Before, During and After

I have a great before picture.

Well, I say it's great. It's only great because it will show the "before-the-committment" shape I was in.

It's not a pretty sight.

One weekend in August, about 3 week after I accepted the you-do-a-triathalon-with-me, I'll-go-to-a-scrapbooking-weekend-with-you challenge, the kids and I visited my parents in New Jersey. My brother was visiting at the same time with his wife and kids. Brendan and I took a swim in the lake. The one where I looked at the back of his head for 1/2 an hour. Still pisses me off.

Moving on.

For documentation purposes, I asked my sister-in-law to take a picture of Brendan and me on the dock, right after we got out of the water.

Now I have no delusions of looking "hot", or even good in the speedo that vaguely resembles a fishing lure. But I really had no idea how bad I actually looked.

You can hide your bulges under sweaters, big t-shirts, and oversized turtlenecks. You can convince yourself that the dryer shrunk your jeans, and that the scale must need to be re-calibrated.

But when it comes right down to it, Speedos......and cameras do not lie. When I uploaded the picture she took into iPhoto, I gasped. Then I nearly croaked. Picture a pasty white, wet linebacker wearing a huge bruise. I had no idea my thighs were that big. How the hell did that happen? And my shoulders? When did they get that enormous? And.....plump??

So now I have a great "before" picture. Relatively speaking. And in a few more weeks, after some more bike/swim/run calorie burning and trimming down, I am going to take the "during" picture.

I hope to have a fan-tab-u-lous picture to post at the end of this adventure, but that remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure. I am not going to post that horrid "Before" picture until I can post one helluva picture next to it that is titled "After".

The Regional Factor

**Disclaimer**  This  post has absolutely nothing to do with exercise, training or triathalons***

Just in case you don’t want to read further, ya know?

It has come to my attention that one of my blog posts referencing my favorite calorically disastrous food caused some confusion.

Apparently the whoopie pie is not a nationally known food.  Who knew?    I just figured cause I love them so much, they must be everywhere.  But apparently they are not all over the great US of A, just in certain special places that are blessed with their sugary goodness.

For my dear friend from Florida, then New York, then Florida again, then Missouri,  here it is.  The ever so lovely, terrific, yet horrible-for-the-hips whoopie pie.

You always remember your first.  Mine was in Pennsylvania Dutch country, at the roadside stand of an Amish farmer and his family.  I remember it like it was yesterday……..aaaah. 

Okay, back now.

I found a site dedicated to this lovely delicacy.  It highlights the history of said dessert, along with recipes to make some if you dare.  I say if you dare because I cannot have these in my house.   They are like crack for the chocoholic.  The site is here.

This got me thinking about all of the places I have lived, and certain things that are commonplace in one area, but unheard of in another.

Case in point:  the bubbler. 

Going to elementary and middle school in Bridgewater, MA, the bubbler was an integral part of my day.  I passed it in the hallway, stopped for occasional refreshment, squirted water up my nose by accident more than once.

However in the rest of the country, these are referred to as water fountains.  I found this out when, upon moving to NYC, I stopped a boy in the hallway of JHS 104 (on the corner of 21st Street and 1st Ave)  and asked him where the bubbler was.  He looked at me like I was from Mars.  Then he walked away. 

Example #2.  Hotdish.

Never heard of it?  I hadn’t either, until we moved to North Dakota.  We invited some new neighbors and their kids over for dinner.  My neighbor asked what she could bring.  I said “Bring whatever you’d like”.  To which she replied, “I’ll bring hotdish”.

Now  being the polite person I am, I said “Sounds great”.   But in my head I was thinking  “#$?@##???   No idea whatsoever.

Turns out this is hotdish

 

It is a casserole, usually involving hamburger, some sort of creamed soup, and topped with tater tots.   This one is aptly named…that’s right, tater-tot hotdish.   It sounds kind of gross, but it is actually quite good.  We made a lot of it when we were living just a few degrees south of the Arctic Circle.   Which has the nicest people on the planet, just so’s you know.  

What have you eaten, that once you moved somewhere else you realized no one else had ever even heard of?   Did you move somewhere only to find out that you couldn’t get your favorite junk food?  Did you go to desperate measures to get what you were missing? 

Care to share?

All She Could Say Was “Wow”

It has been a week for inspiration.  Not me necessarily doing the inspiring, but being inspired. 

My sister finished the Marine Corp marathon in Washington, D.C.  in a personal best time.  She was amazed and inspired by the people running who had lost loved ones to war, and cancer.  People who were physically challenged, running the race of their lives.   I am amazed and inspired by her.

My incredible neighbor ran the Cape Cod marathon.  I hope she doesn’t mind me referencing her here.  (I guess if she does I’ll hear about it, no?)  Besides I won’t name names.  Deanna. 

I may have a rival in the accident-prone, weird-luck category.  Knocking my tooth out with a car door and hitting myself in the head with a can of ham almost doesn’t come close to breaking one’s arm the day before a triathalon, and then swallowing a bee during your first marathon. 

No joke.

But in spite of getting stung by a bee (on her tongue no less), she persevered and finished the race. 

Wow.  All I can say is “wow”. 

I am inspired.  I was so motivated by their incredible feats that I went to the Y last night at 8:30 and swam 1000 yards at a time when I am normally snoring on the couch.

Let’s see how long that lasts.

Squeezing It In

So this training thing has fallen into somewhat of a routine. It works. Some days better than others.

I have new found respect for people who are training for major athletic events and train for hours at a time. I can barely squeeze in 45 minutes a day without a problem. And sometimes it kind of is a problem.

Sunday mornings have become a designated swimming morning. I get up at about 5, feed my addiction to Facebook, throw in a load of laundry or two, unload the dishwasher, straighten up whatever disaster catches my eye first, catch up on the TV show I fell asleep in front of the night before on DVR, and then get ready to go swim.

The pool opens at 8am. I try to be there right when they open so I can get my 800 or so yards in and call it a morning.

You see, I try to squeeze this in before church, where at 9:45 on Sunday morning 10 or so pre-adolescent kid/tweens are waiting to be enlightened by my biblical knowledge and incredible wit.

Alright, that’s not what they are waiting for. Sometimes I think they are just waiting for the snack. But in any event I have to leave my house by 9:30 to get there on time, so I am pushing it just a tad if I get to the Y any later than 8:00.

Last weekend I arrived a tiny bit on the late side. Just a few minutes. I shoved all my stuff in a locker and headed to the pool. Unfortunately the door between the locker room and the pool was locked. So I had to walk, in my lovely Speedo, barefoot (eeeww) through the Y to the front desk. I told them the door between the women’s locker room and the pool was locked.

“No it’s not,” was the reply.

“Ummm, I believe it is,” I said.

So they walked me to the pool where the lifeguard informed me that the door I pointed to as locked actually led to the family locker room, not the women's locker room. The women’s locker room door truly was unlocked.

How sad is that that I have never actually been to the Y without kids enough to know that women have their own locker room? I just assumed that the locker room with all the moms and children was the women’s locker room. I will have to remember that for the next time I want to get dressed without screaming, yelling children whose moms are bargaining with them to just get dressed and stop whining already. Not that my kids ever did that. You know, me having perfect children and all.

Moving on.

So I traipsed myself into the pool, found an empty lane and got to the business at hand. I actually had a grand old time. I think I might have even had a “swimmers high”. I think that’s what it was. Either that or I was getting hypoglycemic from not having had breakfast. But it was a great swim. I could have actually kept going except that the clock was beckoning me.

And the thought of being late for church makes me break out in hives. I think it borders on a pathological fear. Growing up, we were always late for church. And we were not the “slink into the back of church when you are late” kind of family. Oh no. We had to find a seat, which after church has already begun is almost always in the FRONT of the church. Where you have to walk by the entire rest of the congregation to find a pew big enough to seat 6 people. By the time we were at our appointed nearly always-the-very-first-row seats, I was sweating profusely, wanting to just disappear.

As you can see, I do not like to be late for church. So I jumped out of the pool and ran to get ready.

We did make it to church on time. Our Sunday school class was fun, and I managed to bang the water out of my right ear half way through the recessional hymn.

For now, that’s how I’m squeezing it all in on Sunday. The rest of the week –- well, I don’t want to bore you all at once. I’ll save that for another day.

If I Can Do It, Anyone Can

That is a phrase I have heard repeated over and over again.  Many times in conversation, when the topic turns to “What have you been up to”, I fess up to training for a triathalon.

I say “fess up” because I am sure the idea of a moderately overweight, middle-aged mom preparing for an athletic event is not an intuitive leap--could even make some people laugh.

Sometimes it even makes me laugh. 

So when the subject comes up, I am surprised by the number of people who have said that they did one X-number of years ago.  The conversation usually  ends with “If I can do it, anyone can do it”.  

That does make me feel a little bit better.  Although it’s usually someone in a jogging suit, fit as a fiddle and on their way to the gym.   But even so.

Just last week I was at a high school cross-country meet when one of the other moms told me that she had participated in a triathalon about 2 years ago and was surprised by how much fun it was.  She admitted she was most worried about the swim, and once the swim was over she felt much better.

I think that is my problem.  I am not worried at all about the swim.  That seems like a piece of cake to me.   Theoretically speaking, that is.  Speaking in concrete terms, cake would be much better.    And preferable.

Just sayin’.

I almost wish the run was first so I could just get it out of the way.  

Let’s put it this way—if I look like a half-drunk spasm-ing wingnut when I run now, what will I look like after I have swam (swum?) 21 lengths of the pool and then biked 12 miles?  I am almost afraid to picture it.   

But it will probably make for a good blog post.

It’s A Family Affair

Apparently my family finds exercise addicting.

Kind of like potato chips.  Without the fat.  And the salt.  And the taste. 

Monkey-see, monkey-do. 

My sister and her husband have been active exercisers for years.  Running, swimming, biking.  Marathons even. 

My brother started biking this summer, lost more than 50 pounds  and has now completed a few  triathalons.   He’s also completed a century ride.  That’s 100 miles.  Yikes.

My daughter was bit by the bug after doing a relay triathalon with my brother in Virginia.  He swam and biked, she ran the 5K.   She is signed up to do the Polar Bear Triathalon in May.

My younger brother John has not yet been coerced  recruited to join us in our exercise escapades.   But he is about to be a dad for the first time so we are cutting him some slack.  For now.

So the Polar Bear Tri next May will be a real family affair.  My daughter, my brother, my sister, her husband, his sister and her husband.

Oh.  And me.  Almost forgot :) 

Can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?

Say What?

Don’t you just love when you hear someone singing a song you love, and it all of a sudden occurs to you that the words you thought were the words, really aren’t?

I started thinking about this this morning while I was running.  The Killers song “Are We Human” came on the iPod.  There is a line in the song that goes ,“Are we human, or are we dancer”.

Huh?

Never mind that it is grammatically incorrect. It also makes absolutely no sense.   Dancer could be pluralized to make a tiny bit of sense.   But not a whole lot.   Or maybe I was hearing the words wrong altogether? 

There is plenty of precedent for that.  Me hearing a song and screwing up the word beyond belief, that is.   My husband almost ran off the road when we were dating when he heard me sing the Peter Gabriel  song “Jeux Sans Frontiers” as “She’s so salty love”.    I seriously had no idea they were singing in French.   Those words didn’t make any sense to me, but it kind of sounds like that’s what they are singing.  Kind of. 

And when you don’t understand the words, sometimes you just make up something so you can sing to it.  Know what I mean?

When my brother was in elementary school, he had an assignment to write down the words to his favorite song.  He was in love with the Kinks at the time.  We used to listen to their album on the record player until one of his friends sat on the needle and scratched the record beyond repair. 

Aaah, the record player.  If we had kept half the crap we had no idea would be “quaint” today, we would be raking it in on eBay right now.

In any case, my brother listened to his favorite song off that album, wrote down all the words and handed them in to his teacher.

That’s when my mother got a phone call from school.  His teacher was  “concerned” about the music Brendan was listening to and told my mother it was rather inappropriate for a 12-year-old.  My mother asked her to send the paper home so that she could talk to my brother about it.

He had picked the song “Art Lover”.   One of the lines is  “like a Degas ballerina”.  Except that he had heard, and written “like a naked ballerina”.

Hence the phone call.

That cracks me up almost as much as the time I looked over in church and heard Madeline belt out the Hosanna at the top of her lungs.  She was shouting “lasagna in the highest”.   I am quite sure God has a sense of humor about those kinds of things.  Her heart was truly in it,  and she was only 5 after all.

Do you have a favorite “misheard” song? Have you ever sung really loud, only to realize after the fact that you had absolutely no idea what the actual words to the song were?

Come on, share it with us.  Pretty please?? It will make us all feel better!