Not New Miserable Experience

The other night, our current series – Longmire – opened with a shot that reminded me very much of New Miserable Experience

I’m having a not new experience, and it’s not exactly miserable – I’ve decided, for the last time, that I’m not doing the Panama race.

I just couldn’t stay healthy. After all the other stuff, I got an “allergy” that felt like an awful cold. I’m now taking two anti-allergens and a nose spray – and, for the short term, a cough syrup. 90 minutes into my three hour ride on Saturday, I just stopped.

I’ve said many times that I’m only going to do sprint and Olympic distance races, and I keep conveniently forgetting that. So now I’m actively remembering it.

I’ve backed off on my volume and increased my intensity. And I’ve started doing the core work again. We’ll see what happens. That’s sort of my mantra these days – “we’ll see what happens”.

I have a new piano teacher. Jocelyn is an interesting character – she teaches music at the local International school. She is actually a drummer, but knows the rest of the instruments well. She actually comes here, to my house, to give me the lessons. That makes stuff pretty simple.

Carnaval is finishing up. It was actually pretty quiet here at Bahia – the only real problem was the traffic. Not here, but on the Pan American Highway. The problem is that for us to go anywhere, we have to go on that highway. So we’re currently attending the local meetings via Zoom. That should change on Thursday or Saturday.

Speaking of Thursday – on that day, our plumber shows up to take away our kitchen. He is remodeling a house and he will be taking our cabinets and granite and fixtures away and putting them in his house. After that – several days after that – the woodworkers will come and put the new cabinets in, and then comes the new granite. But, for a couple of weeks, we won’t have a kitchen. I’m in favor of disappearing during that time, but Ethel wants to be here to supervise.

And then, after that, the gas will get turned off for a couple of weeks. We might go to Aruba for that.

Living in Panama. Every day, sometime during the day, we’ll say something like “holy mackerel, we live in Panama”.

Thumbing my Nose

Today I managed a two hour run on the dreadmill.

It seems that the beta blocker isn’t stopping the tachycardia spikes, but it is allowing me to run through them.

Actually, the run felt fine. However, yesterday was a two hour easy ride. I don’t want to get excited about a two hour run at just faster than twelve minute pace.

I was sort of thumbing my nose at reality, though. Once upon a time, I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 3:08:10, negative splits, and qualified for Boston. That’s a 7:11 average pace.

Well, today I was running just barely faster than a 12 minute pace. But, halfway through, I started speeding up just a little bit – just to make it “negative splits”, even if the “run” was just faster than I might have been able to walk 🙂

We have reserved a room for the Panama 70.3, but only because if we don’t have a room, we can’t go. I made durn sure that that it’s free cancellation; I’d say my current chances of actually making it to the race are about 30/70.

But if God decides to throw a miracle my way, I won’t sneer at it.

This run was, of course, indoors. I realized today that one thing I miss about the “old days” (read: before Panama) was being able to actually “go for a run”, outdoors. With the temperature never varying here, that ain’t liable to happen any time soon.

Reboot

Two days ago, I rode an hour long Sweet Spot ride, and then jogged on the mill for an hour.

Yesterday, I swam 300 meters.

Today, I rode for three hours.

Who knows? Maybe I will be able to do the 70.3 in….five weeks?*

…which sounds impossible. But just a couple of weeks ago, I did another three hour training ride, which indicates to me that I’d be able to finish the bike. And I know that I can do the swim. So that should leave me something like four hours to do the “run”.

I’ve got five weeks from tomorrow until race day. If I choose to do this, then it’s gonna hurt. There will be nothing comfortable about it. My cardiologist and I have done some of the same races, and he says that the heat during the run is simply terrible – and he’s a native Panameno.

Tomorrow I’ll try a long run. We’ll see what happens then.

I can’t explain why I want to do this. It will certainly be a personal worst time for a half Ironman.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

*Actually, I would rather be able to do the 70.3 in eight and a half hours, but that’s not important right now.