I Need Yet Another Cup of Joe

Yesterday my daughter, Lara, left open the door to the closet in which we store the dog food. She was busy skulking away after stealing Pirate's Booty for a snack, and it must have slipped her mind to shut that door.

And of course, enter Hazel, my food obsessed lab. She downed quite a bit of dog kibble before I caught her. She looked up at me when I found her, paws neatly pressed down on the shredded Purina dog chow bag, her lips and nose covered in bits of kibble-laden saliva. Then she stood, with difficulty, and slunk guiltily away, her larger-than-I-have-ever-seen-it belly swaying morbidly from side to side.

She has since shit and burped dog kibble non-stop for 16 hours straight.

And so, here I sit, the smell of kibble vomit and doggy burp enveloping me like a blanket. Except not a warm blanket. To boot, it's fucking cold in this house. The furnace began emitting a quite nauseating burnt-oil smell a day ago. Andy turned the furnace off much to my chagrin. I would most definitely tolerate the smell of burnt oil if I could just stay a little warm. Alas, he fears we will be poisoned by the fumes wafting from the basement. But what's a little poisonous air? I'm so cold! It's 55 degrees in  here! And sure, it's MAY, but it's New England. It's raw, drizzly and cold outside... and that raw cold has seeped, now, into my bones.

A big cup of Joe is not really helping, though I feel it should. I need the warmth, the caffeine, and the smell of coffee to overpower Hazel's lingering barfy, burpy, farting stench. (As I write she lies sleepily at my feet, letting slip noxious farts that are certainly more poisonous than the fumes from the furnace...)

But onto more savory topics.
I'm in a recovery week.
I  have some observations to make about the recovery week.

The first is this:
Fatigue and hunger seem to have a delayed onset for me, making their most pronounced appearances just when I feel I should be feeling sharp and satiated.
So, strangely, it's not following the big rides and runs that I feel ready to crawl into bed and never come out again. Instead, that desire comes when I don't expect it, days, sometimes a week later.  So, for example, despite that I have been doing light workouts for a few days, I am craving a nap, I want to consume every morsel of food that comes into my field of vision, and a 4 mile run seems like the ultimate test of torture.

Why is that?
So, it's day 4 of my rest week. I *feel* I should be *feeling* peppy. Instead I am feeling like a would like to eat huge breakfast and then take a long nap (as opposed to executing the 2.5 hour ride on my schedule). Sigh.

Another observation about the recovery week:
I find it hard to shift gears.

When I am working hard day in and day out I just get it done. I put my head down, try not to think too much about how a 16 mile run or a 90 mile ride will feel, and I, in the immortal words of Nike, Just Do It.

It takes me a few days into the recovery week to settle into not having to spend my entire day working out. Suddenly I have time. My athlete schedules are done for the next few weeks, and it's Wednesday! (Ask any of my athletes and they will tell you that lately I have not had them done in quite so timely a fashion.) And here I am--writing a post, *gasp*, which hasn't happened in quite some time. And the laundry is not exactly done, but it's also not piled so high it's being pushed out the basement windows, and the house, though freezing cold, is not in the disastrous state in which one usually finds it.

And that feels good.

I guess this is why I find it hard shifting BACK into workout mode. Suddenly that 2.5 hour ride seems extremely inconvenient. And yet, in a build week a 2.5 hour ride on the schedule would seem gleefully short.

I finish off this recovery week with my first tri of the season, The Sudbury Sprint. This race is shorter than short: a 400 yard swim, a 7 mile bike, and a 2.3 mile run. I'm definitely excited to race, because I love racing. But I am also uneasy: I haven't "made it hurt" in the sprint tri sense of what that means in quite some time. Sprinting is going to be quite the shock to the system! But it will be a nice little wake up in a twisted sort of way. I know that.

A bunch of my athletes are racing, and so is Jordan, my daughter. Can you think of anything more fun that that? My 10-year-old is racing with me! My hope is that I finish early enough to go back and find her on the run so I can run with her a bit. I know it's not technically triathlon-legal to run with someone... but she's 10... and it's a mini-sprint... and it's a small race. I'm pretty sure they won't throw me off the course if I jog with her (or walk... wherever she might be at if and when I find her). Aside from the swim, Jordan has not trained at all for this race, and she also still doesn't really get shifting on the road bike. So there may be some walking involved. But who cares! So much fun! Her first tri! I hope she loves it.
I know she will love it.
(I just hope she doesn't beat me in the swim. Is it wrong to hope that? Maybe when she is eleven I won't mind so much...? )

HAPPY TRAINING to you all.
The season is here! It's finally time to race! YAHOO!