Marina is just that – it’s an open marina that you row in a counter-clockwise loop, and depending on your course it can be about 6000m, not counting inlets. You’re out there with everyone else – rowers from other boathouses, recreational motorboats, sailboats, a couple of commercial tourist fishing expedition boats, and the occasional Catalina-bound ferry. As you might guess, sometimes that makes for an adventure wrapped in chaos punctuated by many an utterance of “What the fuck?”

Creek is different. It’s an outlet of the LA river which has about 2400m of protected water between two bridges that’s two, maybe three boat lanes wide. Thanks to our location, Bear!Boathouse has a dock that lowers down directly to the water. Everyone else has to actually row out of the marina, go out around the breakwater & surf about five or six hundred meters of ocean waves to get access. As such, the course doesn’t get much play beyond some of the local Masters who know how to manage that sort of hazard and college crews who have a coach launch as safety escort.

I like rowing in the creek. Not just because the water is flat – after six years in our marina, shit water is just part of the game. No, I like creek because it helps me let go.

Truth told, I really needed that this week.

Laziest. 2k. Ever.

I did a 2k piece last weekend. I went to SD & did their Indoor Classic, and while everybody else in my heat was busting their ass racing, I just went ahead and… did a piece.

One of the Juniors described it later as “the most casual 2k ever”, and it’s true – I pretty much did the anti-2k.

I sat down, I did a nice steady state piece. I adjusted the volume on my ipod twice, I deliberately didn’t go faster than the girl who was winning the lightweight division (open & open ltwt went together) & and I really only put pressure on for the last 400m when I looked the screen & saw that Hoff (who came in 2nd in the lightweight division) was +10m up on me, which the junior rowers described as, “it literally looked like you said, ‘ehhh, screw it, I’m gonna go ahead & beat Hoff‘.”
That was actually a very accurate assessment, except that longtime readers will not be surprised to know that in my mental version of that statement, I dropped the f-bomb.

After I was done, I put my handle in place, reached back for my phone, took a picture of my screen, then cheered on the girl next to me for her last 500m & waited for everyone else to finish.

Rowers reading this story are either laughing or horrified right now. Or, as JRo said to me at work on Tuesday when she heard, “Wow. You seriously did that & still won your race? You’re kind of an asshole.”

Salter:	hahaha…what a good example you lead for the high school kids
Claris:	what? i cheered the girl next to me on – that’s totally sportsmanship!

Why did I do a piece instead of a race?

Because the problem isn’t my body, it’s my head.

For me, last weekend wasn’t about winning or busting my shit out, it was about composure. It was about rowing a piece without freaking out. Last Saturday, I pulled a 1.53.7 average split – pretty much the same time I pulled last year. The difference is that this year, it wasn’t a fight. I wasn’t hyperventilating. There were no panic attacks. Honestly, if I was anything last week, I would describe that piece as oddly detached.

I wasn’t rowing for time. I was rowing for flow.

One of the things that I’ve come to realize over the last few months is how much I’ve lost my flow.

High School Locker People: where you the shover or the shovee?

On the water, athletically, I love rowing.

Off the water… well let’s be honest, folks – the rowing community has a lot of crap.

Rowing is a small group of people to begin with, and each individual boathouse is a bit isolated from others, so oftentimes you end up in what I can only describe as high school, only nobody is ever forced to graduate, so they just sit at that maturity level. Forever.

The result? You see a lot of dumbass crap.

For people like me, who didn’t participate in high school when I was in high school, being different can make you a target. Add in that I’ve never been one to duck a punch, and you learn real fast what it means to stand alone.

But having to deal with that sort of thing, to keep taking care of yourself over & over… after a time, expending that energy takes its toll. And in the course of that, I’d lost much of what made me love my sport.

So I retreated. I purposely backed away from people & just concentrated on the rowing. Z changed the metrics of my training plan so that I couldn’t measure things the way I usually would. And while the detailed entirety of the tale will no doubt be a different blog entry at another time, for the last four months, I have simply dialed things back & worked the problem.

All of which is why, last weekend, I rowed a piece for flow. I rowed it like I was in the creek.

While the water conditions are mostly flat, unless you have very specific conditions, the split you pull in the creek isn’t really an indicator of your actual speed – since we tend to row early in the morning & later in the evening, the tide is almost always either coming in or out, so one direction your split will be really great, and the other… not so much.

If I really wanted to, I could I find those perfect conditions – as Z loves happily pulled out his phone on Sunday to demonstrate, there’s totally an app for that.

Do I bother? Nah.

Right now I just need to row to row. After Saturday’s 2k, I came home, went to sleep, headed over to Bear!Boathouse on Sunday and hit the creek for a 4×20′ under 155 HR where I literally spent and hour & twenty minutes just playing around with the technicality of my stroke.

The truth is that right now, I am a selfish rower.

Christmas Day, I rowed a 2x with Stesha Carle.
@Steeesh & I had known each other for a bit, but really only started talking over the last year or so, & have never actually rowed together, so when there was nobody around & neither of us had a training plan for Christmas, we decided to meander out & see what there is to see.

…and I was reminded that damn. I row selfish.

Overall, it was decent for never having rowed together. Balance was good, & as someone who normally rows a single, I was perfectly happy to let the little control freak bow so I didn’t have to steer.

There was some slight mismatch – due to yoga having allowed me to develop the ability to scrunch my body into as tiny a ball as one could be when 5’10″, I have a fair compression at the catch so my front angle is deeper, but Stesha comes off the footplates & turns around into the drive much quicker & harder than I do — which is probably why she’s got the silver medal for team USA from this year’s Worlds in Bled and I’m just mucking about in a creek on my own.

…but the thing that struck me the most about that row was the difference in how we balance.

As we would go up the slide, I could feel Stesha behind me – there were wiggles and twitches and movement from her calves and toes as she counterbalanced me.

For me, balance comes from relaxing – I tend to deliberately loosen my upper body as I go up the slide, push my shoulders away from my ears, finesse the oar handles, and allow the boat to roll around me.

Now, to be clear, neither approach is wrong. It just illustrated to me a difference in mindset.

Competitively, Stesha rows a quad, so she’s used to counterbalancing and working with other people in the boat. As much as she concentrates on her own performance, there’s always a part of her brain that also constantly adjusts what she’s doing to better mesh with her teammates.

For the most part, I row a single – because I don’t have to worry about what anyone else might do to offset my motion, my instinct is to just keep my body in line, allow the shell to go where it’s gotta go, & re-engage as I approach the front in order to allow for as little disturbance as possible.

While neither of us knew it at the time, looking back, I know now that really needed that row. For me, that row, and the lesson that I learned from it – athletically, it was a kind of blessing.

When you learn to row, you’re taught to row with others – the most common boat is the 8+. You work as a team, you compete against others for your seat. So much of what & how you do things involves other people.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love an 8+. Rowing-wise, I was born & raised to be an engine room, and after the practice row for last year’s Crew Classic, I was the one going, “Sweeeeeeep – wait, why are we stopping? Let’s go again!”

But, much like the fact that my parents raised me in a Catholic Republican environment only to have their daughter send them a copy of Farenheit 9/11 right before the 2004 presidential election, how I was raised is not who I turned out to be.

What that row with Stesha taught me is that right now, I’m a single rower. And there’s nothing wrong with that other than that I hadn’t accepted that because what I row has changed, how I approach how I row has to change. I have to be selfish. More importantly, I have to be okay with being selfish, and doing what I need to do for me, no matter how that stacks up to what other people think or expect.

I’m just now getting to the point where I can start to put my head back in the game. Last weekend was the first time in three years where I rowed 2000 meters on something other than the paddle and didn’t feel like my heart was going to explode from neurosis.

Was I at full pressure? Hell no.
Athletically can I do better than that? Yah, I totally can.

But mentally, that was the best 2k I’ve rowed in four years.
There was no psychologically abusive coach telling me I’m not “a real athlete” because I hadn’t hit a certain split, no lung-stealing panic, no feeling that the walls were gonna close in on me. I stopped thinking about anything other than what I needed to do for me, & I did a piece. I did okay. I didn’t freak out. I was okay.
I am okay.

This weekend? Round 2.

There’s another erg sprint at Beach!Boathouse, so I’m going to build on what I did last Saturday & try it again. Based on the heat sheets, I know there’s at least one other girl who’ll probably beat me in the event, and honestly… I don’t care. All I want to do this week is to be able to go a little faster than last week & still have the same composure. To push out of my comfort zone a bit more & still be okay.

This isn’t my endgame. This is a step. This is part of my process. To get to there, I have to get through here. So if I lose on Saturday, that’s fine. Right now, I’m finding my flow.

I’m not racing to win. I’m not there yet. Today, I’m just rowing for me.

Music: Falling – Staind (Chapter V)

previous adventures

• letting go & learning to breathe.
• Just like freakin’ Ghandi.
• rowing & puppies – because really, what else is there?

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Why, you might ask?

One word, people: Crosstraining. Cross. Training.
Okay, yes. I think it may be two words. shush.

Here’s the thing – when you’re a rower, you can’t just row. If you do, two things happen:

1. you get hurt because you’re overworking those muscles.
2. your brain gets bored & you burn out.

Thus, cross training. Swim, bike, run, whatever – you do something that’s not rowing.

Last May, I joined up at YAS.

YAS is exactly what its name stands for – Yoga And Spin. That’s it. That’s all they do. No upsell, no attempt to get you to do personal training or their diet program. Yoga & Spin, in one form or another. Very cut & dry.

Thus for me, as someone who used to teach spin & is already inclined to yoga, that’s pretty much perfect. And I loved it there. Loved it.

At least, it was until my right knee decided to get all… wonky-like.

Lemme ‘splain.

If you’re going to spin regularly, it’s highly advisable to get shoes & clips. This gives you a better footing on the pedal than using your regular sneakers with a basket on the pedal.

Now, when I was teaching, spin was still fairly new, and I was poor & in college, so I didn’t get clips. This time around, however, I decided to take care of business, & caught a good sale on some Sidi shoes.

At the time I didn’t know anything about spin shoes & just went with the philosophy that I wanted the lightest hardshell shoes I could find, because to me that seemed the logical choice. I later learned that I’d lucked out not only in price but also in brand since, as YAS instructors Diane & Gina said when they saw my new shines, “You got the rockstar shoes! Nice!”

However, you also have to get clips to go on the shoes before you can use them.

So, that in mind, one Saturday I stopped by MDR bike on Lincoln in Marina Del Rey & said, “Hey, I got these shoes, I need to get clips, can you help me?” And the guy in the shop said, “Sure, here you go”, installed clips & off I went.

No problem, right?

Wrong.

I have a bad feeling about this… No, seriously. There’s actual pain. It feels bad.

As time went by, I began to notice that

a) the right shoe always seemed to be loose
b) my right knee was beginning to be sore

Well… crap.

At first, we thought it was just that the bikes needed to be tightened.
(because yes, I’m a princess & pea about my equipment, so Gina & I started testing the bikes)

After the regularly scheduled maintenance at YAS came & went and I was still having problems, I was willing to admit that yes, it was somehow my shoe, & this time I headed over to Helen’s Cycle in Marina Del Rey & explained that I didn’t know what was wrong, but something was just not right.

Their shop guy was really great, and sat down to look at my shoe – took a look at the shoe, at my foot, opened everything up. In the course of this, he discovered two things:

1. the clip had been placed way too far up on my foot – basically, every time I was out of the seat, I was on my toes instead of the ball of my foot.
2. the washer on the right shoe… yeah, one of them was in backward.

Possibly the words “this is just not even an amateur screw-up” may have been used in the course of that conversation as they asked who set my shoes up originally. I’m just sayin’.

Sadly, even with the shoe fixed, my knee remained sore. Damage was done, man – every time I went to spin, my knee hurt like a bitch the next day. The incident which led to our Holiday Zombie Abandonment Poll? At the time I thought it had been from my erg, but looking back, totally because I’d been on a bike the day before.

So I took three weeks off at the end of the year, thinking I’d just give my knee time to recuperate, and the first week of January, off I went back to YAS.

…where I didn’t even make it through the warm up song.

Instead, I did something I’ve never done before in a spin class – I got off the bike, packed up, & had to leave. Waved to Gina, pointed to my knee, she was cool about it, but yah. No spin for me for a bit.

Instead, I get to work on diversifying my cross training, which isn’t really a change you want to have to figure out in your training during a month which ends in two consecutive weekends of 2k races.

The moral of the story:

When it comes to your equipment, when things don’t feel right, never be afraid to be steal a little something from the Princess & the Pea. As the freelancer without health insurance who was happy to be able to run a slow 5k last week for the first time in three months, I guarantee you – it’s worth it.

Music: Baby You’re Gonna Have to Pay – Victoria (Alcazar)

previous adventures

• A guy, a girl, & some heavy breathing: Welcome to Ayurvedic Healing.

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Three months later, I know it was about me.

Back in the day (aka mid-July) while Pomatto & I were sitting up at Lake Mercer about to inadvertently fluster our way to winning Southwest Regionals, she mentioned to me she’d heard the varsity 8+ of the lady Trojan Navy would be racing Head of the American in singles this year.

Oh, crap.

The USC women have a high yield of European recruits. This means that, unlike a lot of American collegiate rowers, USC girls know how to scull. And in the case of one Trojan, I know she knows how to scull, because I was learning to coach & lent her my speedcoach while she learned to row a 1x.
(I’m sorry American schools, but let’s be honest — emphasis isn’t put on smaller boats to get recruited to college. Flyweight, who has been sculling (and winning) in a 1x & 2x for the past two years, actually had college coaches reject her for recruitment when they found out she wasn’t primarily sweep rowing. I’m not saying it’s better or worse, that’s just the way the two systems are, and the result is that the majority of American collegiate rowers are not scullers.)

As a single sculler under the age of 35, rowing in the Masters’ category is kind of pointless — no matter what my raw time is, the age handicap adjustment would kill me.
Right now my age is only useful for a Masters’ A boat’s ability to bring in new collegiate grads to the boat & still make the 27 minimum age average — a fact which my original coach G was happy to realize for Crew Classic this year considering that when I started five years ago I was one of the young’ins he had to compensate for.

So if I row the Masters’ category, I could win in raw time & lose to a 67year old by age handicap, but if I row Open, there’s a very good chance I’ll have to compete against the freakin’ Trojan navy, two of whom placed in the top 10 at this year’s U23 World Championships.

And people wonder why I laugh when they say rowing looks so relaxing.

My decision?

Frack it. I’d rather take the chance of getting beaten in raw time than lose because of math.
Damn you, math*! ::shakey fist::
*not to be confused with Math, who is an actual person I quite enjoy talking with & simply has an ironic misspelling on his birth certificate, poor bastard.

Upcoming challenge in mind, I emailed what would should have been my primary source of training info & said, “Okay, I’m not going to Canadian Henley, but it looks like I’m gonna have to race the Trojan Navy at the end of October, so how do I alter my workouts to use the end of the summer to prep for that?”

In return I got…nothin’. Crickets started to chirp, & then stopped to apologize for being loud.

As someone that used to coach & run a team, I recognize that for the group at large there were other priorities at that point, and I’m realistic enough to understand that a lone Masters’ rower whose schedule didn’t match the competition plan for the rest of the team… not high on the list.

However, since this wasn’t the first time I’d asked a training question and gotten the cricket response, and I’ve never been one to sit around & wait, I went to Z & said, “Hi. I need help. …please. I totally meant to say please.”
Z, being a bit more used to me than most people, said, “What’s up?”
“Based on scuttlebutt, it would appear I’m going to be rowing singles against the Trojan Navy.”
“Crap.”
“Exaaaaactly.”

Note: that Trojan who used to borrow my speedcoach? Guess who was her coach as a junior rower. If you guessed the guy that I was talking to, good call.

So we sat & talked a little.

While Z & I have known each other since I started rowing & his then-girlfriend Mo was using her experience as a former U23 rower to systematically kick my novice ass every seat race, he’s never actually had any direct interaction with my training other than the general stuff you talk about when you’re in the same rowing community for five years.

When I was looking for a coach after First!Boathouse, I’d actually asked Z first, but he was taking pre-reqs to get into grad school & didn’t have time, so I ended up working with Webster instead. Three years later, Z‘s decided against grad school for the moment, I wasn’t working with Webster anymore, & here we were again. Circle of life, man.
: obligatory Lion King joke here :

In talking, we went over my heart rate settings, which caused Z to have a coronary of his own and declare me freakish & odd, something that I have long accepted isn’t a descriptive solely isolated solely to my pulse rate, but more a continual state of being for my overall existence.

“In short,” I explained, “I have the heart rate of a hamster. A hamster that’s got a 5-hour Energy addiction. And does crack. A lot.”

So we did a step test, which for non-rowers means that I did a step test, & Z stood behind the erg & wrote numbers down, then went away & did a bunch of math. (Considering the options, I’m glad I was on the erg.)

The result was a two-faceted change to my training.

Physically, I had a new set of intervals for my morning workouts on two-a-days, and then I’d continue doing a recovery workout of stacking a spin class followed by yoga that night.

In terms of mental perspective, Z changed the metrics by which I measured my workouts. Where in the past I’d been ruled by meters on the water & splits on the erg, Z took into account the fact that four years of trying to change my heart rate workouts to what everyone kept telling me they should be and failing had only resulted in the the annoyance of this making my HR go faster because my competitor brain would look at the slower split & think about the split time instead of the heart rate, which is the actual focus of the workout.

To combat the fact that I’m overly competitive and more than a little OCD about tracking numbers to the nth degree, my new parameters were that I would do my pieces on the water for time instead of distance and that any work on the erg would be done using watts instead of watching split time. This way, the goal became to stay within my heart rate ranges for that time, and whatever distance/split I got, I got. We’d take a look every so often at split/meters total to see if those improved as I went, but otherwise that wasn’t something to be taken seriously — kinda like the rowing version of Joey Fatone on Dancing with the Stars.

Thus I was sent off to go try this out for two weeks so that we could make any changes needed before Z went on vacation – aka The Time of the Year When He Runs Like Hell for a Week or Two & Pretends the Boathouse Doesn’t Exist & There Aren’t Over 120 Teenagers to Plan for in September & Really Who Can Blame Him for Doing So.

What I discovered was… I felt better.

Longer, looser… way less stress.

Don’t get me wrong. I love rowing, and I’ve learned something from every coach I’ve ever worked with. But so often in doing workouts, I would walk away feeling defeated instead of accomplished. Not by the actual rowing, mind you – otherwise why on earth would I still be doing this, ya know? But for me, as someone that walked into rowing a minimum four years behind most of my teammates, & then in running a team and working as a single sculler — I have always had this feeling that I didn’t know enough, and that the reason I felt like I couldn’t keep up was because everyone else was just better at rowing or knew something that I didn’t, or I wasn’t working hard enough, or I just wasn’t… enough.

As such, I had spent four years since G was my coach thinking I was lacking. There’s something wrong with me, I needed to figure out how to do better so I fit into what everyone else was doing.

Even with my heart rate – I’d had my last two coaches both tell me at different points that the reason I was out of their range was because I was out of shape.

On the other hand, Z’s reaction had been, “Has anyone ever tested you?” and I went, “There’s a test?”
somewhere in northern California, Jessica just read that & mumbled, “How do I do a sprint start?” Yes, Jessica it was just like that. Shut it.

But in changing the approach to the pieces (and also their structure), I found that I would finish & feel… accomplished instead of defeated.

Here’s the thing – a lot of coaches (but not all) will be very pound-pound-pound-pound and work to get you to push your body to the limit all the time. And for many people, that totally works – for a fine example of this, see the Canadian Mens’ 8+. They’re not just hot enough to populate Kalmoe’s List, they also supposedly have a Spartan-worthy coaching philosophy to beat the band. And for them, it totally works, because hey, hello with the winning.

For me, as a(n almost) 32 year old competitive Masters’ rower who has a full time job & limitations on when my nearest boathouse and its equipment is available… the pound-pound-pound approach… turns out that just isn’t me.

It’s not only an age thing — a goodly number of National team rowers are actually in my age range, and I know that Kline, a 42 year old lightweight down at Beach!Boathouse, can kick my ass on the water.

For me, the improvement was mental.

Z‘s methodology is a lot more… chill. When I was talking to him about it, I described it as that things felt longer, looser, like there was a lot more flow to the workouts rather than bang-bang-bang all the time.

Part of that comes from who Z is as a person, which of course is a huge influence on how he runs things. I learned to coach by riding launch with Z for a summer. In the course of that time, Z described his college rowing experience as, “For the first year, I was the guy that everybody was hoping would quit.”
We also learned during our time in the launch that we’d existed in the LA rowing community for the previous 3 years ignorant that the other was also a humongous pop culture nerd. Delightful for us, dangerous for everyone else.

Z‘s approach is fairly low-pressure — the girls are pushed, but for a rowing team, it’s a very relaxed environment. However, if you take a look at who’s been jockeying first & second place for the womens’ 4+ at Nationals and Head of the Charles for the last three or four years, clearly it’s an approach that doesn’t entirely suck.

When that philosophy was applied to my training program, I was able to appreciate as an athlete what I’d learned in the launch as a coach — that for some athletes, when constant push and pressure is taken away, things just work better.

For me, the result was that I began to feel better not only in terms of the workouts, but also on a physical level. I found that I had more energy – in addition, I altered the heart rate ranges I was working with in spin, and once I wasn’t constantly beating myself into the ground, I could do things like… stay awake at my desk around 2pm during a work day at Museum!Co, which is probably helpful for being able to continue to fund rowing my life.

Z also worked within the construct of what my stroke actually is, as opposed to trying to make it what it theoretically should be. Down at Beach!Boathouse, I was working out with lightweight rowers — mind you, these are damn fast pre-elite caliber lightweights, but still — lightweight rowing is a different technique & approach. It’s quick(er), short(er), fast, high rate.

It is, in essence, everything I suck at.

When I was a novice, as part of G‘s campaign to simply shove technique into my erg score, I spent most of the summer rowing behind PK. PK was about 6’3″, 6’4″, and a collegiate coach who’d been rowing competitively for about, oh, 20 years by the time I started rowing. I was literally told, “Go learn to match PK’s slide control.”

Incidentally, while he would never actually admit it to any of us, one of PK‘s ideas of a good time was to understroke everyone, something Mo found out one day when she bowed a 2x with him & said to me afterwards, “Okay, seriously? He rowed a 12.”

“Yes, yes he does,” I told her. “Welcome to my friggin’ world.”

Take that beginning & add in the fact that my next coach was Webster, a 6’7″ former National team rower for the pair, and the result is that, as I joked with Z, “Basically, I row kinda like a guy. An openweight guy. That’s done a lot of yoga. And prefers to understroke. That’s me.”

To which he laughed (because he knows both PK & Webster) and said, “So the assumption that this October you’d be head racing at a 28-30 rate…”

“Yah…not what exactly what I’d call ‘realistic’.”

As such, we built things around the fact that, at this point, I’m not going to be rowing at as high a stroke rate as most people, & thus need to work on incrementally getting used to being able to hold higher rates for longer periods of time.

Which, for me, has been a total bitch.

Oh, and did I mention I’ve been injured? Because yah. That happened.

For those of you just tuning in, before rowing there was kickboxing. While I was developed as an ambidextrous boxer and can maintain a fair southpaw, I am instinctively right handed. Also the three years of violin lessons, which used my right arm for bowing, and the years of painting/art school, and the fact that I work as a freelance web nerd & sit at a desk for hours on end using my right hand for the mouse…

Right. It’s really not surprising that there was a slow creeping of twinge-ey pain growing in my right elbow. Honestly, in terms of repetitive use strain, it’s kind of a miracle that it’s taken 30 years to show up.

But still…. ugh.

So I went through my life, and nailed down that the root cause was the desk arrangement with my new (to me) cube at Museum!Co. Heights were adjusted, things fixed, and while the cause of the problem was remedied, I now had to get through the part where things (aka my right arm) heal up & go back to normal.

Which is why, at one point in the process, Z got an email whose first line was, “J’ai besoin d’un nouveau coude.” Which is French for “I need a new elbow”, a phrase I mastered in speaking with Cecile, a lovely Parisian lady who rows out of our boathouse & likes the fact that my time in New England included six years of French classes.
After all, an injury’s not an injury until you can bitch about it in the European language which turned out to be completely useless because you moved to LA, right? Right. Totally.

All this in mind, I confab’d with Z and was like, “look, let’s just be realistic — I’ve been training more off the water than on, and we don’t actually know if my elbow will hold up for a full 5k, so me ‘racing’ this… maybe not the best idea.”

The verdict was that since we don’t actually know what my steady state speed would be if I completely disregard heart rate & just row at a comfortable pace, we might as well use Head of the American to find out. Natoma is a simple course, flat water, no obstacles in the way — Bear!Boathouse Marina has ocean chop & a 180 turnaround halfway through their 6k, Beach!Boathouse course has three bridges & an expanse of open water whose crosswinds have caused some of the junior rowers refer to that stretch as The Devil’s Triangle — so if I couldn’t race it full up, Natoma was a good route to use as a control experiment.

Double the questions, double the fun, none of the winning.

Based on everything over the last three months, the goal became twofold:
1. Hope that my elbow would hold for 5k.
2. See what, rowing comfortably, I could hold for an avg split around a 24/26 rating.

In short, I was going to deliberately tank the race, and after that we’d figure out where to go next.

Good times.

Race day – early intestinal upsets, late starts.

On Saturday morning, I made a rather disconcerting discovery — even when I mentally know the race aspect doesn’t matter, my body still treats any race day like a race day, which is why I had the awesome experience of driving the porcelain bus not once but three times before I walked down to get breakfast that morning. Thank you neurosis, thank you so very much.
on a bright note, after brushing that many times I probably had the cleanest teeth at the starting line, so I like to think I at least got the periodontal win.

The other crappy thing about that race is that our event wasn’t until 2:45 in the afternoon.

:sigh:

While theoretically I understand the semantic reasoning behind this, which is to get the big boats for juniors/collegiate events out of the way and make it easier for those teams to start to de-rig & load trailer… I still hate racing later in the day. As my intestinal upset might indicate, I would much rather race early in the day get things over with so I can spend the rest of the day watching everyone else race and Wandering Crew Crap*.
*shopping the vendors who come to regattas with products that say “crew”. Actually, that’s a limited description — some of the stuff also says “rowing”.

In some ways, this event was a little reunion — I was rowing with Cheng and Austin. Cheng I’d seen at SW Regionals, but Austin I hadn’t seen in about 4 years, back when she was rowing in college & her coach was… PK, the guy that liked to row a 12.

I launched with the Lil’ McGs, who were in the lightweight events at the same time, and upon getting up to the start line, found Cheng in her 1x in tears — it seems the borrowed boat she was rowing had a wing rigger & she couldn’t move the feet, a problem she didn’t realize until she was out on the water. Because of the way the Van Dusen was set up, she couldn’t adjust her shoes without taking the entire rigger off — yet another reason I really don’t like wing riggers in a single.

Thankfully, the start line launch was willing to help Cheng out, so we all chillax’d while they were taking care of that, & I got to say hey to Austin, who was back from Pocock with a shiny new fiancé and an open dubiousness to my assertion that, “No, seriously, I’m not actually racing this today, you’re totally going to pass me by.”

Once they got Cheng at least a little more adjusted in her settings, the starting line informed us that Cheng would be going last, so with the staggering of starts used for head races, the first person to launch would be… me.

Dude. Really? So both of my competitors will get to pass me on the course?

Thanks.

I took off and did what I was supposed to — I settled into what was a comfortable stroke with a concentration on swing and form, probably about eh, 65, 70% pressure, stroke rate around 24.

Around 1000m, Austin caught up with me & I called, “In or out, dude – lemme know.” She glanced over her shoulder, saw that I was seriously there, and I don’t think it was until that moment that she realized I hadn’t been bullsh*tting about the fact that I wasn’t racing the course. I pulled port so she could have the buoy line, and about 1000m later did the same for Cheng, who also looked at me like, “You were serious?” as she went by.

Honestly, it was actually kind of a nice row. Weather was decent, the course is pretty flat, I was rowing with the sun at my back, and I was allowed to completely disregard any and all numbers on my speedcoach. When I have to row my steady state in heart rate range, I’m usually around 2.45, 2.50 avg split, so it turns out when I just chillax & actually have a comfy go at it, I’m about 30, 35 seconds faster. I just rolled into my stroke and really worked on finding swing and getting length out of each stroke, and around 3500 meters, my abs actually started to get tired, which hasn’t happened in a bit.

I hit the last 1000m of the course, which is when the spectators & other teams can see you, & you’ll hear, “Go faster! You can do it!” … and I was thinking, “thanks, but I’m not supposed to go faster…”

Behind me, I heard the horns for when Austin & Cheng hit the end of their runs, and was like, “Cool, next one is me, just listen for the horn…”

…except it wasn’t, because it seems that HoA uses a double-horn at their finish, so the horn I thought was mine was actually the double for Cheng, and I stopped 250m short of the finish. #GoTeamMe! #HowToActLikeANovice #WayToRowDumbass

I laughed at myself & hurried across the finish line, hitting the timer on my speedcoach.

Afterwards, when things were de-rigged & put away, I went over to say hey to Austin off the water and when we were talking about the race, Austin made a joke about the fact that she used to rag on PK for understroking his races, and I confessed, “I’m not gonna lie, I totally rowed that bad boy PK-style.”
…and then we moved on to the fact that she doesn’t take the riggers off her shell for travel, which omfg would make me so nervous, and a little worried that by now, saltwater has fused that metal to the fiberglass on her boat.
Just the thought of it made me wash my boat really well when I brought it back to Beach!Boathouse Monday morning. :shudder:

Overall, I did aww’ite.

In terms of the theoretical benchmarks that Z & I had talked about, official time puts my average split within striking distance of what we’d been hoping to see. Sadly, since my rating was a 24 instead of a 26, actual goal achievement is a bit 50/50.

In terms of the race itself, I came in dead last.

One of the things that the guys taught me in fight training was knifework — close quarter maneuvering with handheld knives. (rubber blades were used for practice) The guys I was up against were all minimum six feet, most with brown belts or higher in more than one discipline. So to win, I learned early on to make sacrifices – turn my shoulder into it, allow the graze over my hip, use my forearm to block the blow — all things designed to draw my opponent in and make them feel comfortable enough for me to get close & make a single strike count enough to finish the fight.

After one of those bouts, the guy that I was up against asked, “What are you doing? You’re all cut up by the end.”

To which I replied, “Yeah, but I’m only bleeding. You’re dead.”
For some reason, guys seem to find it disconcerting when a girl says things like that. :shrug:

Earlier this fall, Math & I were discussing some stuff for his own training after he’d missed an erg benchmark. Since it was at the same time as the Worlds in Bled, I sent him the quote that Kitch got from Kalmoe after the 4x won silver – “I hate to say it, because you always want to win, but sometimes you need to lose to figure out how to win.”

In the last few days, a couple people have looked startled when I’ve laughed about finishing last behind two (nearly) lightweights. The thing is that for me, I know this isn’t the endgame. I’ve got an idea of what that is, and this was just a step in the process. I’ve got a baseline. I can plan the what comes after this because now I know where I’m comfortable.

Now it’s time to get uncomfortable. It’s time to get re-accustomed to pain.

It’s time to start what comes next.

Womens Open 1x

Music: What the Water Gave me – Florence + the Machine (Ceremonials)

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- Me in conversation with a junior coach, inadvertently providing an abject example of why rowing really is just something you have to experience to understand

…just lie back & it’ll all be over soon – isn’t that what they used to say?

One of the project managers at Civic!Co emailed me yesterday — I’d talked to him late last week (talking=ongoing email chain with the same subj line as a project we finished 3 mos ago) and said, “At this point, I’m kind of overloaded and I’m not taking on any new work until after Nov 5th.” and J, who I’ve worked with since I started subcontracting there two & a half years ago, said sure, no problem.

…and then today I got an email regarding a migration starting November 7th.

On the one hand, it’s nice to be needed.

On the other, I could use a break.

I’d set the Nov 5th date for new work because I made the decision not to row NARF this year. I’m going to do Head of the American this Saturday and then take a week off for myself, both athletically and personally.

I just… I need the time, honestly.

There’s no way around it — I can tell just by looking at my online bank statement & seeing how many times there’s a charge from Whole Foods West Hollywood between the hours of 9:45-10:30pm, which is particularly ridiculous considering that my fridge is completely stocked with things that are perfectly healthy for me if I would just take an hour or two to set everything up so they’re ready to go.

Have I done this? of course not.

And really, it’s not just food – I have at least three client projects to finish up, a personal site that I need to put live Friday night, and a whack of administrative paperwork/recordkeeping crap for my business that’s just… in dire need of seeing to, lest I get to the end of the year & be utterly screwed. Thus, I’m going to take a week off the water (other than finishing teaching Sculling I) which will give me at least two to three hours a day back to myself & should make The Accomplishment of Things easier to… accomplish.
Yeah, my English kinda failed me there. not gonna lie.

Hopefully I’ll be able to hit the ripe old age of 32 having knocked the majority of Things On my List off said list. While they say that people can age like fine wines, I going to guess that’s not supposed to include dust on your to-do list.

Plus by then, the dogs will probably need another bath – and really, who isn’t looking forward to that?

Music: bang bang bang – Christina Perri (Lovestrong, deluxe edition)

previous adventures

• Hoff’s maximum speed, code vs life, & my continued employment – aka, ALL HAIL THE POWER OF THE LIST!
• what of the what, staying put, & trust issues with alcohol.
• Scribbling signs of life, 10 min at a time

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I dunno about you guys, but I have been tired. There was a snafu with a client’s job that had me working from 5pm on Sun afternoon until about 6:30am last Monday morning, and I spent last week been trying to play catch up ever since. I’m having one of those stretches where I’ve got a case of The Don’wannas – I don’t wanna work, and I don’t feel like doing pieces at race pace even though there’s a head race next weekend, and I didn’t want to drive three hours round trip that night to pick up a roof rack so I can transport my single on Monday…

…et cetera and so forth. It was Head of the Charles this weekend, and while half the rowers I know were either in Boston or on watching the Cambridge web cam to see how many people would use a boat crash to mark their visit to The Land of Dunkin’ Donuts (mmm…. delicious blueberry cake munchkins that it turns out I’m totally allergic to…) I wanted nothing more than to just crawl into bed for The Best Nap Ever.

Which would explain why, on Friday afternoon, I fell asleep for about, oh… 14 hours. oops.

Also, because it’s a stretch where I am slightly whiny and oogy (as if this post hadn’t already given that away) I am also having that time where I just want a Nap Boyfriend.
I don’t need sex (although wouldn’t that be nifty), I don’t need an actual relationship right now, but it would be nice to curl up with a nice, solid male-gender type in my attempt at Best Nap Ever.

Alas, most likely it will be as things normally are — I’ll tell Ernie to go sleep on his bed, he’ll jump over his bed (often because Zoey’s already in it since she’s left all of her toys on her bed) and he’ll hang out on the couch until I’ve fallen asleep, at which point both dogs will take advantage of my unconscious state to climb onto my bed and drape themselves on top of or wedge next to my body so that I wake up hot as hell and pinned down to my own mattress like a mental patient that’s been strapped in for safety.

This is my life, people. Welcome to the whirlygig.

…because clearly a single woman over the age of 30 must be in want of a sailor.

Okay, you know what Google? Meet me at Camera 3.

Do I even want to know what on earth in my internet workings caused your algorithm to present me with this ad?

Really, Google? Really?

When I said I wanted a Nap Boyfriend, it didn’t mean I was going to be trolling the docks to provide any port in a storm, thankyouverymuch.

and now for a #TwitterFail of Olympic proportions

… you ever have that day where you make a joke on twitter about your neighbor being a pothead right as your friend on the National team twitters & cc’s the world championship 8+ to thank you for the baked goods you sent them?

… yeah. Me neither. :cough:

um, hi guys. < /awkward>

Honestly, what I really like about this is the educational opportunity that @thisismagda created:

You ever have that moment where you just look at your world & think, “our lives aren’t like other people.”

… yeah. me neither.

previous adventures

• owning a boat, patronized by fashion, & cutting teenagers off from making decisions.
• museum of me, macbook thievery, & greenwash balls.

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Looking back, I suspect he gave it to me so that I left him alone before he threw it at my head — just because I insisted I could feel that the oars weren’t set evenly & it turns out they were off by .3 does not mean I’m crazy. It means I’m precise, so there’s no reason to ask if I’m the Princess & the Pea like it might be a bad thing, it means that I now know how to change out handles & set even lengths on oars, and I think that’s a good thing.

…right? Right. Totally!

Note: For the record, I gave Z his book back, because I’d gone to Amazon & ordered my own in case I wanted to be able to take notes.

The point being that rigging a boat & doing wiring — normally these things & I are, if not Great Friends, then at the very least, Fairly Amicable Acquaintances.

Sadly for me, the following story is not normal.

Saturday. The day I thought I had it figured out.

So for those of you that actually read my blog entries that have #rowing in the header:
first off – thanks for putting up with me
second, you probably know that with my new boat, there’s been a slight… struggle with setting up my wiring.
(“struggle” : trans. MTV called from the 90’s, they’d like to know if I would participate in Claris vs Boat wiring as a Celebrity Death Match.)

Thus far this process has involved discovering that my wiring set didn’t have a magnet on the seat (my fault for not checking & assuming it’d be there), switching out the original wiring that came with the boat for a new set, trying three different magnets before I found one strong enough (really NK? What’s up with a weak magnet in my NEW wiring set? A couple of rowers at Beach!boathouse say they had that problem too, you might wanna check your supplier.)

The point being, two wiring sets & three seat magnets later, I finally had a rate.

Unfortunately, it appeared to be the horribly wrong rate, unless I’ve suddenly developed the heretofore unknown to me superpower of thinking I was paddling and in fact rowing a 46. (for non-rowers, you paddle at like, a 16. Slight difference, that.) G-mo borrowed my 1x for his heat at SW Regionals* & it told him he raced his 1k at a 108 stroke rating, a skill of which we were all appropriately in awe.
*because of my vertical proportions, I discovered my best hardware fit was a mens’ F-15 with a 165 weight cap. As such, my boat is the envy of every lightweight male on our team.

Since everything appeared to be installed correctly, we declared that I’d gotten a crap wiring set, & I ordered another from NK. Got it, put it in… same. damn. problem. Stroke rate: approx a bajillion.

Em. of. effffffff.

Attempt at Silver Lining:
Well, I have been working on improving my ability to hold a higher rate.

At this point, I gave up, admitted that I’d hit the edge of my troubleshooting capability, & asked DaddyMcG to take a look. So after team practice on Sat morning, we took my boat down, & by the time I’d gotten my speedcoach & came back, he said, “I can see the problem right here.”

The magnet was too far back.

JTG, whom I’d bought the boat from, already had wiring in there, so when I put the new sets in, I used his old spots thinking, “Okay, he’s already proven this is the right place. As they say in Beauty & the Beast, if it’s ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it.”
@Steeesh: B&B reference is totally your fault. I’ve had that song in my head on & off ever since you said “Hey gurl!”

Realize you’ve put the seat on backwards.

Sit 100m away from the dock & go, “Son of a b*tch!”

Paddle back to the dock. Get out of boat. Pull oars in. Take seat off tracks.
Turn seat around.
Put seat back on tracks.
Grumble.
Run oars out. Get back in boat. Push off dock.

Five strokes… no stroke rate again.

I just… I don’t, I can’t… it’s not fair.

Okay. Stop. Breathe. Engage yoga breath. Apply brain. You had a stroke rate last time, then you put the seat on correctly.

…if the magnet was at the front when the seat was on backwards, putting the seat on properly moved it to the back again.

When I stopped to talk to the other rower & explain that I didn’t come back in because Something Dire Had Occurred, I must’ve not been paying attention & put the magnet right back where I’d just taken it off from.

Go. Team. Me.

Paddle-back-to-the- dock. Get-out-of-boat. Pull-oars-in. Take-seat-off-tracks.
Put the damn magnet in the right damn spot.
Make sure seat is facing right freakin’ way.
Put seat back on tracks.
Grumble.
Run-oars-out. Get-back-in-boat. Push-off-dock.

Obligatory five strokes.
Achieve stroke rate.
:fist of triumph!:

Start to paddle away… realize that there’s a click & slight bump when approaching the catch.

What. What now? What the freakin’ bloody hell now???

With the added weight of… well let’s just be honest – my ass, the seat now bends in just enough that the two magnets don’t pass by one another, they hit each other.

Really? Really? It’s not enough that I’m having this morning of mornings, but now you gotta make a sister feel fat, too?

WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LIKE TO TORTURE ME?

Seriously, people – I’d put up with a lot from the Cosmic Muffin that day, but the fat joke — oh, that put me right over the edge. I just started mumbling stuff like, “You wanna go, b*tch? Really? You wanna go? Fine. Effin’ bring it, and we will em’ effin’ go. And you will lose, because right now I’m in the mood. I am from New York. My mom works at Wal-Mart. My parents live in a trailer. I was the first to get a freakin’ degree. You know what that means? Underneath all this nice, civilized, well-spoken, meditation-practicing, educated-up guise, I am a Long Island girl with a bad temper whose parents are technically trailer trash and if need requires, do not doubt for a moment that b*tch, I will cut you. ”

Backtodock. Outofboat. Pulloarsin. Seatofftracks.

Let’s look at what we’ve got here.

Okay. Seat – magnet cannot get any higher, it’s on the frame for the seat wheels. No give there.
Boat. We’ve got the deck, the tracks, the porthole cover.

Dude, wtf, I lost ten pounds & shifted BMI this summer because I’m freakin’ allergic to mother-lovin’ wheat. What is wrong with the world when I have to give up bread and my own damn boat is still telling me my ass is too big? Why you gotta be like that, Baby? Didn’t I get you new wiring? I’m gonna order the new shoes soon! Momma loves to row you, why you gotta be so mean?

Okay. No. Stop that. Focus, brain. Focus. Let go of the leftover childhood insecurity borne of being taught an unrealistic body image and focus on the now.

Porthole cover. That’s inset, so it’s lower than the deck. Unless I flip the boat :pause to knock on internet wood: I’ll pretty much never take that cover off, so it really won’t move.
I can try putting the magnet on that, and it should be low enough so that the magnets will clear each other under the apparent weight of my ginormous ass.

Hey hey! Focus, remember? Focus. Before we descended into allowing Bridget Jones’ neurosis to control thought process, there was an actual good applicable solution there. Let’s focus on that.

As you might guess by… most of the entries in this blog, my life often falls into the category of… special, and as such I’ve learned to contingency plan, which is why, when I’d first come down to the dock, I’d brought a roll of electrical tape & a small pair of scissors which I keep in my toolbag just in case.

This, it turned out, was just such a case.

I gently pried the hull-magnet (attached by double-sided tape) off the deck, scooted enough slack in the wiring to stretch to the porthole over, and pressed the hull magnet onto the cover, using my handy-dandy electrical tape to tack things down for testing purposes.

Run the oars out. deep calming breath.
Get back in boat. it’s gonna work. it’s totally, totally all going to work.
Push off dock. Things will be fiiiiiine…

Obligatory five strokes.
Achieve stroke rate. yay!
Five more strokes, listening carefully….
No clicking noise.

No way.

I’m almost afraid to say this, but I think it works.

YES!
It’s possible I almost started to do a victory dance before I remembered I was in a slightly tippy conveyance out in the middle of a body of water and thus needed to hold on to the oars in order to stay upright.

Finally.

I paddled out clear of the dock & the stadium which was no longer open to rowers & thus meant I couldn’t calibrate that morning, & started up the channel towards the yacht club. Held water, took a minute to check things before I started my workout an hour & fifteen minutes after I first put my boat in the water (Not that I’m bitter. Not at all.) Looked up as I was putting my sunglasses on, & saw…

… the rest of my team rowing by from the bridge to the dock as they finished their practice.

Hey guys… :sad little wave:

At that point, it was about 8:30am, the sun was up & in the sky at full shiny brightness, the rest of my team was headed home, & I’d accomplished jack-all for a workout that morning.

There was really only one thing to do.

…and so, 3×30 minutes of steady state later, I was done.

What? Of course I did the workout after all that — even my boat is saying my ass needs to train!

Music: Henry Nearly Killed Me [It’s a Shame] – Ray LaMontagne

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So while I compose this tale of stomach-emptying woe which may have resulted in me thanking the gods I got an apartment with hardwood while I laid on my living room floor in my underwear during LA’s only heat wave this summer, I thought I’d share some of the non-yicky part of last week with you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to resume sipping on my Nalgene full of watered-down Gatorade and cursing the part of me that told Museum!Co, “Sure, I’ll come in Monday so we can get it done early!”

My son has 46 friends on his facebook page. He’s five days old.

~ Pawswithclaws

This is what happens when you have nerd parents.
…and a nerd auntie, and they all have nerd friends.

Welcome to the future, people – it’s gonna be great.

I know, right? If I was you, I’d totally want me teaching you to row.

Text’d by me to another coach:
I just signed up to teach my sculling I requirement for the december class. I can’t wait ’til flip test day, those poor shivery bastards.

The German language – crushing souls one word at a time.

Actual German word that I had to type out for one of my contract jobs:
Wissenschaftgeschichte
Ha! It is too a real word, I totally linked it ’cause I knew you’d say I made it up.

As someone of primarily German descent, I’d just like to take a moment to look at my ancestral heritage & say:

why on earth would you do that to the children? ’cause you look at that word, & you just know that somewhere, at some time in history — that word completely killed some poor kid’s dreams at a spelling bee.

Is it pathetic if you’re just bein’ honest?

One of the project managers at Civic!Co & I were talking about project management/availability for the fall, & my response was:

yah, I’ll be around the next few months — my life’s boring like that.

After I sent it, I thought, “Wow, that’s kinda depressing.” Then I realized… doesn’t make it any less true. :shrug:

This is totally making my life better.

Texts from Pawnee

First, if you’re not watching Parks & Rec… wtf, man. You really need to. It’s okay if you’ve held out, for a while I did too. Then I had a weekend at the Menagerie following a week of texts from amypop about the greatness of Leslie Knope & there was this Roku box loaded up with Seasons 1 & 2 via NetFlix, & yeah. It was all over, I just can’t even tell you.

Second, if you’ve ever worked in the nightclub/bar/restaurant/nighttime entertainment industry, the captions are awesome because I’ve totally heard the real life versions, and no comic could sit down & make up the sh*t people say when they’re trashed.

Awesome because…

• Not gonna lie, situations like this are how I learned the majority of what I know about the internet.
• Based on how he parties, it would seem Tom Haverford would make a great Bronzer
• Technically speaking, he’s not entirely wrong…
• I know people that have made this particular life choice. Sometimes it actually works out better.

Plus, I just really like this one because it kinda defines a lot of my friends:

I can tell that we are gonna be friends…

There’s often a staff mtg for my department at Museum!Co on Wednesdays, and CaptJack will bring bagels for it — even when there’s not a meeting, he still brings bagels. (this kind of works out for me since as a contractor I don’t go to these meetings, so either way — bagels!)

But Claris, you might be thinking — no wheat, no bagel, yes?

Well… yes. but the New Yorker in me likes the free bagels concept on principle. shoosh.

Anyway, so it’s Wednesday, and there I am in the staff kitchen, putting my bowl of fruit & yogurt together for breakfast across from the mountain of pastries & bagels delivered by the CaptJack Express.

One of the girls that got hired the week before comes in, looks at the bagels & gave a sad little sigh, so I laughed & said, “I know, right? There’s almost always food out here, it’s actually kind of evil.”

She looked at me & replied, “It’s not just that. I’m actually gluten intolerant, but I really like bread, and that’s kind of my idea of hell.”

What can I say? Men have brothers-in-arms, women have sisters-in-intestines.

I cracked up. “Oh my god yes totally. I actually have the same problem. Hence my gluten-free breakfast.” :holds up bowl of fruit:

It was kind of awesome, I’m not gonna lie – we both admitted to constantly eating fruit & the fact that you just… reason out having bread every so often & resign yourself to the part where you’re gonna pay for it after.
example: later in the day, I told myself that the the half a bagel that I had wasn’t bad nutritionally because the cream cheese had lox in it, so I was actually just using the bagel as the vehicle to deliver extra protein to my system, so the protein outweighed the gluten… right? Right. totally. that’s what I said.

The conversation petered out, & she went, “Okay, so what’s your name again?”

“Claris. I’m sorry, yours?”

“lyssa.”

“Awesome. talk to you later?”

“Totally, we’ll exchange recipes.”

It’s like this whole little club that I never even knew I belonged to…

Music: After the Storm – Mumford & Sons

previous adventures

• babycakes, Enrique eff’s up, & I’ll be in my bunk.

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Not to worry, I’ve got two fun stories in the works – one about adventures in IT help desk interaction, and another about the fact that in high school it was actually proven that I’m a crappy Nazi.

In the meantime, here’s some stuff that caught my eye:

» Gluten-Free Pop Tarts recipe

Dude. For. The. Win. I don’t even need to actually make this recipe, I’m just happy to know the option exists.
I used to love Pop Tarts growing up. Hands down, one of my Top 10 Factory-produced Comfort Foods That You Know Probably Doesn’t Have One Natural Ingredient in it But You Just Don’t Care.
for the record, Hot Pockets? also in this Top Ten. And Pizza Bites… oh god, sometimes I really could go for some Pizza Bites…

Our dog Heidi loved Pop-Tarts too — what cheese is for Zoey, Pop Tarts were for Heidi, and she was far more of a brazen diva about life, a trait she displayed one day when I was on the couch, watching tv, eating one Pop-Tart, second on my stomach, and Heidi walked by, reached out, delicately took the second Pop-Tart in her teeth, and just kept on walking…

As you might guess, Heidi is the reason Zoey keeps getting caught.

» I totally want to know the story behind this picture

I have no idea what it is, it just happened to be the random that showed when I went to the Flickr homepage the other day, but yes — assuming it’s not a PhotoshopJob, what on earth brought that about?

» …and yeah your body looks so sick I think I caught the flu

(Drop Dead) Beautiful [feat. Sabi] – Femme Fatale (Deluxe Version)
oh, Britney^{™ Missi}. I kind of love you for that lyric, I really do.

» I think if I left that unsupervised in the apartment it might eat my dogs.

…and considering my dogs, that’s really saying something.

Hands down winner for Scariest PT Prop I’ve Ever Seen

I went to go get myself a Trigger Point roller, & that came up in the search. Jeezum capeezum, what kind of injury do you have to get to warrant that?

» You don’t always have to wait until the end to throw the cox in.

In rowing, there’s a tradition that when you win, you can throw the coswain off the dock.
(we don’t do this all the time, but many noisy threats are often made.)

It would seem that this team knew they were so freakin’ awesome that they didn’t even need to wait until their imminent victory — they just went ahead & ejected the cox right at the start line:

» Better than bacon & chocolate.

…because unlike bacon & chocolate, I actually liked this unexpected combination.

While I’m not a big fan of either Nelly or Saturday Night Fever, I’m going to agree with Lovely Poet that this is indeed a really well-done mashup, so feel free to rock your frock.

Music: Big Fat Base – Britney Spears (Femme Fatale)

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It’ll run really fast whenever I do the least bit of workout (or, you know, walk across the room) and then it drops back down faster than the stone that I could stand to lose from my child-bearing hips.

When I was training with Webster, this meant that I would do 10 or 15ks on the erg for a HR

note for non-rowers: Theoretically, your steady state rate should be about 16-20 seconds slower than what you would pull on a 6k. My 20′ test last winter when I was injured was about a 1:58, 1.59. So I was pulling about… thirty seconds above. Not kosher.

CoachIan moved me up to a 166 threshold, not only to see how I’d do, but also because I was just way behind everyone else, since on the water maintaining a 150HR had me at a 2:42-2:45 split. There I could at least apply some modicum of pressure, but yah. Still not really the ideal in terms of solving the actual problem of why my ticker doesn’t tock right.

In the last year, the overall splits have actually gotten better, which I think is due in great part to the fact that my life has so much less stress than I did when I was working with Webster — I have a stable job, which just makes everything easier to plan, I’m not running an entire team, and on a personal level, there is currently no one related to oars trying to f*ck over my life, which is a blessed change after the last… four years.

In the course of things, Z & I were discussing my heart rate, & when I explained that I was doing my steady state with a 166 threshold, his reaction was literally,
“Are you half hummingbird? What’s your resting HR 110? Great googley-moogley… ”
yes, he actually said “great googeley moodgely” — of course I’m gonna quote that, it’s awesome.
–> and for the record, as of Wednesday morning, my resting HR is around a 46, 47, although in the minute I had the HR monitor on after I woke up, I did see 42, 43. Meditation, man — it really does kinda change your world.

So we decided to do a step test, which no coach has ever done with me — mostly, I just got told I was out of shape.
(Before anyone has Sachiel’s reaction to that, they mean out of shape for a rower.)

I just wish Z had suggested that four hours sooner or I wouldn’t have used this last Monday morning to try out my new Vibram runners for the first time.

You know how they say that the first time you run in the barefoot shoes, you’ll do shorter distances at a slower pace & your muscles will hurt from running in a completely different way?

It’s totally, totally true. Especially the hurting part. Mostly on my calves though, so erging didn’t hurt, & I figured “F*ck it, let’s just get things done.”

I tried to do my step test Tuesday morning & discovered why the test said to have a person there monitoring you — because a C2 won’t record anything below 20 seconds, & the test required numbers for every 15 seconds.

Great…

So Z came in on Wed morning, & we had a go at it. He got there in time for the 4′ section of the warm-up, where you’re supposed to just go for 4′ under 140 HR, which I… could not manage if I wanted to keep a flat to my power curve. We watched my HR hang out around 143, 145 around 100 watts, & I finally said, “I swear to god I’m not pulling.”

Then we went ahead & did the actual test, where you step up 25 watts each 90 seconds. I felt like because I started so low, I spent more time on the test trying to hold back & control the watts than actually doing anything, and when Z called stop, I didn’t feel like I’d hit my fail point so much as that I was just tired. Honestly, I feel like I could have gotten higher on the watts — in terms of muscular effort, it wasn’t hurting like a 6k does where you stop & your legs are on freakin’ fire, just more that my body was like, “Dude, I’m tired. Sleepy time.”

I’ve been running into that a lot, actually. I get done with a workout, and my body is like Ernie in Cuddle Mode — it just wants to turn on Mumford & Sons, curl up in bed & snuggle, & we have nappie times now, m’kay?
I don’t actually know if Ernie likes Mumford, but personally I find it calming in the same way as that when I need to mellow I’ll just hit repeat shuffle on Jack Johnson and spend a couple hours coding a page while a part of my brain says, “One of these days, I really do need to finally call Alley & learn to surf.”

It’s not the actual workouts, because I’ve been doing two a days on & off for five years now and it’s never been this bad. It’s almost like my energy levels now match my heart rate — good to go like a freight train while the workout’s on, & then afterwards it’s all fwah-bam! straight south through the floorboards to the basement so that the camera can pan up to frame Robert Downey Jr. & Jude Law looking down through the hole as they deliver a dryly pithy dialogue exchange courtesy of Guy Ritchie.

Part of it is having to give up bread/wheat. For endurance athletes, bread is life. You get a lot of fuel out of it, and my body’s still adjusting to not having that to depend on. Whereas back in May I would have said that I was about 85-90% off bread, I finally sucked it up in early July & changed my dinner habits (since a love of pizza was my last bastion of bread-consumption) so that now I’m pretty much bread-free. I say “pretty much” because every so often I will cave and totally have a Girl Scout cookie or eight :cough:Tuesdayafternoon:cough:
Or, I’ll have a long day & be so tired that I stand in Trader Joe’s & go, “Oh screw it, I’m having a small goat cheese pizza*”.
*Yah, those. That one, that’s like $3.50 or whatever. I know, they’re really good, right? Totally.

…and then I end up with an eyegraine.

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eyegraine:

noun \’ī–grān\\

1. when you have what feels like a migraine, only the pain is in your eyes.

2. And since I’m making that word up all on my own, bread-induced eyegraines as of late also involve spending an hour or two enjoying the anatomical entertainment of sporadic periods with your right eye twitching.

See also: good times, man. good times.
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I think part of it is that I need to just approach life Hobbit-style and invoke Second Breakfast.

It’s that section of time between when I get done with my workout & head up to Museum!Co that’s kinda killing me. Wed morning I ended up having a bunch of time since I only did the step test, & I parked at 52 thinking I’d do my morning meditation — totally ended up having a full out asleep nap for half an hour before I headed up to work.

Then there’s protein powder, which is the natural thing to suggest. It just seems like I go through a whack of it already — on Tues & Thurs nights when I stack spin & yoga at YAS, I have orange juice w/ protein powder in it — first after cycle & then again with a Clif bar on my drive home… do I really need to get a third mini-nalgene & add another protein round? or maybe I’m better off buying the gatorade powder & just adding that to my water post-row to tide me over until I get to work?

As it is, since I’m prepping my breakfast & lunch to take most days anyway, I already feel like I carry a small restaurant into work with me. Plus I spend so much time standing at my kitchen counter chopping & prepping food now that I just got myself a softie kitchen mat to stand on because my feet were starting to hurt on the original 1930′s tile & grout that is my floor.
Oh, and on a fun note, Ernie decided he doesn’t like the way the mat smells, so whenever he’s annoyed because Zoey & I have left the house without him, he pees on my kitchen mat. Thank god those things are water-resistant to begin with. :sigh:

The point of this whole ramble being I did a step test to see if we can figure out my heart rate freakishness, and now Z‘s got a bunch of numbers to chart. In the meantime, I asked what he suggested I shoot for on my steady state until he got a chance to actually analyze things, and he looked at me & said, “I have to say 150″, and then he snerked at the incredibly pained look on my face.

Oh god, dude. The monotony of it… Seriously, it makes the Baby Jesus want to cry. I just can’t even tell you.
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Dear Heart:

Why can’t you work like everybody else’s? No good very bad, dude. No good very bad.

:sigh:
~ Claris
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Notes:

• my less-than-three got left back in the day
  on the metaphorical heart level, Kiba Rika‘s Facebook status Wed morning seems to have happened across the solution for my romantic problems — I need a time machine. This leaves me with two questions:
  1. omg, why didn’t I think of this before?!
  2. can anyone recommend an online store for purchase so I can add “time machine” to my Amazon wish list?

  Kiba Rika :
  I love what Felicia Day has to say about Highland Hunks in romance novels:
  “The only thing that throws them off is a plucky lady with sass, dubious fashion sense and a dash of low self-esteem.”
  Because you know what? That describes me and many of my friends. So clearly, ladies, we are all exactly what 18th century Scottish men require to find true love.

  Claris: well that explains why I’m not getting anywhere with 21st century men in California.
  Kiba Rika: Time travel is the key.
  Mr Whyt: ladies with low self esteem? then mayhaps they’ll settle for me
  Kiba Rika: Especially if you put on a kilt.
  Mr Whyt: done and done

• It’s possible that in writing this, I may have stopped everything & composed a playlist that’s made entirely of Jack Johnson, Mumford & Sons, & Ray LaMontagne. This probably makes me look like a big ol’ stoner over on spotify, but oh well.
• and just because I found it while I was referring to second breakfast, here’s a bunch of Lord of the Rings outtakes. oh, you silly Hobbits…
• How freakin’ awesome does the Sherlock Holmes sequel look? Pretty damn rawk, that’s how.

Music: My Little Girl – Jack Johnson (To The Sea)

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I ended up getting pretty ridiculously sick this week & thus haven’t been on the water since… last Friday. Which sucks. until this morning, I hadn’t worked out at all in a week, which meant that I wasn’t just sick and hopped up on antihistamines, I was also irritable, because not working out makes me a crabby, whiny, bitchy, baby — a trait that I may or may not have displayed in my phone call to Sachiel as I walked to WholePaycheck Tuesday night to get food because even though I had food in the fridge, I just didn’t have the mental capacity to cook anything, and really?

High on Sudafed + Knives & Open Flame = Potential for “No Good, Very Bad”∞

I’ve got an Art degree & even I can do the math on that one, thanks.

To tide you over in the time between when my drug-induced delirium returns to my normal, completely sober dementia, here’s a couple things that I found this week.

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Hi, welcome to the internet. Just… just don’t touch anything for a bit, okay?
Actual profile blurb for someone that started following one of the twitter accounts I manage:

I need to learn about tweeting. I am cheery.

Well… okay then. I feel like I should hire them for my mailroom. If, ya know… I had a mailroom.
If I did have a mailroom, Ernie would totally run it. I just decided that. Crap, now I totally need to get a mailroom…

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Oh, gay community, I really do less-than-three you so.
As a straight girl that’s lived in West Hollywood for ten years now, it’s pretty safe to say any conservative tendencies that my Republican-leaning parental figures hoped to instill in me have pretty much been eradicated, what with me having been living around all Teh Gay. Which is why, while this particular article might seem a little off-kilter on its etiquette, it’s no less true — gay protests really do have some really great signs — especially the first one, which is awesome because it’s true.

The most hilariously effective signs supporting gay marriage.

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I’m sure the actual clothes are great, but is anyone else thinking of that remark a former Harvard chancellor made re: a certain set of rowing twins?
I’m all about upholding the honor & dignity of the sport of rowing.
(Shut up – I can too. Hey man, I did 13 years in Catholic school, I’ve got pretending to care down.)

But really? The way this company is presenting itself just reminds me of the exchange they gave George Clooney & Eddie Izzard in Ocean’s 13:

Roman Nagel: [about the Greco] He named it after himself.
Danny Ocean: [confused] Wait. Greco? Roman?
Roman Nagel: You obviously haven’t served time in a British boarding school.

http://www.navisbiremis.com

The best part of this site is the shot of the guy staring at his trophy.
And if your brain just made that joke, just imagine what my brain thought up.

Rowing is small enough that I’m sure I know someone or I know someone who knows someone that’s involved in this company, but honestly guys – please just go… roll in the mud or do something equally… untoward, because right now you’re totally setting yourselves up to be the douchebags at private school whom cinema has taught us will ultimately meet some sort of humiliating & untimely fate.

Metal Chickens & Mustaches – an office email exchange.
At one point in a conversation about Mexican art, Polgara read me an email from a co-worker who’d just credited her with causing co-worker to spit cous-cous out her nose.
this all makes sense in context. At present, Polgara‘s working on an iPad the size of a 6-person kitchen table. Ours? Not always with “The Normal”.

Meanwhile, I went back to my desk to work on an update for Governance. Governance, you see, is very important — it’s the legal sh*t, & you really don’t want to screw it up. When it comes to Governance, even I set aside the laissez-faire and pay attention.

Or, rather… I tried. Instead, upon returning to my desk, there was the following email exchange:

>>> Polgara 7/28/2011 2:06 PM >>>
re: Martini Cat
I swear I don’t usually write about my cat this much.

>>> Claris 7/28/2011 2:24 PM >>>
Of course right after I closed the door b/c I figured she’d left, OfficeMate showed & I just sat here, repressing laughter at this so hard that I just CRIED a little.
Damn you.
The moustache just… it killed me. KEEEEEEELLLED me ded.

>>> Polgara 7/28/2011 2:27 PM >>>
I KNOW! It’s just so awesome and perfect. You should read the original chicken post, if you haven’t already.
And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles.

>>> Claris 7/28/2011 2:31 PM >>>
I’m sitting here, silently DYING and I BLAME YOU.

>>> Polgara 7/28/2011 2:32 PM >>>
Seriously, one of the funniest writers I’ve read in a long time. I LOVE HER.
When you’re done with the big metal chicken, go to the homepage and read today’s (yesterday’s?) post about the monkey.

>>> Claris 7/28/2011 2:33 PM >>>
DAMN YOU, I’M NEVER GOING TO GET ANY WORK DONE.

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And in closing, I never thought I’d say this but…
Raise your hand if you’re ridiculously proud of Jake Gyllenhaal for this shirt.

That’s it for now, kids — I’ll be back on Monday chock full of non-medicated goodness, and probably posing the current decorating conundrum which is creating stymie in my brain. Yes, that’s right – I said decorating and you’re gonna like it.

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