Thinking Too Much, Probably

I’m not in the habit of explaining and endorsing somebody’s viewpoints, but I’ll throw this out there and see if it sticks. To be honest, I’m naturally cynical (surprise!) about people who act like they have all the answers, such as self-help writers and motivational speakers. Maybe that works for some of you, but I think anybody who asks me for, say, a donation or something like that is motivated by more than just making me ‘feel’ better. And isn’t taking charge of my life the first step in making me feel better? If so, for me taking charge means not listening to somebody’s tapes or reading somebody’s books on how I should approach life, because I already took charge of all that.

To begin with, I have a weakness for PBS documentaries and educational shows. Not the crowd-pleasers, necessarily, such as what you always see on Nature (‘Lions of the Serengeti at Dinnertime’ or at the other extreme ‘Science Isolates the Canine Gene That Makes Puppies So Damned Cute’), but the stuff you see in the middle of the night before all the pre-school alphabet-shoving programs begin. So lately I’ve been setting my DVR for the tried-and-true, such as The Western Tradition and now, the questionably-titled Philosophy, A Guide to Happiness, a series from a few years back. ‘Philosophy’ is based on a book by British writer Alain de Botton, 'The Consolations of Philosophy'. It’s a half hour series that only runs three total, and that half hour chunk is about all my brain can handle at one time. Anyway, Mr. de Botton identifies and explains particular viewpoints on emotions ranging from anger to happiness and much in-between, all in an easy-going, soothing British accent that makes everything seem painfully obvious (I’m not sure if it’s on most local PBS stations, but you can always check, like I said, it’s been on a while).

So for example, during one of his programs he examined Nietzsche’s philosophy that ‘only through pain, suffering, and hard work do you achieve happiness’. I completed a 10-mile tempo run on a goddamn treadmill this morning, does that count? By the way, that’s a picture of Friederich, a.k.a. Laughing Boy, above.

And there was one question from Schopenhauer: Why is everyone so angry about things they can’t control? What if we approached life more pessimistically, and by assuming that the worst would happen every day, wouldn’t we be better prepared to deal with life’s setbacks since there would be no nasty surprises?

Well, I can’t say that my outlook on optimism or pessimism has been changed by a TV show (or a book I haven’t read yet), but at the same time I’ll take what I can get from dead Western Philosophers. At least they’re not trying to sell me something. In the meantime, you might want to check out the show, or Alain de Botton’s website, or anything of his other written works, maybe they’re at the local library. Anything that gets the brain cells going in the direction of self-awareness may not be such a bad thing. In the meantime, I will someday soon approach a 20-mile training run armed with a Nietzschean outlook. At least that sounds better than being armed with nasty-tasting vanilla-‘flavored’ gu.


Check Out:

Alain de Botton; Video – Nietzsche on Hardship

’The Consolations of Philosophy’ at Amazon

Race Report: Manhattan Half Marathon

After all the fun I’ve been having in the pool and training for Boston, I almost forgot to get stressed out over the first NYC borough half marathon of the year. So yesterday was the Manhattan Half, two 6-mile loops of Central Park plus 1.1 in case you hadn’t had enough. I didn’t take any pictures because I forgot my camera and besides, pictures from races all start to look the same after a while anyway.

It was 31 degrees, cloudy, and crowded. Just under 5000 would finish, and that seemed about right considering the droves of pushy runners around. After finishing a moderately-difficult tempo run on Friday, and an overly-long (10 miles) easy run on Saturday, I went into the race too tired and I should’ve known better. But just having one sport to think about, or obsess about over the course of the day was a welcome change.

Funny thing was, and this used to never happen, I kept running into people I knew, before and after. I’d planned to meet up with running pal Susie before the race, and did, but it was just one acquaintance after another, on the course and past the finish line. Later on, a runner came up to me and said ‘Philly?’, and as it turned out it was someone I didn’t know who had seen me running in my old gym in Philadelphia three years ago, and had remembered me. Small running world.

Well, I could go on about the usual race stuff, people running too slowly who get right up front, nylon pants-wearers making that constant swish-swish noise, hearing ‘Born to be Wild’ blasted out of some runner’s headphones from ten feet away (I’m not trying to be funny, that actually happened)… but I won’t. But I will say the race was tiring, and I pushed myself to the 80-85% threshold, and that got real old on the rolling hills of CP. The last steep-and-unhappy hill was at mile 11, and I was cursing it even though I’ve run it a million times. And I had planned to race with running friend Tim, then I couldn’t get up to the marker where we were supposed to meet before the start, and I spent the whole race running just a little bit faster to find him up ahead. I never did, and later on we met up after the race and it was only then I discovered that he’d been stuck in a port-a-john line at the beginning, started late, and was running behind me the whole time. He still beat my finish/chip time, so I’m going to have to work in a little kick-ass rematch in the spring. He’s a roll-out-of-bed-and-run-a-PR kind of runner, and I just hate that, but then again, so am I sometimes, so I’ll shut the F up.

After finishing at an average pace I shouldn’t have done (7:04), I was definitely fatigued. And as it would turn out, soaking wet under the layers, and despite checking extra clothing and throwing it all on later I still managed to get the shivers and chills that left me more tired than before. I don’t live too far away from these races, but a 20-minute post-race walk in freezing temperatures when you’ve got wet layers on is both difficult and stupid, planning-wise. But I kept running into people, and yakking, and I’ll just have to save that crap for warmer races.

So I acquitted myself well in the race, though no PR, but that’s OK. There’s another half in The Bronx in two weeks, so we’ll see about that one. In the meantime, my swimming coach took pity on me this morning in my pre-dawn workout; my quads were feeling tired as I recreated the first ten minutes of the movie ‘Jaws’, and believe me, I wasn’t playing the shark.

Mad World

Not as in ‘angry’, but ‘mad’ as in batshit crazy.

I’m sure nobody out there needs too much convincing that we live on a planet that’s gone nuts over the wrong things, but honestly…

So this morning I hit the pool, and just as I’m sinking to the bottom I realize that I should have left a note at the front desk asking that if something happens to me, please speed dial Mary-Kate Olsen immediately. If you don’t get what I’m joking about, you haven’t been watching the news much this week. Or rather, the tabloid news that Americans crave by the truckload.

It’s very sad that Mr. Ledger died this week, but this city has just lost all it’s remaining marbles among the five boroughs. I didn’t know the actor, but I saw him with his wife in the village last summer, and he looked like an everyday guy just walking down the street, and in interviews he seemed vaguely embarrassed about being a celebrity. He was his own worst critic, something we can all understand, and if he could see it he’d probably be appalled over the media circus surrounding his death.

And now the cameras are everywhere, all night, in ghoulish delight over the latest tidbit of this week’s edition of ‘too-young-to-die’ theater.

This afternoon it occurred to me that Mr. Ledger had been spending the last couple of nights down the street; since the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home is six blocks away from Cranky HQ, I decided I would head on down there to take some of my own pictures of celebrity media idiots taking their pictures of the arriving mourners for today's viewing. For those who don’t know, the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home is where everybody who is anybody in New York City stops before making that final road trip through eternity. Sort of a ‘Last Chance Saloon’ or ‘Last Starbucks Before Boarding Your Flight’ where you get one last stop to check in before the final check… out. I’ve been inside the place for a friend’s mother’s viewing, and it’s small in a New York City overpriced 2-bedroom apartment way. Tiny elevator, too, manned by a kindly, very soft-spoken, understanding guy that’s totally out-of-place in THIS town, let me tell you.

So off I go, and see limos pull up, and nerdy paparazzo with cameras that cost more than any of us will make in a month, and there are dozens of folks out there just waiting for somebody, anybody wearing black to show up. I didn't spend much time at the death watch, but I did get to take pictures of the on-camera bimbos and himbos discussing the early demise of a young actor like it was on par with the Kennedy assassination.

So what’s my point… I just think we need to get a grip on what’s more important, and what passes for news. Sure, the presidential campaign feels like it’s been going on since A.D. 79, but at least that’s news. Stocks taking a dive is news, too. The death of an actor teaches us nothing other than tragedy can happen anytime, even though that's worth remembering. But not worth flogging over and over, every single damn day. Well, at least we’re not hearing about Britney for the moment.

Of course, I will get my wish for the media to move on as a certain football game becomes the next New York City obsession. I can see the headlines now, ‘Eli Manning in Paper Cut Shocker’. So anybody out there want a city? I got one here, and it’s batshit crazy.

iPod Friday 24: Feedback

Thanks to all of you who responded to all the teeth-gnashing and fist-shaking posts I’ve managed to throw out over the last week or so. The feedback is appreciated, I don’t say it often enough, so thank you. The tri-experts all know what I have to do, and know how to do it, and thanks go to them, especially. HOWEVER, Ms. Claire gonna get her ass kicked or hit up side the head with a big iron skillet into next Tuesday if she keeps THAT stuff up. I was going to get all up in a Tyler Perry/Martin Lawrence/Eddie Murphy career move on her and throw on a fat suit and play a large-and-in-charge, take-no-shit black woman stereotype and then get all clocky on her ass, ‘cause that’s what she’s asking for… but then I decided I’d be better off hitting the pool like she says. But Miss E. Girlfriend better watch out unless she want a throwdown! I see you in Boston, baby.

Love, Cranky.

Miss Jackson, If You’re Nasty - Feedback

What’s Goin’ On

I haven’t written much in the last week because as some pain-in-the-ass once said a million times, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Not that I’m hating on myself for not becoming triathlete of the year after three weeks of training, I just got tired of listening to myself mentally discuss my ability, or lack thereof. I don’t even like it whenever somebody uses ‘lack thereof’, so I’ll just stop that discussion there.

So far this year I’ve been to two tri seminars (‘Scheduling a Training Plan’, ‘Heart Rate/VO2 Zone Training’), read two triathlon books, joined a gym with a fairly unbelievable pool (pictured above), joined a tri ‘team (I have my usual reservations about that, more later), hired a swimming coach for private lessons, started those sessions, done several hour-long 20-mile bike sessions, done a couple of 2.5 hour long runs in advance of Boston in April, all the while keeping my running mileage at 40-50 miles a week. And sticking to my usual weight training schedule that has made me gain weight and increase the likelihood of sinking to the bottom of the pool. Overall, I’m averaging two hours of ‘exercise’ a day and I feel like I’m just scratching the surface.

The credit card bills have arrived, and the debt is already in the four figures, no problem, And I’ve barely started spending on all the bike-related stuff. Training better start coming together before spring, because I’m not going to want to be throwing money at the three-sport lifestyle for months if I don’t enjoy it on some level, be it through better health or through satisfying some personal masochistic tendencies. We’ll see.

So right now swimming is akin to a root canal, but then again that’s giving root canals a bad rap. But as the coach put it, don’t think about what you can’t do or negatively judge what you just did, just assess your abilities, make a small goal and work on it. I have major issues with breathing underwater, more about that later when I’m in the mood for self-psychoanalysis. For now I’ll just say that the collapsed lung I suffered (along with major surgery) a dozen years ago has made me just a little nervous about putting myself in situations where breathing is restricted. So for the time being I’m just trying to improve my pool experience comfort zone from ‘root canal’ to ‘teeth cleaning’. Insert happy face emoticon HERE, motherfuckers.

More later.

BBBLLBBBBLLLLLUUUUUURRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH

Last Thursday was my first swimming workout. The letters, as arranged above, accurately describe the sound of me exhaling underwater as I act like I have a cinder block tied around my neck.

I alluded to all this recently, so allow me to expand and discuss and talk about myself endlessly, which is what I always knew what blogging could be about, and now I get to achieve blog nirvana. If you’d like to skip the meandering prose and pathos and cloyingly self-deprecating humor, I’ll just get to the point, and that is, I SUCK AT SWIMMING. Otherwise, read on, oh intrepid readers and fellow punishment gluttons.

So my running club has a sister Tri organization composed of several reasonably well-grounded triathletes, and every couple of weeks they have a nice swim workout or bike ride that apparently engenders camaraderie devoid of the competitive BS I hate seeing whenever you get a bunch of hyper-athletic assholes together. So a handful of decent swimmers meet at a public pool on Roosevelt Island and do drills for an hour or so, and it’s only $5. So thanks to Tim, who is the same Tim who I ran with during his first triathlon last summer, and impetuously ran the 60K with me last November, I was encouraged to come on over for much-needed training. Too intimidated to jump into the pool facility I just signed up for, I decided fast friends would give me the icebreaker I needed to move forward.

I’ve run to Roosevelt Island before, but it’s a 5-6 mile distance, and I wasn’t in the mood to find construction stopping my run, so I took the tram to the island from mid-town. After all these years, I’d never been on the tram, it’s a cable car that crosses the east river, it’s the same one you see in the climax of the first Spiderman movie. It was already nighttime, and commuters were jamming the car. The scenery and skyline was just gorgeous, and I didn’t want to get off. Sometimes you really should listen to that inner voice.

So I get to the island and the facility, which is OK, one 25-meter pool with people looking like they know what the hell they’re doing out there. Soon Tim shows up, and then the rest of the nice-looking people who will later turn away when they catch sight of my swimming form. However, for now, the two coaches are very patient and want to see me head on down the lane so as to check out where I’m at. Well, as it turns out… have you ever seen a big, black dog dive into a lake to get a stick out? And seen them coming back slowly, stick in mouth, head out of the water? Well, that’s what I WISH I looked like. I was a sight to behold… flailing, head too far up out of the water, gasping for air, cramping almost immediately. Turn away! Turn away!

So Coach Claudia calls in Coach Les who gently asks me if I don’t mind doing a few drills and laps with a board under my arm, and I’m like, no, I don’t mind because I can’t breathe out there, and breathing is quite often important, and if it’s going to take the kiddie board, bring it on. So I try that, and look like Little Ricky getting his first swimming lesson. Things improve ever so slowly, but I am not happy. And I start to clockwatch, just like in 10th grade P.E. class. A half hour later Coach Claudia tells me that last lap was SO much better, and I’m ready to have her children, which would be quite a trick for both of us, I imagine.

By the end of the session, I’m happy to say nobody was pointing and laughing or anything like they would’ve in grade school, but all those bad ‘last-one-picked-for-the-team’ memories certainly returned. Plus both my calf muscles decided to turn to granite with charley-horse pain undoubtedly due to bad kicking form. And later that night I discovered a nice cut on the bottom of my right foot that made running the next day lots more interesting.

All I can say, or ‘assess’ as one of the tri coaches I know would put it, is that I did get better over the course of the hour. But what a demoralizing night. And I’m supposed to be able to do this for an hour or more in a triathlon?

I showered, dressed, packed and made my way to the subway stop with Tim. ‘Maybe next year an Ironman?’ he asks. WHAT? EXCUSE ME? Of course, I didn’t really say that out loud, but my face said it all. I immediately longed for the good old days of crisp, white cups filled with water on tilted card tables at mile markers, and I saw myself edging over, in slow-motion, to grab a cup, down it, and continue on to some wondrous finish line realization that I’d just PR’d. But I snapped back to reality, or at least my version of it. My calves were locked, so I shuffled onto the subway car and trudged home, head hanging low.

Now, now, I know, I know, shut up, cut the whining, get on out there again, and besides, you at least got a little better, all in just an hour. I know all this. So I made the decision to seek some swimming lessons beyond just showing up for a team workout and expecting instruction fueled by pity. And to get better so as to not scare the children in the pool. That’s right. DO IT FOR THE CHILDREN! Because, as the bumper sticker says, ‘Children are our greatest natural resource’. I remembered this the next day when I put on new bike shorts that felt like a loaded diaper.

Now that I mention it, is training for a triathlon like returning to your youth? Does the swim part correspond to being in the womb? Is your birth just the ‘T1’ transition? What does that make biking and running? Do you think I have too much time on my hands to come up with this shit?

OK, OK. I need to figure out what the hell I’m doing in a pool. And I will. If I don’t, it won’t be because I didn’t try. As one coach ominously said to me last week after I asked him about training for Boston and training for a half ironman at the same time, ‘you’re not a runner anymore… you’re a triathlete.’

Well, la-di-frickin’-da.

Dizz Knee Land

Posts will certainly be coming soon from Angry and RGL about their respective performances today in Orlando, but I am happy to report they’re both done with all THAT. It was 72 degrees and 96% humidity at 6AM, according to the NYT weather update… Hmm…

I was checking AR’s arrival at key points on-line this morning, and the results weren’t posted fast enough for my taste, but relief set in once the finish time arrived, hours after it had been achieved. AR's got a PR. Now he knows better than anybody else how it felt and how he feels now (he’ll probably have something to say about that), so I can’t put words into his mouth or thoughts in his head, but now he’s done it. A really long race, that is, and congratulations to him… he’s no longer a marathon virgin, ‘cause Brother Angry is all growed-up…

And Ms. RGL also finished up nicely, especially considering she ran the damn half marathon yesterday, too. Congratulations to her, I hope she got lots of pictures and had lots of fun along the way.

Whew! I wasn’t there, but I thought of you guys this morning while slogging through a particularly tiring long-ish run. I had to cut it short because I was failing to keep any energy level going, probably because just knowing that some folks had started running at 6 and were still going at 10 made me tired. Better you than me (this time), but then again, you got medals, and deserve them.

Congratulations!