Last week Teresa must have weighed all her objectives and settled on one that was especially important to her: Operation Kill Rebecca’s Legs. And so she embarked on a week-long plan to destroy my little Asian stumps and succeeded quite handily. The week’s workouts weren’t too bad…who am I kidding, the entire week sucked. Let’s revisit the schedule of pain: Monday: dryland. I was already feeling kind of tired and Bridget sensed fatigue and pounced, making me do lunges, squats, burpees, and a bunch of other dumb crap because she’s sadistic and mean. Swim:...

I mentioned in my Rev 3 recap that in the days leading up to the race, my left hamstring got really tight and that the hammy and groin muscle gave me grief during the cycling portion of the race. It’s been intermittently sore since then, so I finally hunkered down and saw the physical therapist because I’m starting to get tired of being a couch potato. I can only stay in and play videogames on a sunny day so many times before I start feeling like a fat turd, so a couple weeks ago I trekked over to Fremont to see the doc. He instantly diagnosed me not with hamstring issues but hip flexor...

On Monday I went to dryland strength conditioning, and that day Bridget decided to get cute with us and change up the routine a bit. She did a 30 seconds on/30 seconds rest/30 seconds on workout where we’d be at a station doing reps for half a minute before getting a break. That’s all well and good if the person running the workout is paying attention to the clock and timing everything properly; unfortunately, a couple times Bridget would get too caught up in watching everyone’s form to remember to check her watch and realize that she had been punishing us well past the :30 mark. (She...

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. (I’ll devote a later post, tentatively titled “An Ode to My Chiropractor,” to my good sport of a chiro.) 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...

One of my greatest triathlon weaknesses (aside from running and biking, of course) is swimming. I don’t like swimming. I feel like my stamina in the water sucks, I drag my arm too much, my turnover is too slow, I’m either too hot or too cold, my wet suit is ghetto and ill-fitting, and I find swim training boring and craptacular. My disdain for swimming has reflected in my swim times: every race except for one has resulted in disappointment. I want to improve a lot in 2009, and I figured that a huge area of opportunity would be improving my swim. I think I can shave anywhere from 5-15 minutes off my...