Morning Music….
Posted in Music
No videos, just the two long playlists that got me through last weekend’s bigger workouts.
First, the 56-mile bike:
Next, the 9-mile run:
This Week in Training – Week 16 – Last Big Week Before the Tune-Up Race
This was a significant week for two reasons. First, it was my last week of work before summer break. Second, it was my last build week before I taper and “race” this Sunday.
I put race in quotation marks because this is really just a supported training day. Even so, I’m nervous as heck about it.
Swim 🏊
- Total swims: 2
- Total distance: 6,025 yards
- Total time: 1:55
I was supposed to get in a third swim, but between finishing up school and a hard weekend of training, I dropped it. No regrets. The volume was still solid and I felt good in the water.
Bike 🚴
- Total rides: 5
- Total distance: 83.9 miles
- Total time: 5:31
Four of those rides were commutes, which absolutely count, but aren’t quite the same as dedicated training rides.
The big ride was Saturday when I rode the Rockford 70.3 course for the second time. This time I completely dialed in my nutrition. Big thanks to Claude AI for helping me think through fueling and hydration.
Ironically, the ride was slower than my previous attempt when I nearly dehydrated myself into another dimension. But I felt much stronger throughout. I intentionally kept my heart rate lower and rode within myself.
Afterward, I did a 15-minute run off the bike.
It stunk.
But I learned a few things:
- Walk for the first 60-90 seconds to bring heart rate down.
- Start slower than I think I should.
- Remember that race day should be cooler.
When I started that brick run, it was 81 degrees. Sunday’s forecast calls for a high of 74. That difference is enormous. I do not like hot weather.
Run 🏃
- Total runs: 4 (including the brick run)
- Total distance: 23.2 miles
- Total time: 3:47
This was actually an increase in run volume.
The highlight was Sunday’s 9-mile run. It was one of my slower long runs, but considering it came less than 24 hours after a long ride on the Rockford course, I’ll gladly take it. I got it done and wasn’t that far off my normal pace.
Total Training Time 🧮
- Total time: 11 hours 13 minutes
My biggest training week of the cycle.
Reflections ✍️
Now comes the part that feels wrong.
The taper.
Today is a rest day. Thursday is another rest day.
Tomorrow I’ll do a short open-water swim. Officially, it’s to get comfortable in the wetsuit. Unofficially, it’s to freeze to death in Lake Michigan.
The rest of the week is ridiculously short workouts. Twenty to thirty-minute rides. Twenty to thirty-minute runs. Just enough movement to stay loose.
I’m putting a lot of faith in the taper.
Sure, my bike was slower this weekend, but I had already run six miles and swum an hour the day before, not to mention all the accumulated fatigue from the week. On Sunday, I’ll be racing on fresh legs. That matters. The cooler temperatures matter. The nutrition plan matters. Even “legal drafting” on the bike course matters. Six bike lengths back is still six bike lengths back.
Mostly, though, I need to trust the process.
If I’m being honest, I’ve probably spent most of the last two weeks somewhere between nervous and a panic attack. I don’t know for sure it’s the race, but I don’t know any other reason. The good news is that once it’s over, I’ll stop wondering and start knowing. I’ve also started planning the next phase. I ran my Ironman plan through Claude and adjusted it for the three weeks I’ll be in Utah this summer. That should make the transition smoother after the race.
For now, though, the focus is simple:
- Rest.
- Recover.
- Enjoy the first week of summer. Try to calm down and reset my existence a little.
- One week to transition into summer.
Morning Music…
Posted in Morning Music, Music
The Sweet, Elusive Sound of Absolutely Nothing…
Posted in Old Man Yelling at the Sky
I have officially reached the age where my number one enemy is noise.
It’s the dark side of my love/hate relationship with Chicago. Sometimes I love this city, but Christ, it is relentless. It’s the diesel trucks groaning on the highway. Yesterday, it was some guy on a motorcycle in traffic who apparently felt the entire gridlock needed to experience his exhaust note. It’s being under the L tracks at the exact moment a train rumbles overhead, vibrating your teeth out of your skull. It’s the sirens, the unnecessary honking, and the cars with aftermarket subwoofers tuned to a frequency that literally rattles my windows.
You’d think a high school classroom might offer a brief sanctuary. You’d be wrong.
Today was the last day with students. In between periods, instead of letting us enjoy the impending sweet relief of summer, the administration decided to blare music over the intercom. It wasn’t just music; it was tinny, screechy, and turned up to eleven. It was actually physically painful in my ears. Combine that with hundreds of teenagers yelling over the din, and my central nervous system was ready to check out.
I am just so incredibly, profoundly tired of the noise.
In fact, I am so desperate for a break from the auditory assault that I did the unthinkable today: I skipped a workout. I pushed the training block to tomorrow for the sole purpose of going straight home to sit in my backyard and read. “Quiet” in a Chicago backyard is relative, of course. I’ll still hear the hum of traffic and the neighbors’ lawnmowers and trains in the distance, but at least it won’t be actively assaulting my eardrums.
It’s times like these where the siren song of Utah gets incredibly loud – or rather, incredibly quiet.
When we’re out there, the silence is a physical presence. Granted, we live near a major road, so if you’re sitting outside, you can hear a faint hum. But usually, the ambient bubble of the hot tub drowns it out, and the second you step inside, the world goes completely dead. No sirens. No people blaring bad bass from a Honda Civic. No commuter trains shaking the foundation. Just stillness.
The irony in all this is that, as I get older, I am systematically losing my hearing.
It’s a documented fact. It’s the main reason I started taking ASL classes and why I still spend time watching sign language videos every single day. But here is my dirty little secret: I’m completely fine with it. People ask if I’m going to get hearing aids, and my answer is a hard no. Why would I pay thousands of dollars to turn the volume back up on a world that won’t shut up? I don’t want to hear most of what’s going on out there anyway.
I don’t need to hear the intercom, the traffic, or the motorcycle guys compensating for various life shortages. I just want the world to be still. And if my ears want to cooperate by fading to black, I’m happy to let them lead the way.
The Golden Cage and the TiVo Life
Posted in Old Man Yelling at the Sky, Work
Right now, I am getting paid to do absolutely nothing.
Seriously. If you walked into my classroom today, you’d find me sitting at my desk, watching TV, messing around with video games, noodling on a bass guitar, and texting friends. Occasionally, I leave the building to go for an hour-long run or a bike ride.
The reason for this sudden, tax-funded retirement preview? I teach high school seniors. They graduated a week ago. Across all eight periods of the school day, my remaining roster totals exactly three students. Two are in one class, one is in another, and both of those periods are completely wrapped up by 10:50 a.m. After that, my classroom is a ghost town, and I am a highly compensated piece of furniture. Heck, most days, two of those three students wander to their girlfriends’ classroom, and I have nobody.
I can’t even pretend to be productive and plan for next year. Thanks to the perpetual bureaucratic mystery of public education, there is a solid 35% chance I’ll get laid off, and zero indication of which classes I’d actually be teaching if I stay. Unit planning is impossible. So, I sit.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s awesome. I will take a free paycheck any day of the week, and I’m not crying into my coffee about it. But even after eight years in a classroom, this forced confinement highlights the one thing about employment I still absolutely loathe: the schedule.
Before I became a teacher, I spent fourteen years running my own law firm. I was the boss, the employee, and the scheduler. If I had court, I would go to court. If I had a client meeting, I would go to the office. But if I had a mountain of police reports, financial records, or audio wiretaps to review? I could do that anywhere. I could sit in a coffee shop, at my desk, or out on the back deck at home. If I wanted to look at discovery from noon to 2:00 p.m., I did. If I wanted to use those hours to go for a long ride or run errands, I did that instead and read the files at midnight.
It was the TiVo life. I could pause the grind, live my life when I wanted to live it, and catch up on the work on my own timeline.
Granted, the TiVo life had its reruns. There were plenty of times it completely stunk – like getting a call on my birthday at 10:00 p.m. and spending until 3:00 a.m. in a bleak police station because a client just got busted, again!. But the flip side was priceless. I was able to pick up my kids from school most days and just sit there watching them play on the playground, completely untethered from a timecard.
Now? I’m trapped by the bell. I have a million things I want to do, but they all have to be crammed into a strict, narrow window between the time I get home and the time I go to bed, or punted to the weekend.
With summer break looming, that craving for autonomy is screaming. I’m counting down the days until I can once again do what I want, when I want, or at least choose the damn order I do them in.
Lately, the daydreaming has taken a specific turn. I find myself thinking about walking away from teaching and dipping my toes back into the legal waters. Nothing crazy. Just taking on a few court-appointed federal criminal cases. Go to court when required, take the massive boxes of FBI or DEA discovery, and review them wherever the hell I feel like sitting. Meet the client on a mutual schedule. Control the time.
The older I get, the more poignant that becomes. The clock is ticking, and I’m literally running out of time.
So as much as I’m enjoying the absurdity of getting a paycheck to watch TV and play video games this week, the novelty wears off fast. I’d rather be traveling. I’d rather be hiking, paddle boarding, or doing something as mundane as cleaning out a junk drawer or organizing a closet at home. I want to get things done on my own terms, rather than just burning daylight in an empty classroom.
Even if the thing I’m getting done is just sipping a hot cup of coffee out in the woods, on my own watch.
The Known Unknowns of an Eleven-Year Itch…
It turns out Donald Rumsfeld was a triathlete. Or at least, he perfectly captured the mental degradation that happens two weeks out from a race.
On paper, I’m fine. The base is there. The logbook shows the yards, the miles, and the hours. But there is a massive difference between having the physical capacity to grind out a finish and remembering how to actually execute a multi-sport race when you haven’t stood on a starting line in eleven years. Eleven. Entire political regimes have risen and fallen since I last transitioned from a wetsuit to a bike.
The panic didn’t creep in; it hit me like a crosswind. I was out in Rockford two weeks ago, grinding through a miserable ride on the actual course, when a stray thought bounced into my brain: Oh, yeah. Hydration and nutrition. How exactly am I handling that again?
That’s the Rumsfeld problem. It’s not the things I know I need to fix. It’s the “known unknowns” – the things I know I’ve forgotten, but can’t quite recall until it’s too late. What else am I missing? Am I going to rack my bike and realize I forgot body glide? Am I going to fumble with my bib number? Is my transition setup going to look like a yard sale?
Some is coming back. This morning, on my bike commute, I thought, “Hey, where am I going to eat the night before the race? And what am I going to eat?” It’s little things like that.
Then there’s the swim. Rockford is a downstream river swim. Mechanically, it should be easy-ish – the current does some of the heavy lifting. But the cold reality is that when I jump into that river on June 14th, it will be my first open-water swim event in eleven years. No practice in the murk. No sighting adjustments. Just straight from the pristine, black-lined bottom of the indoor pool to river water. It’s a hell of a way to get reacquainted with the sport.
If I could rewrite the script, I wouldn’t be doing this. In a logical world, the progression is simple: an Olympic distance to dust off the cobwebs, a 70.3 to test the endurance, and then the big dance at the 140.6 in September. In fact, the training plan explicitly called for an Olympic-distance race right about now, pushing the half-Ironman further down the calendar. But the race schedule gods didn’t consult my training plan. The local calendar didn’t line up, the dates didn’t work, and so here we are. I skipped a step. I’m staring down a 70.3 as a “warm-up.”
It’s stupid, but it’s what I have.
The plan for this weekend is damage control. I’m driving back out to Rockford to ride the course again. No illusions of grandeur, just re-familiarizing myself with the asphalt. Afterward, I’ll throw on the running shoes for a quick one- or two-mile brick run off the bike, mostly just to remind my legs of that specific, awful sensation of turning over after ninety kilometers in the saddle. I’ll practice a transition to run (complete with a fake race bib holder).
At this point, the romanticism of the return is completely gone. I don’t want a poetic breakthrough, and I don’t need a PR. I just want to get this specific weekend over with so I can close the loop on the unknowns and get back to the work I know how to do.
Morning Music
Posted in Morning Music, Music
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