Tag: fail

An Open Letter of Apology to My Spin Class Instructor… the New One

BobbieLeave a comment

Dear Instructor Deb,

I know I’m not in class right now, and you need to know what happened, because I LOVE your class. I love the music (that remix of Stevie Wonder’s Superstitious? the one with the Indian drums and guitars? Is AWESOME!). I love you (in a totally platonic, non lesbian way). I love the new bikes. I love the old bikes. You have singlehandedly (or double wheeldly) made me love the gym.

And I’m not there today. I won’t be there next week, either.

I went to a Sports Medicine Doctor today. I went there, because last weekend after finishing up an hour on the bike I decided, HEY! I totally signed up for a 5k in May, I should see what I can do on the treadmill. After three steps– at 5mph, we’re not talking fast– it really did feel like someone was stabbing me in the knee. This is not good, you will totally agree, so I decided to see a sport medicine doctor. My Sport Medicine Doctor — Madame le Docteur, actually, as she is Quebeqois — is awesome. I totally stole her from my friend Kevin. At any rate, today was my appointment with Madame le Docteur.

Madame le Docteur first asked me about symptoms, so I told her about the last two half marathons, and the triathlon, and the giving up running in early 2010, and the attempt at running. I told her about pain-free cycling, about painful cycling, and about how much I love my ibuprofen. I told her about the spectacular crunching noises my knee makes going downstairs but not up, about how I feel cold in my knees. She asked me when I started feeling pain and I said about 3-6 months ago, I noticed after a good hard spin class I’d be a bit swollen and it would be a bit tender. She raised a Gallic eyebrow and looked at me: “You mean to say, you knew you had pain in your knees, and you decided then to run?” I totally felt like I was in school.

Madame le Docteur (ok, we’re going to refer to her as MlD, for ergonomic’s sake) next instructed me to put on a pair of shorts. As I didn’t come equipped with any, she handed me a pair of oversized men’s boxers– printed with Spongebob Squarepants. I knew I liked her when I entered her office and saw it very zen, with draperies and cool paint colors and I wasn’t one of fifteen people she was seeing that hour. But when she handed me the Spongebob? I knew I liked her.

She tsk’d tsk’d over my pronation (known to me) and after various assessments (the sounds my left knee make are painful to hear, even for MlD, and she made me stop after 1/2 of one lunge), she declared:

  • It is highly likely my left leg is longer than my right
  • I am highly over pronated
  • The orthodic inserts assigned to me from my former Podiatrist are crap
  • I need six weeks of physical therapy, 2x/week, at minimum
  • That my last round of physical therapy was NOT what you do if you want to keep your knees. Those Bulgarian Split Squats? Yeah, those aren’t cool.
  • I need a bike fitting
  • I need new orthodics (duh)
  • I need Xrays
  • I need to learn how to McConnel tape my kneecap
  • I may not exercise (bike or run) without taping first
  • I have to wear an anti-inflammatory patch on my knee 24×7 for at least a week. This is different from what they’ll put on there in physical therapy.

And now the good news: I will be able to do STP. As long as I do what she says.

“We are going to make you work very hard”, she said in her stern french accent. “If you want it you will need to work for it.” Well.  I certainly will have to.

If only to make all of the @%(^#*$ appointments.  But let the record state: I really love M. le Docteur. Oui.

Tired!

Bobbie1 Comment

I love my car. LOVE it. It is wonderful, it is simple, it goes vroom-vroom. It has two nails in my passenger side front tire.

I bought the car in May. I had it all of two (2) weeks when an unidentified light lit up on my dashboard, indicating something that looks like this: (!). This is not a very intuitive sign, you see, so I immediately pulled over and looked at my Owner’s Manual, tucked ever so elegantly into its pleather binding that matches the interior of my car just-so.

(!) remained unidentified.

After calling the dealership, whose service department was closed, I then called BMW America, because if my car was going to blow up on me I really thought this was something I should know. They called me back and announced that (!) in fact means that you are losing pressure in a tire (somewhere) and don’t worry! They’re run flat tires! You can totally drive… under 50mph… for like 150 miles when that light goes off.

So merrily I went upon my way, and then merrily paid $258 the next day for a (single, as in uno, ein, un) tire. You can’t patch a run flat, you see.

FINE.

Fast forward four (4) months, and I do not have (!) showing up. I do however have two (2) nails in my passenger front tire. That would be the same passenger front tire that had the one (1) nail in it last May.  So, with a fully pressured tire, I look at my options. I can:

  • Pay $258 for one (1) tire at the BMW dealership
  • Pay $105 plus installation at the Discount Tire company for the same tire
  • Pay $X (TBD) at Costco for two front new tires and get rid of the @)#($%%$^*($# run flats

And I choose Discount Tire. I make an appointment, because that appears to be the most efficient thing to do.

I arrive at said appointment, which was at noon. As I’m checking in, I tell the young man behind the counter that I really need to be out the door by 5 to 1, to which he replies “Oh yeah absolutely!” Comforted by this assurance I sign the little paper, hand him the keys, and go sit down.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

Twenty minutes in, my car has not left the parking lot and made it into the bay. Twenty five minutes in, it still hasn’t.

At thirty minutes in, I ask for my keys, explaining that the car hasn’t been touched, and that I don’t think they can replace a tire in a half hour, and please gimme my friggin keys already. I leave, and on the way to my next appointment call Firestone — trusty Firestone, who does the tires on my old Rav — and tell them my sob story and they promise to fit me in at 2pm.

At 2pm I arrive at Firestone, who, 15 minutes in, announce my tires are RunFlat and they can’t replace them and they can order special tires at $300 a pop if I’m willing to come back tomorrow.

In the meantime I had called the BMW dealership who had said they didn’t put a run flat tire on my car.

So at this point I have Firestone willing to sell me 2 tires (because they don’t have the same brand), Discount Tire unwilling to actually, you know, work, and BMW telling me that my tires aren’t really my tires.

I give up. I go to Costco. If I’m going to buy two new tires, I reckon, I’ll get non-run-flat and I can get out the door for the price of one run-flat. So to Costco I go!

Whereupon I discover that:

  1. Yes, they are run-flats
  2. No, you can’t just replace two. You have to replace all four. You can’t have two run flats and two non-run-flats.

It is important to note that at this point I whipped out the iPhone, copied all of the little markings on the tire, googled it, verified yes indeedy they are run-flats, did some mental arithmetic regarding speed and mileage, had them put the tires back on the car, and went home. Once there I had a very comforting, very large glass of red wine.

I am officially delegating this to the MoH (man of house).

Fancy Gym Fail

BobbieLeave a comment

Dear Columbia Fitness,

I am so not happy with you.

Right now, I pay something on the order of $56 (after tax) per month to use your Sammamish branch. It’s nice, it has a decent set of equipment, and the people are awesome. It does, however, lack a pool, and if I am to be training for tris I need a pool.

I have until now been driving to Mercer Island to use their pool (at $5.25/pop, plus $0.25 for the lockers, plus roughly $4 in gas roundtrip) and the Spreadsheet tells me that if I pay for your fancy Pine Lake Club membership (which includes use of a pool) that I can break even at a mere two swims a week.

I talked with your people via email, got pool schedules, and arrived at 5pm today to fork over an additional $60/month and have you watch my kid and swim.

Not only were your membership people too busy (which surprises me, I don’t really need a membership person, because I’m already a member I should just be able to have the front desk person upgrade me, right?) but the kids club was closed. This surprised me, because kids club is supposed to be open on Fridays until 8. It says so on the website.

The unhelpful person behind the counter pointed out that on Fridays they close if they don’t have a reservation. Well, your site indicates this phenomena on Sundays, but not on Fridays.

I left your club, and left an email for the membership person I had been talking to, expressing my discontent.

Then I decided to call, spoke to her, and am to arrive tomorrow at 9am to swim and upgrade membership, assured that someone will be there to watch the boychild. Then it occurred to me: kids club opens at 8, so why don’t I just show up at 8 and swim and then sign? I mean, I never got an answer to whether or not a front desk flunky can upgrade my membership for me, right?

So I called. And got ahold of the same unhelpful (if not, vacuous) person as before. Yes, I can totally talk to anyone and even call to upgrade my membership. I said great, can we do that now? No, no I can’t do that because I need to wait until 9am tomorrow: when the membership person is in.

Am I crazy for thinking this is stupid? That Joe Clueless should have been able to figure out that by asking if I could get this out of the way, and by asking if I could come swim at 8am, that I was asking if I could get to talk to ANYONE that would get the damn thing upgraded? Only one of the four lanes is open at 9am and I have no idea how busy it will be or what I will have to deal with. And I’m not altogether confident things will go smoothly.

The axiom of gym memberships is that you’re happy to take money and assume people won’t show up. I want to give you money and show up, you don’t seem to want to let me.

Taper

BobbieLeave a comment

Tapering is described here (don’t you love Wikipedia? I love Wikipedia. I am totally going to marry it.) I am starting a long taper for the long Ride. This week while my mileage remains the same (112 or so this week), the long distance ride is going to be short — a mere 26 miles on Friday and on Saturday.  This is sad, because I got a new bike and it is really, really awesome. It’s a 2010 Schwinn Fastback, all electric-blue and white, and the only thing that hurts when I get done with nearly 60 miles is my back-end (not my back). I’m getting the seat replaced to help with that.

In an unfortunate turn of events, though, it has come to my attention that due to my nut allergy (yes, I get it, I’m a nut and yet I’m allergic to them) I need to provide my own food.

For two days.

Over 168 miles.

I still have to call the Ride to find out exactly what they want me to do: do I show up with a bunch of Amy’s Organics and tell them to have them nuked and ready? I have no idea how hungry I’ll be or what they will or won’t have that I can eat, nor can they seem to tell me. It’s frustrating, but I get that from a liability standpoint they don’t want someone dropping dead on the Ride.

Kinda defeats the purpose.

Giddyap

BobbieLeave a comment

You don’t change horses in midstream…unless the horse dies. Then you can either sit atop a stinky horse or get a new shiny horse to remove you from the stink and hopefully find you a good saloon… I digress…

I was riding the ol’ Cannondale along the Sammamish River trail Friday morning when I stopped about ten miles in. I had been doing awesome, pacing in the rain at 15mph (hey, for me that is good!) and not minding (well, not much) the puddle of water in my clippy shoes (note to self, get shoe covers). I got water, took off, heard a “wsh-chunk!”, and then a “scrape scrape scrape scrape”.

“Scrape scrape scrape scrape” is not what you want to hear on your bike, in the rain, 10 miles from your car, on a relatively deserted path. “Scrape scrape scrape scrape” kinda sucks. An untrained investigation showed that my rear wheel was out of true, it was scraping against the brake. With no prospect of rescue I rode the thing with a scraping brake in 10mph headwinds in the rain (not uphill but you get the idea) back. My pace slowed to 11mph.

At the earliest opportunity I deposited it with much angst at Mr. Crampy’s.

I am awaiting guidance via phone from Kyle “Mr. Crampy” of Mr. Crampy’s Multisport in Redmond. He called and left note that my bike, my lovely fourth-hand Cannondale, has died. It has died of a dead spoke, a need of wheels, messed up shifters, and the only good thing on it is its frame. I am going to need to purchase a new bike, because it is not safe.

When a man who does Ironmans each year for FUN and is ex-special forces is telling you not to do something because it is not safe, you listen.

I’m a bit nervous though: my old bike was a road bike with mountain bike tires (because skinny tires scare fat girls like me) and there’s this whole budget thing. Also, I have only ONE more long ride in training before the Big Day, and that is this Saturday. Ergo, I need to purchase, fit, and ride this bad boy within the next week.

It’s not as though I had a lot of other things on my plate — my brother got married this weekend, bought that new car, shifting jobs, school and PTA is wrapping up, and all of the myriad of normal life-things that waft in and out of my responsibility cloud. I’m actually quite glad I finally took the bike to someone who alerted me to all of this: I went to the local bike shop (we will not print their name, but they are VERY close to my house) and TOLD them I’d be on this thing for 2 days straight and they charged me 20 bucks and said good enough.

I won’t be going back there. I’m going to ride into the very orange sunset with something from Mr. Crampy’s.

Home Stretch

BobbieLeave a comment

Considering that I’ve only been in training 4 and a half months, I can call the next five weeks the home stretch. I’m following the training guidelines, and am on a first-name basis with my local bike fixer dude, as my derailer isn’t quite sure if it wants to derail my chain appropriately or derail my ride inappropriately. I blame poor nomenclature for its inadequacies and overcompensation.

I have, as of last week, made the minimum amount of money raised ($2,500) and am aiming to get my goal of $3,000 in. At this point, my goal is to stay on the bike for the two days of riding and hope my rear end doesn’t fall off.

Or maybe I hope it will. Since starting training in January I have gained — wait for it, wait for it — seven pounds. SEVEN. POUNDS. This is insane.

Ok, let’s put this into perspective: I weigh X.

At my lowest weight at this height, I weighed X-19.  At my highest weight at this height, unpregnant, I weighed X+40ish. (Yeah, I’m putting the “ish” there. I wasn’t proud of it, and it was a long long time ago). I am on the slighter end of this sliding scale but it doesn’t make me happy.

I have ordered a body fat scale (hello, whole new heights of things to obsess about!) and I’ve downloaded an app for that, and an app for this. I would really like to get back to at least X-7, which is where I was in the New Year and fine with that. I’d like even more to get back to X-19, or even perhaps X-25; but let’s not get too carried away.

That said, I have a new job 🙂 Perhaps that will help burn some excess calories?

I’m Back in the Saddle Again

BobbieLeave a comment

Doot doot doot doot doo…

My lack of progress was apparently not as awful as I thought it was. One of the advantages to going with a formalized, large ride like the Ride to Conquer Cancer is they give you a handy-dandy training plan. That training plan states clearly that by the end of April (which I count as this weekend, in terms of long-distance-ride) I am to be able to ride 41 miles on the long ride and go through  another 60 miles in 2-3 rides during the week. This I can do and have done (I did it last week) so: guilt assuaged!

What is going to be more difficult is that as training progresses, that long ride, and the interim rides, get longer. I was not-so-secretly elated at stopping half-marathoning because, to my way of thinking, running just took so much time — long runs in training would take like 2 hours!

What I wouldn’t give for a simple 2 hour divot in my weekend these days. The long rides are taking 4 and 5 hours, and by the time we get to June I can expect 7 hours of riding in one day. This is, of course, nothing compared to the actual ride days, which I can expect to be 9 hours each day, back to back.

My speed needs to increase as well: in chatting with my boss (who is a cycling hobbyist– you know, rides his bike everywhere) I should have no problem doing 20mph on the flats. I have no problem doing 20mph on the flats — in the gym. In the real world, I’ve been doing as good as 15 and as bad as 10 given the day. Clearly, I need to get my cogs looked at. Further, I’m going to have to deal with some real hills and not the teeny climbs involved on the Burke Gilman, and this has me… apprehensive. Hills + clippie shoes = whups, splut!

Still. I only have 8 weeks to go, and then it’s over… until the Danskin Tri 🙂

Travel Fail

Bobbie1 Comment

Ok, tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of my life. Or something.

I write to you from the relative comfort that is the Embassy Suites in Jacksonville, where I am having massive guilt and am a little scared at my dearth of progress. Having lost two weekends of bike time I rented a bike here in Jacksonville.

A bike that I was not able to pick up.

To be fair, the weekend was to be packed with wedding-related activities (and it was) but I thought I’d be able to squeeze in a couple of hours on the bike. Having lost my luggage twice though (enroute to Geneva and coming in to Jacksonville) and not slept for 24 hours upon landing in Jacksonville (I was a zombie), I decided that getting up and getting on a bike was going to be unlikely.

Someone had reminded me when I rented the bike that it would be no problem to get around, as Jacksonville is all flat. This is so very true. Jacksonville is all flat. In the section we were in, this means you can get your car up to a hefty 50mph in the 30mph lane and since there is no official bike lanes anywhere that I could see, I could just imagine my tired-jetlagged-rickety self on a borrowed bike getting smucked thirty or forty times by the varying products of Ford or Chevy. 

Therefore, the bike was never picked up. Off to plan B, which was to abuse the recumbent bike in the gym. However, in this particular Embassy Suites we had a Mary Kay convention and a Fish and Wildlife convention and some sorts of sport convention, and the gym was packed both mornings. I had to settle for a run, which does not compare to the mileage I’m supposed to have done. I’ve got ten weeks left to get from the 51mi I was at to the 120mi I need. That means I need to increment by 7miles per week– this is suddenly getting very very real.

Achiever

BobbieLeave a comment

In my fantasy world, this post is so-called “Overachiever” because I’ve totally been hitting all of my marks in training and doing a kick-ass job and Lance Armstrong should totally be scared.

In the real world, this is not really the case. (Disappointing, right?)

I did 51 miles in a day. 2 weeks ago. Then I went to my mom’s house (disastrous), and while I faithfully Spin-Class’d and gym’d and all that, I didn’t really ride my bike this weekend (hello, High Wind Advisory and Rain!). Instead I went back on the gym bike and did 19 miles in an hour, on level 8. Yes, yes, lots of calories burned but not what I should be doing.

Now I’m on a trip to Geneva, Switzerland, and then Jacksonville, Florida. At some point I need to get on a bike and do something but that will not happen in Geneva and while I’ve rented it for JAX the likelihood that I’ll get 55 miles in at a pop is nil. The plan is to get 30 miles in, in two days in a row. And still be sociable.

At this point, my goal is to do it, and to not be the last person doing it. That strategy has worked well in the past 🙂

Slipping my Cogs

BobbieLeave a comment

This weekend I haven’t been on my bike. At all.

My last ‘bike time’ was in the gym, next to various sweaty persons and watching the local news on subtitle. This is bad, because the stress at work is *phenomenal* right now and what I really need is to ride the endorphin wave, not my couch cushions.

Naturally, what I do is pack up and off to my mom’s, home of endless meatballs and macaroni and cheese and couch-potato-age. Oh, and Pizookie Pie at the local BJ’s restaurant. I did but one 4-mile run and the rest of the time my only exercise was to pull the plate closer.

Guilt! Guilt!