morning hours: where plans go to die ...

last week i signed up for the hokily named "couch potato triathlon" at the ymca. in order to win a t'shirt -- which i imagine will be a snug men's hanes featuring a cartoon spud running on a treadmill, yet is one significant reason that i signed up -- i have to run 26.2 miles, swim 2.4 miles and bike 112 miles by the end of february.

two of my friends are also competing. in fact, i kind of honed in on their challenge when i heard them doing hearty boy banter about it. while we aren't competiting against each other, there is pride involved with not being the one who doesn't finish.

meanwhile: the greeter is the sort of person who once was paid actual money to play college football; f. scottie is the sort of person who sees the 'call of duty' and unflinchingly ups the ante to 'personal mission from jesus so i'm going to do TWICE AS MUCH!'. i am the sort of person who gets all wide eyed with plans, schemes, ideas at 3 a.m., then twists in bed blue-printing, only to wake at 1 p.m., too exhausted to follow through. morning hours are where plans, scheme and ideas go to die.

i knew the running would be easy. i can cover that distance in a week and some change. biking makes my legs tired. i'm more of a 'flailer' than a 'swimmer.' but a conversation with a woman in the locker room one day gave me a bit of perspective: she went on and on about how easy it would be to cover 187 lengths of the pool over 29 days. i decided since i thought the running would be easy, maybe 'easy' is a flexible term and that 'easy' to someone should mean 'not that terrible' to a flailer who doesn't like water on her face.

SO WHY DO THIS WHEN I HATE 66.6666 PERCENT OF THE ACTIVITIES?
1. i am planning on running a half-marathon in june, and although i have been running i know myself well enough to know that sometime mid-february i'd look at the training start date in march, shrug, stick my face in a mound of smoked gouda and not come up for air until two days after that start date. if left to my own devices.

2. this is exactly the kind of project i like: something with a definitive finish line, but flexible deadlines in between. if i wanted to, i could wait until february 25th, then hole up at the Y for six hours a day.

3. trying to stoke the dying embers of a competitive fire.

4. the aforementioned ill fitting hanes t'shirt with a gaudy cartoon potato.

THOSE BOYS
the greeter sent f. scottie and i an email last week pointing out that if we were keeping pace, we should be at about 20 percent completion. i did some quick math and discovered i was:

22 percent done running
10 percent done biking
16 percent done swimming

the next day i saw f. scottie at the Y. we gave each other the super secret nod of people working on a similar mission. i busted out a quick three mile run and when i left he was bouncing gleefully all over the treadmill like a happy puppy with a bacon bit caught in his paw. i saw him again today. when i left, i believe he was propped on a bike in the spin class room, pedaling toward a higher percentage than me.

i'm going to spit in his water bottle.

IN SUMMARY
the biking is the worst. i believe that bicycle seats were invented by someone who has never seen a human pelvis. and everything takes twice as long on a recumbant bike -- although i can bust through about 75 pages in a novel while sitting there, so i choose this bike.

unfortunately, while pedaling, i can hear the runners on the treadmill and it picques a bit of runners envy. like a dumb slogan on a runner's world t'shirt: i'd rather be running. i've only run nine miles this week -- and despite the swimming and the biking, this is disappointing.

the swimming isn't as bad as i thought. getting into the pool takes longer than actually doing laps. i need water to be the temperature of soup, and everything else is just a form of hell. one day i struggled with an adult bobber in a life vest who kept popping up in my lane before loudly apologizing; today during open swimming i was delighted to have my own personal lifeguard policing the kiddies from chucking balls and kick boards and having slumber parties in my lane.

AS OF TODAY
i've run nine miles, completed 25 laps and biked 23 miles.