Last night when I was at track, my coach Teresa, with a big grin on her face, blurted out two big announcements. The first was that one of my teammates had gotten engaged, which I knew about thanks to Facebook (nonetheless, congratulations once again, Karissa!). Maybe now that Karissa will be busy with wedding planning, I can finally catch up to her swim speed. (I say this with 100% sarcasm because she is insanely fast in the water and I am dumbfounded by how she does it–I’m convinced she stows some fins and a small motor underneath a dock or something before races.) The second piece of...

I swear, I must be the only person alive who seems to be getting worse the more she tries to swim. I’m like the Benjamin Button of swimming — the more time I spend in the water, the crappier I seem to get. My good swims are at about a 25-33%, meaning one out of every three or four swims actually feels decent. On the rare chance I”ll have what I think is a “good” swim workout (meaning I was just tragically slow instead of abysmally slow), the next 2-3 swims will be freaking awful and I’ll beat myself up over how hopeless I am until my body throws me a bone with a...

When you spend a decent amount of time training with fitness-oriented people, you often get sucked into extra-curricular activities that have an athletic or healthy twist. Like the time I went to my coach’s bachelorette weekend and ended up riding 80 miles through a canyon. Or the time I went to a dinner party that turned out to be gluten, dairy, chicken, various nuts, and egg-free. Or when a couple of weeks ago I did a “holidazzle” run with some of the fittest and fastest females in Seattle. It’s my fault, really. I accept these invitations knowing full well I’m in over...

Every once in a while I make a return to yoga as if I’m trying it out for the first time and have forgotten how much I “nothing” it. It’s like forgetting how crappy candy corn is for 11 months out of the year, only to rediscover it in October and remember how waxy it tastes. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give hot yoga a try because I’m doing two tropical destination half Ironman races next season and figured the humid yoga room could potentially help a bit with acclimation. I’ve done hot yoga a couple times. It’s not bad, but since I’m naturally a...

I’ve been forcing myself to go to the group swims held every other weekend in an effort to improve my swim splits this coming season from “abysmal” to “passably mediocre.” I went to the first one on dead legs thanks to two hours of workouts beforehand, then missed the second group swim because I was running on empty and needed a rest day. The third class was this past weekend, and as always, I dreaded it because it involved me getting into a pool and using horrible form to propel myself through chilly chlorinated water. For this particular swim class, however, Teresa...