I’m just going to come right out and say it: swimming is bullshit. Last week my trainer scheduled me to swim a total of over 5800 meters. What the hell. Three days of swimming, three days of stinky chlorine, three days of getting out of the pool and having perma-freezing fingers for the rest of the night. I’m sure Teresa the Dolphin is immune to all of these maladies, but I’m not because I suck at swimming and I feel like my progress is excruciatingly slow. And you want to hear the real kick in the balls? My trainer scheduled a 2750 meter swim and wrote down “total swim time: 40 minutes.” What the crap! I didn’t magically grow gills in 2009. She knows that I’m too ghetto a swimmer to pull out 1.2 miles in under 50 minutes, so how am I supposed to manage 1.7 in 40? Just because I watched Michael Phelps glide his way to eight gold medals doesn’t mean I learned by osmosis! Progress takes time, mofo! I don’t know what it is about swimming, but it feels like every other swim I have goes terribly. One day I’ll have what I think is a good swim. I’ll get in the pool and feel pretty good and think, “I could swim and swim and swim forever!” Then, no joke, the next time I get in the pool I’ll be gasping for air after 4 lengths and flailing my legs like a fool. My shoulder will ache, I’ll swallow roughly a gallon of questionable YMCA water, and I’ll dejectedly watch some a-hole flying back and forth in the lane next to me, doing his fancy flip turns in his one-size-too-small Speedo. (How on earth he glides through the water aerodynamically with those plum smugglers dangling is beyond me.) And don’t get me started on the actual technique. There are at least a dozen things you have to remember to do with your body when you’re swimming. My mind keeps racing and I can barely keep track of it all. When I’m swimming, I’m thinking, “Head down. Don’t look at the ceiling when you breathe. Don’t windmill your arms. Fingers together. High elbows. Do a good ‘catch.’ Finish your damn stroke! Push! Turn on your side. Reach out. No, further. Small kicks — from the hips. Don’t bend your knees. Keep your legs up. Abs tight. Oh, breathe. Breathe!” I’m not coordinated enough to prevent myself from running into corners or tripping up stairs, let alone remembering (and sustaining) 50 swimming tips while I’m flailing in the water. If I focus on my legs, my arms get all stupid. If I’m conscious of improving my catch, my legs go all crooked. It’s like my limbs react oppositely to each other. So yeah, swimming is bullshit. Pool swimming is stupid, open water swimming is really stupid, and dry land swim conditioning classes are uber-stupid (and make my triceps all hurty). I hate it, and yet I subject myself to it a few times a week. Why? Because I am stubborn. Because I begrudgingly want to get faster and look like less of a spazz when I swim. Because one day I’d like to be better than a mediocre athlete. And because there’s no good way to cheat at swimming (scuba gear ain’t exactly subtle), so I guess I’m just going to have to learn. I know, bullshit, isn’t...

Or, as Sir Mix-a-lot would say, “My chir-o-prac-tor don’t want none unless he cracks bones, hon!” And to Nathan, my Magnolia Seattle chiropractor, I’m probably the Mack Daddy or Swass of patients. You see, I visit a chiropractor and a physical therapist for various maladies, and both of them have pretty harsh things to say about my neck and back. In their words, working on my back is like “pressing down on concrete.” While a healthy back, muscles and joints should have a bit of spongy give to them, my back is as hard as Sharon Stone’s face in Catwoman (I apologize for the terrible movie reference). Both the chiro and the PT recommended I get massage therapy at least once a month to help loosen my tight muscles. I’ve previously gotten three massages in my life. Here’s a brief drill down of each one: Massage #1 was given to me by my triathlete coach’s massage therapist, Richard. She referred me to him after I was complaining of pain near my right shoulder blade. He’s a pleasant, calm Asian man who works out of his house. I spent an hour laying face-down listening to Jack Johnson while Richard worked on my shoulder (at one point, he took what felt like a running start and leaned all of his body weight onto my back, which I found pretty amusing). I liked Richard a lot but found him to be a bit out of my price range for regular visits. Massage #2 was courtesy of a no-nonsense woman I tried out for a session. Her hands were brutally magical (I’m a fan of deep, hard massages to the point of being unbearable — the harder, the better) but she talked non-stop and complained about how expensive it is to travel nowadays. I don’t particularly care to have conversations with surly masseuses, so I ruled her out for subsequent visits. Massage #3 was in Cancun, Mexico, after the Ironman Cancun 70.3 (I’ll write a separate post about that race soon). Jason and I booked a couple’s massage at our resort, and two Mexican masseuses poked and prodded at us for what was probably ninety minutes but seemed like an eternity. The whole ordeal was uncomfortable for both of us. Jason was uneasy because it was his first ever massage, and he was paranoid about virtually everything the woman did. When she rubbed some aromatic cream on her hands and stuck them under his nose, instructing him to “Breathe deep,” he wondered if he was going to get knocked out and wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing. Also, he put up a stink about having to get nekkid. I, meanwhile, had the pleasure of my masseuse giving me a long, grueling massage all over my horribly sunburned back (that deserves its own post as well), which felt more like I was being viciously tenderized for a lavish cannibal buffet. I don’t particularly like getting massages, but since my doctors urged me to consider them for health purposes I booked an appointment with a massage therapy facility for Attempt #4. The massage was good timing since my back and neck had been bothering me recently and I had been having frustrating workouts. It also doesn’t help that I get paid to hunch in front of a computer all day. The fact that I don’t have a Quasimodo hump yet is astounding. Anyway, I booked a massage at a new place in Capitol Hill. After filling out a rough approximation of my medical history, I met with a woman who looked vaguely like tailie Ana Lucia from Lost but...

I don’t know what it is about my running speed, but I’m either too slow or too fast to run with a buddy or in a group. It’s like I give off some sort of anti-social pheromone (it’s probably sweat, which I do a lot) whereby people catch a whiff of it and are motivated to run a couple hundred yards ahead of me. Case in point: my recent track workout. I showed up for my first track night in like a month, but the pattern was eerily familiar. We all do some warm up laps and some drills before Teresa tells us what the workout is and assigns a pace for each of us. Every single time she does this, she assigns everyone a pace and seems to forget about me. I ask her “What’s my pace?” and she gives me one, then she scans the group and tries to find someone who runs at the same pace as me. And, I swear to God, whoever she pairs me with ends up running like a minute frickin’ faster than what Teresa assigned us as our pace. We all take off in a group and I check my watch to make sure I’m running at an appropriate speed, then I look up and see that the group I’m supposed to be running with is a million paces ahead of me, competing in some sort of unknown foot race that I’m most certainly going to lose. I mentally shake my fist at them and call them jerk face overachievers for running faster than they said they would. I then proceed to run by myself. This happens to me a lot. The same thing happens with Jason. We start off on a long run together and he half-ass jogs right in front of me because he thinks he needs to hang back and run at my pace. But then if I need to stop for whatever reason (e.g., I have a cramp, that hill nearly killed me, I’m fat and out of shape), he begrudgingly slows down and walks alongside me for roughly twelve seconds before whining, “Can’t you at least jog?” Then I snap at him to run at his own pace without me, which he ends up doing. He trots back to find me every so often, which I both hate and like (hate because I hate that he’s faster than me, like because at least he’s not completely ditching me). I’m starting to think that I’m destined to run by myself because apparently there is nobody in the entire Seattle metropolitan area who runs at the same pace as me. It’s like the Farmer in the Dell and I’m the cheese who stands alone. Or, in this scenario, I suppose I’m the cheese who runs alone. Hi-ho-the-dairy-o, the cheese runs alone. I’ve gotten pretty much used to it at this point, though. Besides, I’m not much of a talker when I run. I once ran around Greenlake with someone who talked my ear off the entire loop, with me offering up the occasional grunt and winded “Uh huh.” But still, there’s something about having a presence next to you that’s somewhat comforting. It’s like you mentally push each other to keep going and maintain a good pace. You don’t have to exchange words or have a lengthy, heart wrenching conversation about the meaning of life or anything. Oftentimes all you need is the physical presence of someone next to you to encourage you to keep going. And I don’t have that. (Well, Jason is pretty encouraging when we do our long runs, but I find his encouragement to...