Yesterday, instead of doing my swim workout I sat on the couch and watched episodes of Deadwood while eating jellybeans. What was my excuse, my explanation for skipping the pool? Well, other than wanting to see if Swearengen was going to pass his kidney stones (he did), I had none. Feeling shameful, today I focused on my track workout and had my best run in weeks. Why not make up an excuse and tell myself, “You’re just resting up from the weekend’s workouts,” “You deserve a break,” or “You don’t need to swim”? Because as long as Team Hoyt is racing,...

A couple weeks ago I was all gung-ho about making my triumphant return to working out (once you get to know me you’ll realize that I have a lot of “triumphant returns” to exercising). After my last race at the end of September, I took a couple months off to sit on my ass and get fat (I succeeded too!). I wanted to get back into serious training for the ‘09 season, so I started running, cycling, and killing my triceps in order to get all aggro about exercising again. That lasted about a week until Jason and I both got sick at the same time. I pretty much caught whatever had been...