.s. I just paid $ for my first race registration for 2007, that's exactly what I need to continue to be motivated in my Training.....
What will you put your $ on????
After the second week we were disenchanted with our Whitworth class and we both realized that we were not going to gain much of anything new from this class.
We both admitted that we had learned so much more from Roger, in regards to stroke improvement at our Starbuck's Swim in the morning than we did from our triathlete class we paid for. Once again this make me realize one of the significant benefits of being in a Club like Tri-Fusion with World Ranked Athletes who are so willing to share what they know with other Club Members.
Some of my favorite highlights of this past Sunday’s Starbuck's Swim were definitely the fellowship and coffee at Starbucks before the swim. Roger’s positive critique and personal swim technique instruction for each of us. Jessi taking pictures of us swimming, it was awesome to see what we actually looked like, since it is a little hard to see yourself in action when you are swimming, and also seeing Kevin really get into learning how to analyze effective and not so effective swim technique in everyone’s strokes with Roger. I learned a lot today and the pictures were a great visual learning tool for me.
To start with we all met at Kirk Wood-Gaines home, where we had the pleasure of meeting his wife Susan for the first time. Roger let Kevin and I borrow two of his headlamp’s (picture above) since he was injured and would not be able to run with us. We all bundled up and headed out the door about 7:15pm for a 10 k run. It was dark, about 34 degrees and so foggy that it was difficult to see the edge of the paved road and literally impossible to see more than about 20 feet in front of you.
We all (Sam, Kurt, Jessi, Kathi, Natalie, Kevin, & Jennifer, (Kirk was suffering from the aftermath of food poisoning and Roger was nursing his twice sprained ankle) started out in a pack, we were huddling together trying to keep warm. About a half mile into the run Sam says, hey did anyone hear the News tonight? We all said no, so Sam proceeds to tell us that on Channel 2 News they reported that they found a dead body the previous night, on the very same road that we were running on! We are all like, Sam are you being serious?? And Sam is like yes, they said 2 guys beat him up and left him for dead, wrapped around a tree and stole his car. All of us girls freaked out and start talking about how we should stick together, and how each one of us would never go running on this road at night alone, on how we hate scary movies and bad guys etc.
Roger decides to come up along side of us in the Subaru (I think it was killing him not to be running with us) instead of following from behind, and he rolls down all his windows and opens his back tailgate and blasts his music from the car. We are laughing and singing and thinking it should be illegal to have this much fun while running. What a hoot, there were actually several neighbors that came out on their front porches to see what the commotion was and we are like, Hey, this is Tri-Fusion Support baby!!!!!!!!! WhooooooooAhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By 8:30am we were riding away from our parking lot. We would be riding out Peone Road to Mt Spokane. It was now 34 degrees and foggy outside, not sure what temperature it was for our bodies if you figure out the wind chill factor at 15 to 20 mph. All I know is, that I was so cold the first 30 minutes of the ride I considered turning back several times. The moisture from the fog was freezing on my glasses so I had to take those off. My feet and hands were freezing. My fingers were so cold and numb they were burning. I was literally afraid of frost bite and Kevin and I had an 11:30am couples massage scheduled!! So, for the first 30 minutes I rode with one hand and rotated placing one of my hands in the pocket on my cycling jacket to get it next to my body for warmth. Jessi actually suggested that I increase my effort to try to get my heart rate higher to help get my blood pumping through my extremities. So I decided to go to the front with Sam and step it up, and it worked!!!! Now I wouldn’t say that I felt warm by any means but I got rid of the burning and aching and no longer felt in fear of frostbite!!!!!!!
