[side note: My aquatic leave of absence is due to my new obsession with Brazilian jiu jitsu/grappling. I love BJJ because it is extremely skill based. As a beginner I have tons of room to improve (earning a black belt takes 10-15 years!) So, by showing up consistently and learning new skills, it is almost inevitable that I will improve. In swimming, on the other hand, I feel that all I have to look forward to is a gradual decline as I age. The only way for me to get faster would be to become more athletic (difficult for me at this point) or making big changes to my stoke (even more difficult after swimming hundreds of thousands of strokes a certain way). Plus, choking people is fun. I almost never get to choke my students - BJJ gets that out of my system.]
But I've found that I don't like blogging about BJJ. Swim races are easy to write about in an impersonal way (you can say, "I placed 2nd in such and such a race. I made some navigational mistakes, but had great pacing, blah, blah blah" without mentioning any specific people who you competed against). But BJJ matches are limited to 2 people, which automatically makes them more personal. It is me vs. her. And that makes it hard to talk about in a public space. I don't mind saying general things like "I won 3 matches out of 4," but I don't think it's nice to discuss specific matches with specific people. You win some, you lose some. But if I found someone's blog talking about the specifics of how she armbared me, I don't think I would like it.
And as it turns out, a lot of my swimming friends are taking aquatic breaks of their own. So when Billy invited a group of us to run the Tobacco Road half marathon this March, Karen signed up, as well as my archnemesis Mark Mendendorp. Obviously, I couldn't resist. I also signed up for several shorter running races this spring and had a blast competing in them. Since running is not tied to my identity - I don't think I will ever feel like "I'm a runner" the way that I feel "I'm a swimmer" - I don't feel any pressure with it. No one expects me to win running races -especially after seeing my shoulders!
I wrote a race report for the Bull City Running Club, a local group that I joined, and thought - hey this reads a little like my blog! And that made me nostalgic. This is a slightly more colorful version of that race report:
Raleigh Run for the Roses 5k
What made me sign up for this race was its pump and run contest. I love to run, but get passed quite often by slender folks who I can bench press. I thought, “finally, a running event where I can use my swimming shoulders to my advantage!” People who entered this contest participated in a bench press competition before the 5k (guys had to bench their body weight. Girls had to bench half their weight. Each rep takes 30 sec off your net time). The contest used a smith machine, which I found to be much easier than using free weights (you move the bar up and down, but the machine limits lateral movement).
The woman in front of me (a flat chested gal) joked about how big-breasted women had an advantage in this contest, since they wouldn't have to bring the bar down as far. I laughed and agreed that this was indeed true. But then she decided to take nature into her own hands. When it was her turn at the bench press, this lady mentally inflated her A cups to double Gs. She brought the bar down less than halfway to her chest. She got in a whopping 28 reps - 2 more than I had done in practice - and the race officials counted every cheating one of them!
This made me mad. A wave adrenaline-fueled fury shot straight to my biceps. I was NOT going to lose to a cheater. I used every drop of my strength to get 45 reps in- legitimate reps, all the way down to my more ample bosom.
After that, I found it impossible to loosen up before the run. My adrenaline was going and I got caught up in the early excitement of the race. I went out way too fast.
Mi 1: 5:45
Mi 2: 6:30
Mi 3: - I dunno; But I finished in a 20:08, so you can see my pace went down hill. (Actually, the last mile went uphill. It was tough! I wasn’t used to it). I was a little slower than I wanted to go, but I learned important lessons about pacing, staying loose, and running my own race. I placed 3rd out of the women in the 5k, and 1st in the pump and run.
pre-prom, circa 1999
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