25 miles in 1 month

I have a new challenge ahead of me. A challenge full of swimming trunks, weaves, headbands, hair elastics and tampon applicators. Let me explain...

I felt especially elated after my 6th Appleman Triathlon on Sunday, July 18th. I am finally at a place where in order to improve my future times, I have to do more than just try to be in better shape than the year before. I have to actually swim, bike, and run a lot, and after having slower times in the swim and the bike, I decided that perhaps it was about time that I train in these fields for once. Hopping on crappy bike a week before the event was no longer going to work for me.

For a while, I even separated myself from swimmers and cyclists in the past, saying to myself, "swimmers and cyclists are the people I pass on the run," but after this event, I knew I had to finally integrate myself with them and perhaps even become a swimmer and cyclist, myself.

Looking at my splits (17 min, 45 min, 26 min), I was exploring ways to shave off some time: 4 minutes on the swim, 5 minutes on the run, but it became apparent that I could shave the most time, up to 15 minutes, on the bike leg. My biggest problem in cycling was that I really don't know how to ride a bike, efficiently. I was shopping for some top-notch tri bikes, and asked a stupid question. The answer would shape the way I ride in the future...fine, so I didn't know that switching to a smaller back gear makes your pedaling more efficient. I get it now. In the past, I just powered through every hill and set the gears easier if I was about to lose momentum and fall over. Not anymore.

I quickly realized that buying a decent tri bike is a huge investment, so I decided to put that off until the spring when I'm confident in my savings plan to squander it. But just as I began to give up and wallow in my Kardashian gossip, another opportunity to improve my triathlon time had surfaced.

In one of my aimless strolls to explore my neighborhood, I discovered the Hamilton Fish pool. I had passed there before. It was the weekend and kids were overflowing from the gates and screaming and hitting each other with towels. Not the ideal serene environment to go swimming in. But on this journey early in the morning, before work, I saw adults taking turns, swimming laps, and encouraging each other. I later found out that joining this pool is FREE. So I joined.

I started swimming whenever I could, either in the "early bird" or "night owl" shift. Both shifts had something that no other pool I've swum in had: evidence of the reckless kid shift in the middle of the day. I thought swimming endless laps would be boring, but as I approached remnants of wild youth, I couldn't help but wonder how these things ended up at the bottom of the pool. Did no one notice that there is an impressionable young man who seemed to misplace his swimming trunks? Who seriously let that girl go swimming with giant hoop earrings? Are the lifeguards honestly not concerned about what the dark spot in the water is? It's a weave of hair.

I wasn't disgusted--more intrigued by the several oversights that made this experience happen. And the number of swimmers with expensive goggles who swam over the questionable treasures.

I stayed because everyone is really friendly and joked about the hairball in the water.

"I saw you swim, you did well today. Working on your stroke?"

"Yes, thanks," I lied. I swam slowly, because I was feeling lazy.

"How many lengths today?"

I wasn't counting so I was flustered by this. I soon realized that I wasn't being probed. Just outside of the entry gates was a sign that recorded total laps of every attending swimmer. And if you swim 25 miles by the end of the summer, you get recognized by the Hamilton Fish pool and a T-shirt stating your accomplishment.

The swimmers were encouraging each other, because they were all working toward one common goal, 25 miles by the end of the summer.

I wanted in, but it's the end of July so I needed to do 25 miles in August alone. Taking my vacation into consideration, that's two miles a day. I've found my next challenge. So starting Monday, I will be swimming 64 laps a day, 5 days a week. I just hope that the interesting finds at the bottom of the pool don't make me lose count of my laps.

Pierre Lapointe - "Au bar des suicidés"

French makes everything sound sexy.

19 little seconds away

One of the goals on my list is to break a 6-minute mile. This has actually been a goal of mine since high school when I ran the mile for indoor track.

I started my freshman year running the 400-meter sprint. At the end of the season, my track coach realized that despite frequent intense training sessions, my time from the last race of the season was the same as the first. So, by sophomore year, I was running distance and I was thrilled to finally see my time decrease with hard training.

From the sidelines, I saw gym and state records being broken... by my teammates on a regular basis, and I wanted more than anything to get my mile time under 6 minutes. I certainly wouldn't be breaking records, but I was so tired of seeing sixes. I was ready to be a fiver.

My Junior year, I treated track as a sport and not a just a way to stay in shape during the winter. In my last race of the season, I ran the mile in 6:18, and that’s been my personal record ever since.

Fast forward 11 years, and I found myself struggling to even be a seven-minute miler. So, when my bucket list came around, I thought, hell, why not!

Since March, I’ve been working with a trainer, and for the first time ever, I did more than just running to train. I finally understood how important core strengthening was for keeping your form, and how squats help your spring in that last half of the race. I was lifting, pushing and running intervals.

Between sessions, I ran the fastest mile I could on the treadmill, and every other day, I went a notch higher anticipating that moment when I would hit 9.5 miles per hour…a 6:18 minute mile.

One Tuesday while playing 1,2,3,4 by Ozomatli with my water by my side, I did it! Staring at the treadmill number 29, designated by the gym, I reached a meditation interrupted only by the inconvenience of having to start the song over again on my iPod. I stepped off the treadmill with a sweaty grin on my face and stumbled to the locker room hoping someone would ask me what I had accomplished.

19 seconds away, I thought, and yes, I would be perfectly content if I ran 5:59, because even then, I would be a happy fiver.

But soon after, I faced other challenges that would keep me from achieving my goal. My trainer, who I gave credit to any progress, had quit.

I was in a windsurfing competition, where I came very close to pulling my quad and had to take a week off to prevent injury.

I also made the mistake of assuming that a treadmill mile was the same as a road mile, which was proven wrong in a recent hilly 3.5 mile road race, where my first mile pace was 7:30, not 6:18.

I set my treadmill to an incline of 1, and gave up prematurely, realizing that I might as well start over. I decided to be a fiver on a flat revolving surface before putting up barriers. Yesterday, I set my treadmill to 9.6, a 6:15 mile, and also had to quit early…This was going to be harder than I thought.

Before the summer ends, I'm going to step on treadmill #29 and set it to 10.1, and I won't step off until I'm a fiver. I'm only 19 little seconds away. How hard could it be?

Windsurfing in Manhattan

I had never seen anyone windsurf on the Hudson River for as long as I'd been here. I spent three years seeking it out and figured the concentrated boat traffic was way too dangerous for beginners to be unintentionally blown into. Of course, this most recent New York relocation has exposed me to the unreal. In April, I joined this windsurfing meetup, which was born two months after I left New York in late 2008.

At my first meeting, a member of the group, Michael, approached us and tried to recruit us to take part in the Hudson River pageant, which involves windsurfing in the Hudson river behind decorative kayaks and canoes in a whimsical water dance-like presentation. What made this more appealing was that without this "performing permit" excuse, windsurfing is forbidden on the Hudson. Without blinking, I volunteered. As the event got closer to date, I did some research and discovered that the Hudson River is rarely windy, and there was major concern regarding the current, which is a problem if stronger than the wind.

The day before the event, I questioned my competency on the water and was terrified of being dragged into a barge by strong currents that my wind-driven sail couldn't possibly escape from.

The next morning, Saturday May 22nd, our recruited windsurfing team strapped the gear to the roof of some car with man-made roof racks and drove down the pothole streets to Pier 40, balancing shit on the roof and waving at surfer hopefuls on the way.

"Dude, where are you going with that?"
"The Hudson River, where else?"
"???"
"Yeah, I know"

Now, let me digress and mention this time where I took the Community Boating kids to Cape Cod to go windsurfing. When we arrived at Kalmus beach,past the parking lot, where there was just sand dunes, sharp grass and patchem eggs, the car windows, which were ajar, started to whistle, and without even looking at the water, we knew the wind was cranking. The car was silent until we went over the bank, revealing white caps spilling off the shallow waves. These kids went wild, punching and slapping the roof, howling with the window. I could tell, this was going to be a great day.

So, we approach Pier 40, I didn't hear anything, because even though we were only 100 feet from the water, we were still surrounded by concrete. We unloaded our gear onto a wagon-type structure, and I was already tired, because the gear was really heavy and it was humid, hot and windless. I was afraid. Michael said on the car ride over that it had to be blowing at least 10 knots against the current for us to go anywhere, because the current moves 5 knots, which is one of the strongest currents, certainly the strongest I had ever encountered. I fooled him into thinking that I didn't care about how little wind there was. That was a lie. You don't load, unload and rig your sails just to go cruise around. In my mind, I thought, this better be worth it.

We wheeled our gear over to the kayak dock, and we finally felt the wind. It was blowing a gusty 20 from the East, which didn't make any sense, because we were getting the wind that went through Manhattan before it hit us, but it was still strong, and unsteady but manageable. I took a heavy board, (the equivalent of a hyfly primo) and a 5.0 sail, and I still flew. Planing, falling, carving, it was unreal. Unreal. And the wakes from the motor boats and barges made my path feel like this fun and twisted obstacle course.

I hadn't gone windsurfing since last September, and I relived some moments from my last sail, but with a little twist.

I had a boring, plowing reach as I pointed toward the Statue of Liberty, steering clear of the Coast Guard pier. Dark ripply waters and a deep wake were heading my way, so I cautiously tacked around, saying to myself, don't let the wake take you down. You got this. This is gonna be good, Liz." I sheeted in, sank low, and let the Manhattan air pull me out of displacement and into fleeting oblivion. Tourists with cameras waited for my arrival, and I carved upwind with one hand and pretended to take a drag of a cigarette with the other. Then, like all upwind endings, I fell in with an uneventful splash, which my sister happily got a picture of.

On our way in, one of the windsurfers hit a kayaker, ensuring that we'll never get to windsurf on the Hudson ever again. Honestly, that just made this day more special.

My 4th grade pen-pal

My friend and colleague, who I’ve known since 1st grade is now a 4th grade teacher in the exact classroom that we both had 4th grade, 18 years ago. It's unreal to think of how long ago we were sitting in our mini desks pondering how old we'd be in the year 2000. In February, he reached out to some of his former colleagues to ask us to take part in a pen-pal program with his students, and I was so excited to participate.

After a few weeks of finger crossing, I received my first letter. What started off as an awkward exchange of favorite colors and hobbies has turned into an understanding between two worlds. The student I write to loves to read and loves animals. And her words, which are simple yet colorfully expressive, brought me back to my childhood, where school was fun, and reading for school wasn’t a required task, but an opportunity to explore the unknown. She asked me what my favorite books were and I responded with a condensed list, including, “To kill a mockingbird,” which I strongly recommended she read by 7th grade.

“Is that book really about killing a mockingbird? I don’t think I would like reading that.”

This sentence was one of the many unsolicited journeys that I took while reading her letters. I scribbled out several explanations of what and who the mockingbird represented before realizing that 4th grade is a place where crimes aren’t justifiable and spending hours on the meaning behind character actions don’t exist.

I’ve come to learn that 4th grade is the calm before the storm. It’s fun to read, because there’s no dark turn to Mr. Popper’s Penguins. James’ parents’ death by rhinoceros stampede is comical and forgetful in James and the Giant Peach. 4th grade readers have conquered the idea of long chapters and story structure, but they’re not quite in a place where death-stricken moral dilemmas can be explained.

So now, it’s the end of the school year, the last of the letter exchanges, and I had decided to get my pen-pal a 5th grade reading level book, a whole new platform of worlds to choose from. I definitely thought she could handle the reading level, so I sought out to find something suitable for an animal lover.

I soon found out that a majority of young adult authors think, “in order to introduce death-stricken moral dilemmas, which is a required lesson for reading comprehension, we should start with dogs.”

Every book that I recalled reading in the 5th grade, involved the main character’s dog dying, which is seemingly a requirement. Where the Red Fern Grows, Sounder, Old Yeller, Stone Fox, I could keep going. 5th grade is simply not an animal lover’s year, and I had genuine concern for the challenge my pen-pal would have to endure in the coming future.

I pondered, Call of the Wild, because the owner dies, not the dog. I finally settled for “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” about a girl living on an island by herself with a bunch of dolphins…

…Of course the reason she is alone is because half of her tribe died, the other half abandoned her, and a pack of wild dogs ate her brother. Whatever, the girl has to learn sometime.

Nike Y2K Jogger

The stuff that dreams are made of...

...has much less endurance than the drive to make them come true.

I am headstrong into my bucket list, happy that I haven't gotten sick of the need to pursue anything on this list, except maybe the Sundance film festival as I have no desire to travel to Park City, Utah. I guess I'm a little disappointed that even in full pursuit, some things are taking longer than I want them to.

This list has certainly sparked my urge to finish the novel. Now, I feel I have a fair shot to defeat my dad in our race to novel completion. But since I've spent the better, sunnier part of my weekends writing, I feel I've missed on the opportunity to cross other more viable items off the list, so lesson learned, I'll make more of an effort to do that from this point on.

Also, some items like donating bone marrow and is a two step process, the second step being waiting for a match who needs a donor. I've put myself in the position of having to choose between the health of others and the joy of crossing something off the list.

I've also been working with a trainer to get my mile time below 6 minutes, however, this might take years to accomplish (My current mile time is 7:15, a far cry from the 6:18 high school personal record). I'm also throwing a wrench in the plan by giving my trainer other goals to conquer like: improve triathlon time, strengthen my core, look toned, get my bikini body back, get in better shape than my boxing friend, which may or may not improve my running time. Correction, my decision to ignore diet advice is the wrench.