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: Pacing/conditioning workout. Teresa tried to drown me by incorporating sculling into my workout and very nearly succeeded because I am terrible at sculling and think it shouldn’t be a thing that exists.

Tuesday: track. Oh goody, a run test. I ran as hard as I could for 30 minutes, sucking in air like a Biggest Loser contestant on week one. On the plus side, I PR’d for a 5k and posted a good pace for the half hour test. On the minus side, the workout was hard and hurty and I got a wicked side stitch that hurt through the next day.

Wednesday: dryland. Admittedly this wasn’t on my schedule but I had already signed up so I went anyway. Teresa showed some mercy on me and gave me minimal leg workouts so she could lull me into a false sense of security before destroying my lower limbs with the rest of the week’s workouts.

Cycling class: Who gives a bike test the first day of cycling class? The TN coaches, that’s who. I emerged from this one exhausted, legs burning, and with new bike heart rate zones.

Thursday: Sweet fancy Moses, a day off. I celebrated by gorging on fish and chips, a fish taco, and cupcakes from Cupcake Royale. That’s how you take advantage of a rest day.

Friday: cycling. A 1:30 workout in various zones. Not too bad, but after that I had to run to…

Swim: A tempo trainer swim clinic. I only ended up swimming around 800 yards and it wasn’t too taxing. I learned a lot about using the little tempo trainer device and posted my four fastest 100s ever, including a personal best of 1:33. Whaaaaaaat?! I never swim that fast. (And yes, I know that time isn’t fast for 90% of the triathlon population but it is for me. Maybe this “devote more time to swimming” strategy is starting to pay off…)

After class I went out with a couple friends and had a few drinks that wouldn’t have affected Fat Rebecca but ended up giving Less Fat Rebecca a bit of a hangover. I didn’t get to bed until 2 am, which set me up for a grueling Saturday workout.

Saturday: 1:35 run with tempo efforts. I was supposed to go to the group run but seeing as how that started at 8:30 and I was operating on no sleep and too many sickly sweet cocktails, I didn’t start hauling ass until about noon. The run wasn’t too bad but since it was colder than usual, I was atypically sore afterwards.

I stuck my tight calves in some compression socks and headed off to a dinner party thrown by a fellow teammate. I debated sneaking off and taking a nap because I was exhausted but figured I wouldn’t get a return invite if Amanda caught me snoozing in her bed and drooling on her pillow, so I fought the good fight against consciousness and (barely) won.

Sunday (aka D-Day): The triple whammy of workouts coming off a day where I was already getting pretty sore.

Cycling: 1:35 cycling class where I had to do :10 all-out effort bursts every three minutes for an hour straight.

Running: Teresa gave me a 30 minute brick run after the crappy cycling workout in 34 degree temperatures because she loves to see me suffer.

Swimming: An hour-long swim class where I didn’t really swim so much as avoided drowning. By this point my legs were so dead that when I tried to do a “swim with the pull buoy at your feet” drill my legs kept cramping and I had to do a spazzy crawl/kick combo back to the wall so I could whimper and hate life. Then we ended the workout with stupid team relays, because what better way to finish off a grueling week than to sprint in the pool so you won’t let down your group?

After workout #3 I was totally drained (there’s a reason why triathlons begin with the swim rather than end with it) and felt drunk from lack of calories and general exhaustion. When Jason got home from his long run, he found me half-passed out on the couch looking as if I were on my deathbed. (I tried to get him to carry me around like I was Uncle Jack from Arrested Development [see post thumbnail] but he wasn’t on board. Cries of “Swoop me, Jason!” went ignored.) My legs felt physically exhausted for the rest of the day and I had zero energy on Monday (which, thankfully, was a rest day).

It’s barely November–if this is what my workouts will be like for the next nine months, I’ll either croak midway through the season or I’ll have one hell of a race PR. Or both. (It’ll probably be both.) Is this how elites train all the time? If so, I’m way out of my league. When do they have time to eat cupcakes and play video games? Elite triathletes are getting a raw deal if you ask me.

“Not by a long shot!” my chipper coach Teresa most likely exclaimed as she loaded up my workouts with classes and utter bullshit. For example, here are just the classes and group workouts I’ve got scheduled for this week:

Monday: dryland strength class (It sucked; I was tired and Bridget made us do burpees with a biceps curl, one of the poopiest circuit workouts along with triceps pushups, which she also made us do. I hate Bridget.)

Tuesday: track (in which I get to do a speed test which basically involves running as hard as you can for 30 minutes so Teresa can assign me new heart rate zones. FML.)

Wednesday: dryland strength, cycling class

Friday: swim class

Saturday: group run

Sunday: cycling class, swim class

That’s not even counting the additional swims (two) bike workout (one), core workouts (two), and runs (one) I’ve got this week. Tell my wife and kids (meaning “Jason” and “pie”) that I love them, because this girl is going to be living and breathing fitness for the next 10 months.

Unfortunately, since I’ve taken a break from running due to the Achilles tendinitis, I’m left with biking, swimming, and the mind numbingly boring elliptical machine as my viable workout options. Teresa has taken my run hiatus as an opportunity to troll me by increasing my number of swim workouts from 0 (preferred) to 4 times a week (not ideal). She’s also increased my distance from a 1000 yard workout one week to 3200 yards the next. 3200 yards?! I ain’t doing no Ironman in 2011! Note to self: punch Teresa the next time I see her.

So I squeezed my offseason girth into my dusty swimsuit and trudged to the pool for the first time in eons. The water was uncomfortably warm because nobody actually does a legit swim workout at the Y, so while everyone else is casually paddling around the water, I’m battling heatstroke during my drills and contemplating shaving my head so my brain won’t bake underneath the swim cap. It was the crappiest 1000 yards I’ve swum all year, and I marveled at how 2.4 miles seemed so doable back in August.

Swim workouts are the ones I skip the most because they’re the ones I enjoy the least. Unfortunately, the past three seasons I’ve seen big improvements in my biking and running and only slight jumps in my swimming because I’m not putting in nearly as much effort in that sport as I am the other two. I can only imagine how much better a swimmer I’d be if I stuck to the workouts and put in the training time, so I suppose 2011 is as good a time as any to force myself to get those workouts in and see how much my swimming improves. That way, if I train my ass off and still post shit times, I can finally officially write myself off as someone who really has no business swimming in non-recreationally.

Our bikes' temporary home

View from our hotel room

On Saturday Jason, his dad and I woke up and prepped everything for our ride. We parked a few miles from the transition area and started setting everything up when I realized that the black rolled up wad of fabric I grabbed and shoved into my bag wasn’t arm sleeves like I thought, but rather compression sleeves for my legs. Fudgers! It was going to be a gray, chilly day, and my wimpo arms were surely going to freeze without some sort of cover. Jason suggested I just wear my compression sleeves as arm warmers. I didn’t have any better options, so that’s what I did. I ended up with 90 miles of compressiony goodness, but unfortunately I realized two things after the ride:

1. The sleeves, which typically go from under my knee to my ankle, weren’t long enough to cover my entire arm.
2. Even though the sun wasn’t out, that doesn’t mean the rays weren’t poking through the clouds.

As such, I ended the ride with this B.S.:

This is not a good look for me

The watch tan I’m used to. The half-forearm tan? Not so much. (I’ve grown accustomed to the hairy arms though, so deal with it.) Anyway, I started riding for a whopping minute before realizing that, no fucking way, my bike computer’s cadence sensor wasn’t working again. What the shit, I just replaced this stupid thing two weeks ago! I angrily fiddled with it for a while, and it went from not reading my cadence to not reading anything. Great, now I was going to ride 90 miles with no indication of my speed or cadence.

Frustrated and fueled by rage, I took off and anger-rode for an hour. After a while, Jason appeared next to me, slightly out of breath, exclaiming, “It took me forever to catch up to you! You need to slow down!” Apparently I was averaging about 24 mph and was climbing rollers going 20. To be fair, the first 30 or 40 miles of the Canada course are pretty fast, with lots of flats/downhills and a few inconsequential hills. I pouted a bit more about my broken computer but decided to slow it down in anticipation of Richter Pass.

Before we got to the pass, Jason’s dad got an epic flat by running over a huge kinked wad of wire. He wrestled it out of his tire and changed the tube but wanted to stop at a gas station to properly fill the tire with air. While he was fixing his bike, I stopped inside to use the bathroom and buy more fuel. When I came out, I saw Jason barely hiding his irritation while a filthy grifter with roughly four teeth peppered him with questions about our bikes. Apparently this Canadian mountain man had been marveling at how nice our bikes were and said that someone should build an eight person stealth bomber out of the same carbon fiber our bikes are made from. He then paused, looked at Jason, and said, “I see you’ve got a belly under all that gear! You must work in an office, eh? This is good exercise for that!” Jason muttered a “Yeah…” while murdering the dude with his eyes, and I resisted the urge to laugh. What kind of person makes remarks about a complete stranger’s stomach? Dudes with meth mouth, that’s who.

"Your belly offends me and my professional appearance."

After our brief break, we continued on and hit the pass almost immediately. I gotta say, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Don’t get me wrong, Richter Pass is no picnic, but you get to climb for a bit before shooting down a decent decline, then lather, rinse, repeat for a while and before you know it, you’re done. Unfortunately, after you conquer the pass (and are rewarded with a nice downhill), you get hit with a bunch of rollers that are pretty sucky, especially when you factor in a craptacular crosswind (which we got hit with on Saturday).

We skipped an out and back portion of the ride and continued on until we hit the second significant climb, which is the stretch of road leading to Yellow Lake. (Brief aside: who names a body of water “Yellow Lake”? Nothing screams “urine-soaked” like that moniker. It actually is a pretty lake though, and not at all yellow. Still, not the best name.) I thought this climb was uber-shittier than Richter because unlike Richter, which has steep climbs but brief reprieves where you get to descend, the Yellow Lake climb is pretty much a long, arduous, gradual, relentless son of a bitch until you get to the top. On the way up I saw several banana peels and wondered if Jason was trying to take me out, Mario Kart style. If only I had a red shell…

I'm gunnin' for ya, Jas

The last several miles of the bike course shoot you down a pants crappingly fast descent that scared the bejesus out of me due to the semis and crosswinds. Operation De-Chunkify has been going well for me, but at that point I wondered if I should have actually gained an extra 15 lbs instead of lost weight so I’d be better anchored and wouldn’t get bitch slapped by the wind and cars. At several points during the descent I envisioned myself getting blown over the guardrail and falling to my death while still clipped into my bike.

The next day Jas and I ran the middle portion of the run course, which is the same stretch as the first part of the bike course. We did about 15 miles in the sun and I thought about how miserable I was going to be racing in 90 degree heat considering I was already feeling overheated at 70 degrees. The “inconsequential” hills I mentioned earlier on the bike suddenly seemed like a jerk crusted bastard during the run. This will not feel good on race day.

We spent the remainder of the weekend enjoying the gorgeous scenery and buying roughly an asston of wine:

View of the swim start from a vineyard across the lake

Loitering in some Canadian's vineyard

Jason's mom gets inspired by the boobalicious mermaid statue

Our Ironman training fuel

Before we left, we flailed around in the freezing lake (“freezing” being 55 degrees) for about 20 minutes, making me think that I really need to do a couple more open water swims before Boise. Poop. Other than that, though, it was good to explore the Ironman course and dump my paycheck into many, many wine purchases. I can’t wait to come up with the team in July and do it all again. Hopefully Teresa will have some good advice on how to pace myself for the ride, and I’m counting on doing more wine tasting with some of my teammates. Don’t let me down, Ironman crew!

Anyway, one day Christine mentioned to me that she had signed up for the New Balance Half Ironman in Victoria, BC. After much prodding and convincing, I decided to sign up for the Half Ironman too (and I dragged Jason into the entire mess). It’s a good thing Christine isn’t a drug dealer — she’s so damn good at convincing me to do stuff that if she were peddling crack instead of triathlons, you’d be reading my first post from MediocreMethHead.com.

Jason and I each forked over about $230 and signed up. We then set up a meeting with Teresa, our new triathlon training coach. This is what Teresa looks like:

Now here’s me:

Basically, whereas Teresa has abs on top of more abs and shoulder blades that can crack walnuts, I am quite adept at stuffing my face with fried po’boy sandwiches. That’s how I roll: shamelessly inhaling food while armpit fat pooches out of my tank top. I’m classy like that.

Jason and I met Teresa at a coffee shop near the Seattle Athletic Club to get a noob’s guide to triathlons. She then proceeded to humor us for about 2 hours, answering every single question we had about triathlon logistics, from what kind of gear we’ll need to how often we should be swimming, biking and running each week. I swear, we were so clueless about the sport that I’m surprised she didn’t bust out the hand puppets and pop-up books to help us understand.

As I recall, the conversation went something like this:

Teresa: “Do you have wet suits?”
Me/Jason: “No.”
Teresa: “You’ll have to buy wet suits. Speedy Reedy is having a 50% off sale for last year’s gear, so you should be able to get a good deal. Okay, so I’m scheduling a ride for you guys this week…”
Me: “Oh yeah, bikes…yeah, we’ll have to get some of those.”
Teresa: “You don’t have bikes?”
Jason: “Well, I can borrow my dad’s…”
Me: “Christine might have one I can borrow…”
Teresa: “K…well, pick those up this week. Anyway, since it’s too crummy to ride outside right now, you’ll need trainers for indoor rides…you guys have trainers, right?”
Me: “Trainers?”
Teresa: “I’m guessing no. I have a couple you two can borrow…you at least have helmets, right?”
Me/Jason: [blank stare] Mayyyyybe…
Teresa: [sighs] “Do you have running shoes?”
Me/Jason: “Ooh, those we do have!”

We front-loaded Teresa with ridiculous questions and scenarios we wouldn’t even have to deal with for months (e.g., “How do transitions work? What clothes are you supposed to race in? Do you change clothes during the race? Will people see us naked?”). That woman has the patience of a saint. Little did she know how much grief we’d put her through with us being late to every workout, impulsively signing up for endurance races, falling into bad habits over and over again (I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard “Jason, put your head down” and “Rebecca, stop dragging your arm” while swimming), and griping about various race misadventures.

But hey, not all of her clients can be elite age group winners, right? That’s us: bringing down her average since January 2008. We love you, Teresa.