Wouldn't it be cool...

This is very instructive for everybody. We all know that we have to take a “rest week”. Or for some, there is an “off season”. And with big races, there comes a time of “taper”. All these have one thing in common with injury... adrenaline junkies, stop your engines. I’m talking about the gapping hole in your schedule that used to be filled with long runs, big bike rides, and hard workouts. So what happens to you during that time? What do you do? I was talking about this with Meghan while she was digging her boney elbows in to my calf muscle. When you take out an intergral part of your life, say like running. Weird things start to happen. Habits, good and bad, take root.

How my life has changed in the last three weeks since the PF took over my life:

1) Alternative forms of exercise. Elliptical trainer. My stride is not elliptical. I also tried aqua jogging as a last resort. I cannot aqua jog. I am not coordinated enough. Somehow, my legs always get out of sync with my arms. How I stay upright when I run is a mystery. And I don’t float, even with the belt. I need the floaty belt and the floaty shoes.  My answer: more biking and swimming!  I am a triathlete after all.

2) Even before all that stretching, I was already pretty flexible... So, with no running, I picked up my yoga practice again. Should never have stopped. Namaste

3) I’m pretty scatter-brained with out my daily adrenaline. I started replacing it with even more coffee. And that was bad. Now I am on a daily coffee limit, no ifs, ands or buts.

4) Twitter is addictive. When nothing is on TV, and I am standing on my slant board for an hour... I pick up the phone and twitter-tweet to my hearts content. Tweet-tweet.

5) My apartment is dirty. It has not been cleaned in three weeks. I have a mud clump just inside my back door on the kitchen floor that has been there for 2 weeks and 6 days (from working in the garden).

6) I will call this visual entertainment: movies, TV, youtube, grass-growing (more like tomatoes... but similar speed), people. I just stopped and watched. I didn’t do anything else. Scary. I had visions of my future as a couch potato and it wasn’t pretty.

7) I cook a lot. Crazy stuff, too. The emu egg fritatta (I’ll have to blog about that one later), the spaghetti and falafel balls, chocolate chips on my salad, red salad (everything is red, even the lettuce... think strawberries, craisins, tomato, red pepper, raspberry vinagrette). Yum.

Emu egg!

Recap: ix-nay on the aqua-jogging-hay. Yoga, good. Coffee... let’s go with “under control”. Twitter, I’ve got to have one addiction.   Apartment: I am going room-by-room. So the mud clump is still there, but the bathroom is sparkling. Less TV. I’ve kept it to the Colbert Report and reruns of the Ace of Cakes.  Amazing what you can do with fondant.  I love food.  And that is all why it is a good thing I will be back to running soon... did 30-minutes EZ yesterday!