Po Sum On!

La la la... another weekend done and gone.

I was just going to give Moana her bath and put her to bed, but right as we were going up she said, "No! I want daddy bath..." OK then. Mama is free to waste away the evening on the blog. :) I probably have 1000 other things I could be doing but just don't feel like it at the moment. My bike is clean (can you believe I actually cleaned it this afternoon? Amazing.) and all my athletes have their schedules for this week so really the only other thing to do is massage my calf.

For the most part my calf has been behaving and I've been able to run pretty consistently. Got in ~45 miles this week which seems pretty good to me. Funny though, it did not feel like a lot. Maybe because none of it was hard so running does not wear me out like it used to. Sometimes I feel like I could just run and run and run forever. I can feel/see myself getting faster at the lower HR which is cool and motivating and also makes me want to run more. I get all excited at these little gains but then if I compare the times I'm putting out on my typical routes to the times I have done in years past, well, let's just say I should not do that. But I do it anyway. And then I start to feel this little frustration build. But then I look at my average HR for the runs and see it at 151 and remember that I just cannot compare that to what I used to do to myself. It's like I need to just erase all my old routes and start with new ones that I don't know how long they will take. But that is hard when you have lived in the same house for 6+ years and have run every road within 10 miles of your house multiple times... I'm rambling now.

Back to my calf... it was bugging me a bit last week so I went to see Magic Man again. I expressed my frustration about how it gets tight nearly every time I run and I'm afraid I'm going to hurt it again... so he 'got aggressive with it' last week. Um, OUCH. It was hands down the most painful appointment I've had with him to date. BUT, I woke up Monday morning and was able to run so the pain was worth it. He also gave me this special chinese medicated oil and told me to massage a couple drops of it in several times each day. Not sure exactly what this stuff is, but I know the vapor of it burns my eyes if my head gets too close to my calf while I'm massaging it. Powerful stuff. And of course Scott can smell it too (from anywhere in the house if I so much as open the bottle) and he was like, what is this stuff?? Of course the info on the bottle is written in Chinese so we really don't know. There are a few English letters written on the bottle though... You have to imagine Scott using his best Chinese accent... Po Sum On! Lol.

We laughed about that pretty good, but all laughing aside, this stuff is magic. I'm pretty sure my calf pain/tightness comes from a lack of blood flow to/through the compartments in my calf... this stuff just opens it all up (and my sinuses too!) and blood flows freely and ta-dah! No more tightness. Perfect. So I po it on daily now.










In old news, I finally got my hands on the video from a few weeks ago- the one that shows Nalani and I playing tug of war in the pool! (Her husband taped it for us.) I'm the one on the left in the blue suit... It's not really very exciting, but I posted it anyway in case you're interested. Basically we tied ourselves together with a thick stretch cord and then swam in opposite directions trying to pull each other across the pool. This was much harder than it looks. In my memory of this I was flat out giving 100% here but in the video it looks like I'm la la la just cruising. Funny how swimming is like that. Anyway, it appears that I did start to pull her my way but what this video doesn't show is that I just gave up and stopped not too long after this. And also, if my memory serves me right, this was at the end of a w/o that included a swim test of 5 x 300's fast as we could go. I'm lucky I survived at all.

Waiting for coach to put this on my schedule during a swim workout... If he said go until one of you reaches the other end, it might just take the whole hour. That would be the hardest swim workout ever.