Sucking In Seattle

I know that I'll get no sympathy from my bloggy friends living in the frozen north or the mountainous west, but Houston weather sucks donkey balls right now and has for the last three weeks. Rain, cold, fog, more rain, more cold, more fog. It's like living in London or Seattle, only colder and without the stuff like the mountains, the Puget Sound, the castles or the funny accents.

Yeah, this is what my pool in South Texas looks like right now. (That pool is actually full of little kids tearing it up, back and forth in the lanes, but they're going so fast and the exposure is so slow that you can't see them. Note, the immobile grownups are visible and barely even blurred.) I have been devout in my religious devotion to the pool, notwithstanding the cold. Bumblebee wannabees cannot progress without attacking their limiters--and this is one of mine.

Uhm . . . shrinkage? Yeah. I hope it's not permanent.

I've got my results back from the bike test at Trivantage.

I'll give the details after Dr. Endurance goes over them with me, but suffice it to say that the weather is not the only thing in Houston sucking donkey balls right now.

That huge sucking sound that you hear? That's me. Apparently, if I purchase a time machine so as to go backwards in time rather than attempting to maintain any forward velocity, I might achieve a heartrate approriate to base training.

So I did the only logical thing a sucky bike rider can do--I signed up for the Triple Bypass, 120 miles and over 10,000 feet of elevation gain over three Rocky Mountain passes. (Check out this crazy map) GUH! Attacking the limiters? Um yeaaaaah. But I promised Bolder that I'd be on his wheel (at least metaphorically) when he returned to get some revenge on this course. And a bloggy promise is even higher than a pinky swear--at least to a certain person.

So, the run is spiffy, right? Well, not exactly. It probably had something to do with maximal testing on Saturday, maximal testing in Sunday, a hard spin on Monday, a hard spin on Tuesday, a stress test at my physical exam on Tuesday, etc. etc., but I totally could not haul myself around Memorial park. I dragged Coach T out in the pre-dawn rain for a measly 3 miles.

The Runnah Chica saw me crack. Oh, the humanity.

Hey, Einstein. Ever hear of a "recovery day." Try one. You'll like it.

But the good news is that the lab technician doing my stress test actually became bored by my stamina. My heart rate climbed so slowly that after 15 minutes I was still 20 beats shy of the maximum they wanted to achieve. "We have enough data. You can, er, stop now if you want."

At 40 I have a healthy ticker, 160 total cholesterol, 70 good cholesterol, and NO cardiac risk. As the doc said, "most people have to take Lipitor to see numbers like this." This exercise stuff really works.

And, Nytro, I got a whooping cough vaccination. So, we can still be friends.