Weight Training with Colleen!

I either will or won't qualify for the Boston Marathon in December, but regardless I'm sure having fun with the coaching that's leading up to the race.

This morning I met with Colleen De Reuck (Olympic marathoner and wife of my coach, Darren) for a one-on-one weight-training session. I've taken weight training classes and followed weight-training circuits from books many times, and I know my way around a weight room, but I've never had a one-on-one session like this--and certainly never with someone as knowledgeable about runners' bodies as she is.

I was a little nervous, not only because she's a celebrity (four times at the Games, winner of the Berlin Marathon, I could go on and on) and runs at a level for which I'll always be just a spectator, but also because I don't like talking about myself and my first-world problems and I feel I've been doing a lot of that lately. Back blah blah blah.....body fat blah blah blah.....steroid shot blah blah blah.....How could it not bore other people?

Moreover, I know from my own experience occasionally at my job that just because you're paid to help others doesn't mean it's always an enjoyable task. Don't get me wrong--most of the time my job is very gratifying, and I like helping most of our library patrons--but some days and some people just....get to you. I'm sure this is true in any job with a customer service component, be it taking orders at McDonalds, answering library research questions or giving weight-training advice to amateurs.

Turns out none of this was a problem. She was as nice as could be, and working with her was interesting and enjoyable enough that I completely lost track of time and made myself late for a much-anticipated lunch date with Cynthia (thanks again for being so understanding, Cynthia!). In the end, I came away with a series of 14 exercises to be done twice a week, and instructions on how to do them with proper form and so as not to hurt my back or anything else. She also gave me a great idea for a long run course in Boulder that will mimic that of the California International Marathon. Nothing like local advice!

I had almost an hour and a half with her. Half a day later, my back has protested not at all, something that hasn't been the case for me with strength training in a long time, barring my excellent Pilates sessions with Patty. I'm so ready for lunges, planks, hamstring curls, lat work and the like.

I'm a born-again strength trainee!

Juggling

One great thing of many great things about finally being allowed to run outside again will be no longer being in thrall to my gym's schedule and the uncertainty of how many others will want to use the recumbent bike there. And now that the Alter-G is in the mix, my training schedule (if that's not too lofty a phrase for it) has gotten even more ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong: I am NOT complaining about having access to the Alter-G. But after this crazy morning, I do feel compelled to complain about SCHEDULING the Alter-G. See, it's not like I can just march in there, pull on the crazy shorts and get myself going any time I want. I have to have a physiologist on hand to help me get into the thing, and to track my progress and monitor my pain while I'm on it. There are three physiologists I can work with. And their working hours....pretty much correspond with my working hours, or the hours I'm with my kids. They don't have 5 a.m. kids-aren't-up-yet work's-not-open-yet appointments, or 8 p.m. kids-are-in-bed I'm-off-work appointments, or weekend husband-home-with-kids hours.

This leads to days like today. Here's how it went:

4:30 a.m.--I wake up, dress, sneak through the creaky-floored house and drive to the gym.

5 a.m.--The gym opens. I find a recumbent bike (had I arrived an hour later, this could have been a problem) and get my 45-minute interval/hill workout done. The sessions on the Alter-G just aren't long or hard enough for me to start scaling back the bike yet.

5:50 a.m.--After changing out of my sweat-soaked pants, I stretch my pissed-off piriformis and foam roll.

6:05 a.m.--I head home.

6:15 a.m.--Arriving home, I gather up the milk delivery and the newspapers and go inside. My son Will bursts out of his room about a millisecond after I open the front door. Dan and our daughter Ruthie are both still asleep.

6:30 a.m.--Will and I eat breakfast. Dan gets up. Ruthie is still asleep.

6:45 a.m.--I take my shower. At 7, Dan wakes Ruthie up.

7:10 a.m.--Dan and Ruthie eat breakfast. I start some tea for the road.

7:25 a.m.--I leave for Boulder, clutching tea, backpack, water bottle, and purse.

8 a.m.--Traffic was bad, but I arrive at my library when I wanted to. On Mondays, I'm the opening reference librarian, which means I get the reference desk ready for the day by changing out the newspapers, starting up our circulation and catalog software, printing the desk schedule for the day (damn!, I said on seeing today's schedule--I'm due on at 10 a.m.!) and noting any phone messages. I do this an hour earlier today than I usually do, because I couldn't get an earlier Alter-G session.

8:45 a.m.--I head over to Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. My appointment isn't until 9:15 a.m., but I'm hoping to get on earlier. Double damn! My physiologist is with an earlier client when I get there, so no early start for me.

9:15 a.m.--Jaclyn comes to get me. I change into the Alter-G shorts as quickly as possible, and we get the machine going. My tailbone feels a bit uncomfortable, but I'm happy to be at 80% body weight this time (up from 75% last Thursday). I also jack the incline up a little, settling at 3%. But with that 10 a.m. reference desk shift looming, I have time for only 20 minutes. I cut my warm-up short and do some "intervals" at 8 minutes-per-mile to get more for my money. Thanks to this, I'm able to get my heart rate over 150 by the time my limited session is over.

9:45 a.m.--I climb off the Alter-G, get out of the shorts and shower quickly. I throw on my work clothing, forgetting to put on my earrings.

10 a.m.--Lucky thing BCSM and the library are close to each other. I just have time to dump my stuff in my cubicle in the office and grab another cup of tea and some crackers as the morning's first library patrons climb the stairs and approach the reference desk. My first shift there is two hours. Thanks goodness for those crackers.

Now, it's my lunch break...and I'm s-l-e-e-p-y. I'm also g-r-u-m-p-y. Things I normally take in stride on the desk, like the incessant ringing of the phone, made me want to kill someone today.

Yes, I am very lucky to have access to the Alter-G, and yes I will continue to jump through hoops to use it. But yes, yes, yes.....I'm really looking forward to those mornings (they will come, won't they?) when I merely open my door, step out into the morning's cool and start putting one foot in front of the other.

The Spring of....Slow

This was supposed to be the Spring of Speed.

But sometimes the universe doesn't want speed from you.

So you have to switch to slow.

How slow?

Five-year-old slow!

My new plan for spring (besides doing my PT exercises and recumbent bike workouts as faithfully as possible) is to take my kids for a hike every Friday morning.

These hikes are not far (I doubt this morning's added up to a mile and a half). These hikes are not fast (we had to stop so they could climb the tree as you see above; we had to stop for a snack; we had to stop to gather cedar berries--and we were out for only a little over an hour). But this was the second Friday spent this way--and it's fun.

Besides being fun, these hikes are doing wonders for:

1) Getting me some fresh air, which is sorely lacking at the gym. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice gym, and the 30-minute interval workouts are doing more for me than I thought they would...but gyms smell like gyms. They are artificially lit. The only breezes come from fans.

In contrast, today's trail featured bluffs 1,000 feet up from the trailhead, the bluest of blue skies, a little wind that took the edge off the July-like sun (anyone else a bit freaked out by this weather? I personally would like a little more precipitation) and the scent of sage, evergreens and a hint of the mountains that were so close we could no longer see them on the horizon as we drove up. Because, ladies and gentlemen, we were ON that horizon.

2) Getting my kids some fresh air. And getting them to explore all the trails I've been waiting five years for them to be big enough to enjoy. In mid-August, they will go to kindergarten. After that, I won't have Friday mornings with them again until they are almost six-and-a-half. And I have to say, watching my tiny slip of a daughter racing ahead of me and her brother on the trail today....it was almost as good as being able to run myself. She asked me today if she could beat me yet. I told her not yet (though of course she CAN beat me because she can run, and I can't).

3) Reconnaissance for the future: when I'm allowed to run again, I want to do a chunk of it on trails. I know road races require road training. But trail running is my true love. You have to stay in touch with the love.

A Spring of Slow was not what I had in mind, not by a long shot. But I'll take it. I think it was meant to be, for more than one reason.

Thirty Minutes is Better Than Nothing

I've already mentioned my concern about gaining weight due to all this healing downtime.

There's another concern too: that I'm going to be a complete and total grump for six to eight weeks.

Like a lot of people, I rely on running to counter what I think is a genetic tendency to depression. Running has transformed me into an optimist. I don't know how I would have gotten through my teens without the short runs I did with my dad. And I've found that the more I run, the more optimistic, clear-headed and nice I become.

So it was no surprise that yesterday, a day in which I did NO exercise other than my prescribed leg lifts, found me tired, foggy--and grumpy. By the end of the day, when I finally got the kids down, I collapsed myself at 8:35 p.m. My daughter has a cough, and she woke me up at 12:30 a.m. My husband, who has a big project at work, was still there. As I got Ruthie back to bed, I wondered to myself, How am I going to get through this period of such minimal exercise?

Today was a gym day. I didn't make myself wake up early, but as soon as the kids were finished with breakfast, I rounded them up and went. When I got there, I warmed up with five walking minutes on the treadmill. Then I went through my upper-body weight circuit and my leg lifts. And then I got on the recumbent bike for my 30 precious minutes of what I consider "real" exercise.

My back is still sore, but it's much better than two days ago. And it felt nice and supported on that wide high-backed seat. So I hit the workout hard. I had found a pool-running routine by Pete Pfitzinger online. Most of the early workouts in that are about 30 minutes long (unlike the ones in my McMillan Spring of Speed plan, which I've had to set aside for now). The first workout, which I did today, is a five-minute warm-up, followed by two sets of 5 x 1.5 minutes hard with 30 second recoveries and then a five-minute cool-down. Since I can't pool run, my new plan is to do these workouts on the bike.

I kept my eye on my heart rate the whole time and was happy to see that as those fast intervals progressed, it was easy to keep it up in the 140s and 150s. And maybe even better, when I climbed off the bike and wiped it free of sweat, I felt like my usual self was back.

Tomorrow is another day of rest. I'm hoping that I can ride today's endorphins until Saturday morning and that at some point, if I'm diligent about taking care of my back, Cathy will let me do 30 minutes every day and maybe eventually ramp up to a "long" workout on weekends.

It's hard to be patient when you're grumpy. But patience is the key to all of this.

Weight Update: Before the workout this morning, I weighed myself and am happy to report the scale read 128.4. Satisfactory. In the small blessings department, it's good this all happened during Lent, when I'm not eating sugar anyway. I'm hoping that will help.

My Sweet Ride

Before Dan and I moved out of Boulder last year, I was a great bike commuter. It was only 2.5 miles from our home to my library, and I got good at negotiating the bike path in all but the iciest of weather. My trusty steed for the commute?

This little beauty:

Taken before my ride this morning, freshly extracted from the utility shed.

Now I know some of you hard-core cyclists and triathletes may be jealous, so I thought I'd tell the story how I acquired this bike.

For much of my adult life, I got around on my little brother's old Klein. It was a wonderful bike that my brother had left in our mom's garage. When I asked him for it, he said yes. It was light and well-made....and almost big enough for me. But not quite. My brother had gotten it when he was 15, and it was definitely sized for a 15-year-old. Even with the seat jacked all the way up, I was too tall for it. My knees started to hurt when I rode it. So three years or so ago I sold it to a nice 12-year-old boy.

I've never been one to spend lots of money on either cars or bikes. To me, they are transportation, and therefore need only one quality: reliability. I kept my eye on Craig's List, but this being Boulder, where cycling is as serious as running, I almost never saw anything suitably modest. Then one day I was chatting with Lorin, the security officer at my library, and somehow the subject of my need for a commuter bike came up. He told me he had repossessed a stolen bike that no one had claimed and that might be my size. He said the police had given it back to him, so it was free for the taking.

And that, my friends, is how I acquired my sweet ride.

It's a Diamondback, a brand I've heard of, though not as fancy as my brother's Klein. But it was my size and once the gears were replaced it mostly ran fine. It was all I needed to ride 2.5 miles to work and 2.5 miles home. And you can't argue with FREE.

Now having a checkered past does mean my bike has some, um, features that you might not want in a bike. For example, the handlebars:

When Lorin gave it to me, the entire frame was covered in utility tape. The thief had done this to cover up any identifying markings. Dan and I did our best to remove it, but some of it will be there forever. The handlebars are also slightly crooked. The brakes are creaky--the back tire makes a swish swish sound--but they work, and that's all I care about. Finally, the replaced gear system doesn't always hold up on steep uphills and can also be quite noisy, but I figure this just makes me work harder, which I need to do anyway to keep my aerobic fitness up.

It was on this chariot that I embarked on the first long ride of my rehab this morning. It was a gorgeous day, the kind of day you see in late April when spring is well-advanced. The sun was shining, the birds were singing--and packs of Boulder County's colorfully-clad, expensively-equipped road cyclists were out there on the backroads. I had decided to join them. Two hours on the stationary bike on a day like today, where people are meant to be outside, might well have been the end of my tolerance for this "getting better" thing.

A moment of silence indeed! Thanks to I <3 to Run for timely sentiment.

Lucky for me, my ego is accustomed to being knocked down by the athletes around here. As fleets of mantis-like Lance Armstrong dudes wearing rainbow-hued shirts plastered with sponsors' names sailed by me, my bike swoosh-swooshed (the brakes) and click-clacked (the gears). But I think I held my own (and at least I had no flat tires, which would have required a call to the sag wagon). Dan, ever my Zen master in these matters, had said "bad cyclists like us" can expect to go about 10 miles an hour. So of course I wanted to do better than that.

In the end, I put in 30 miles for the two hours. My average heart rate was only 120, the lower end of the range I'm looking for. I'll need to improve on that next week--130 would be much better. I need to find a route with less downhill. But all in all I'm pretty pleased with this as a first go at it.

My plans for this week include taking the bike to a shop for a tune-up and perhaps scheduling a "bike fit." Meanwhile, I have two questions for the veteran cyclists out there:

1) With my history of UTIs (I'm back on antibiotics; another one hit me on Wednesday morning), I'm a little worried about all this sweaty seat time and my girl parts. I changed out of my clothes and showered immediately upon arriving home. Anything else I can do to avoid problems?

2) My knees hurt a bit when I first got off the bike, though they recovered quickly and don't hurt at all now. I *never* have knee issues running. Should I be worried about that? I do not want my "cross-training for rehab" to result in another injury.

I miss running--painfully--but this is do-able. It's much better than being allowed to do *nothing.* If my PT lets me add walking to the mix, I'll feel as satisfied as a benched runner can be.

Here's an inspirational video courtesy of my awesome friend Kathy:

My Last Run and My First Spin Classes

Well, I hope it's not my last run in an absolute sense!

Before I get to the meat of this post, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who sent me advice, condolences and empathy. I can't believe how many of you have experienced the same back problem. I've got another post queued up where I'll share some of the advice I got and some helpful links. For now, I'll just say....take care of your low back, especially those of you who are, have been or will be pregnant!

The last run I went on, on Monday before Tuesday's interdiction on running, was great. Normally I do hard stuff on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but the PT appointment on Tuesday was at 7 a.m. and I knew it would be hard to do a long hard speed workout, shower, eat a decent breakfast and still make that on time. On the surface front of my mind, I planned to run after the appointment. But a nagging little voice deeper down was already whispering that it might not happen that way.

So my fartlek workout--7 two-minute intervals at 10K pace with one minute rest in between--was accomplished on Monday. After a two-mile warm-up followed by some stupid fumbling with the Garmin and my new iPod Touch, I finally got in a groove. My paces for the seven intervals were: 8:23, 8:23, 8:16, 8:22, 8:16, 8:08 and 8:05. The total distance was six miles. None of that will set any records, of course, but after the nasty cold and the UTI it felt good to do something hard and still feel strong.

You already know about Tuesday's news and the sad 40 minutes on the bike at the gym.

Yesterday and today, I woke up to my new routine. All spin class/bike, all the time. The spin class I attend is at 6 a.m. on Monday/Wednesday/Friday and 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday/Thursday. Yesterday's class was fun: the instructor, Sheila, had us in a circle and made us all say our names. During the class, if your name was called, you had to sprint by yourself for 15 seconds while the rest of the class watched. I got called on three times despite my weird name! And today's class, taught by Terri, was also great--lots of "hill" work, sprints, good music. I'm not allowed to stand up or jump, but when everyone else did those things I ratcheted up the "road" to a good leg-burning equivalent.

I'm no stranger to spin class. It's been the Monday morning workout in all three of the plans Greg McMillan has written for me, and before that it was my cross-training of choice under the Run Less Run Faster plan. But I admit I haven't always poured myself into it with the same passion I put into running. That's changed now. I wore the Garmin and kept an eye on my heart rate, making sure it was at or higher than the recommended 120 beats-per-minute threshold for as much of the class as possible. I ignored most of the "recovery" segments. My plan is to lose as little as possible of the hard-earned running fitness that showed itself in Monday's fartlek workout.

Between the climbs and the sprints, I had much less trouble keeping the heart rate up in spin class than I'd had alone on the bike on Tuesday. The one worry I have is that these 45-minute spin classes are too short. At next Tuesday's PT appointment I'm going to see if there's any way I can supplement with something weight-bearing, like hill walking for 30 minutes on my break at work.

Last night I started reading a book I won last fall from Erin of See Mom Run Far, Meb Keflezighi's Run to Overcome. Meb, who I saw win the Olympic Trials Marathon in Houston two months ago, really did overcome a lot to get there. I skipped ahead to the chapter about the pelvic stress fracture that forced him onto a bike and into a pool for several weeks after a disappointing performance in the 2008 Olympic Trials. His coach, Bob Larsen, wrote:

There were a lot of blows for Meb when you add it all up. Here's someone who was running as well as ever till he got sick 10 days or so before the [2008] trials marathon....The second blow is he comes back, tries to get in shape, realizes something is wrong, that it's pretty serious and it's going to take quite a bit of time and effort to overcome.
If you're guaranteed a gold medal, sure, you'd go through all of that. But there's no guarantee with this thing. You're doing it all on blind faith that you're going to come out okay. You've got to have a lot of faith in yourself....

Meb's a great example for me right now. I can still see him sitting up there, the winner of his race, having been through far worse than what I'm dealing with. I want to win my race too. I want to wear my own private laurel wreath. Sitting there on that bike, I see that Boston Marathon unicorn with every sprint, with every tick of the heart rate monitor.

Love the One You're With

On the way to the first physical therapy appointment designed to deal with my unhappy back, glutes and upper hamstrings this morning, I heard the song that's the title of this post. It didn't occur to me that the one I'm "with" for the next six to eight weeks won't be these:

Nope, instead I'm looking at all this all the time:

Yes, it's true. I got the prescription all of us dread: no running. Also no elliptical, no rowing machine, no stair machine, no swimming, no lower-body weight training. Only biking is allowed (but no standing on the bike).

I have sacro-iliac joint instability. According to a good explanation I found online, "under ideal conditions the sacrum is positioned somewhat diagonally between the pelvic bones. With this relationship in place there is maximum stability. With a swayback posture (hyperlordosis) the sacrum tilts downward and forward and becomes more horizontal. The ligaments...are stretched and the sacroiliac joints become unstable and the self-locking mechanism is impaired. The ligaments undergo further stretching, firing the pain receptors. Alternatively, the unstable sacroiliac joints may become locked in an abnormal alignment, maintained that way by resultant muscle spasm producing pain."


The pain described is exactly what I've experienced, on and off, for five years now: "Sometimes the pain goes into my butt and the back of my thigh, but never past my knee.....The pain may involve either or both sides, radiate into either or both legs, usually not past the knee, at the same or different times."

In my case, says Cathy, physical therapist and my new best friend/taskmaster, it goes back to my twin pregnancy--the ultimate time of "swayback posture" for me--and an incomplete period of recovery after it. As you all know, I've mostly ignored my pain because I thought it was just weakness in my core, and that if I could get my stomach muscles back to where they were pre-pregnancy, the back pain would vanish. It was frustrating that core work seemed to make it worse rather than better, but hey! I was running, and the running was going OK, so I just lived with it.

For some reason, it makes me feel better to know that it's not a running injury, that it has nothing to do with bad form or my shoes or how my foot strikes the ground.

But regardless it's not something that I can run through. Running, Cathy tells me, isn't going to help the irritated joint stabilize. Nor can the problem be solved by a cortisone shot or PT exercises. I will probably still have some dry needling done (at next week's appointment) and I will be getting some of that coveted insurance-sponsored massage.

The main tool for this week is this:

The Serola Sacroiliac Belt

During all of my waking hours (and my sleeping ones, too, if I can stand it), I have to wear this little item. I'm wearing it as I type. I'm not going to lie: as soon as Cathy put it on me, my lower half felt about ten pounds lighter. The hamstring pain went away entirely, and the glute and back pain, while not gone, feel much better. It actually takes me back to pregnancy, when I purchased one of those belly support bands and could suddenly walk again without pain.

This isn't to say I felt completely happy when I walked out of the clinic. In fact, I had a good messy bawling session in the car, decided to go to spin class right then and, when I got to the gym where I thought the class was happening and found out it wasn't, broke down crying again at the front desk. I managed to put on my big girl pants and get on the bike for 40 minutes on my own (the equivalent of the 40-minute recovery run I would have been doing today).

Afterwards, feeling sweaty and therefore much better, I apologized to Matt, the guy at the front desk, for breaking down in front of him. Matt is one of those chiseled Boulder types, a coach, triathlete and runner who spends his summers in Kona. He told me he totally understood, that he was sidelined recently himself for a couple of weeks with a freak back injury and had his own breakdown the weekend that happened.

While on the bike getting sweaty, I had decided that my plan for this period of being sidelined will be to stick as close as possible to the workouts in my running plan--but do them on the bike. So, for example, this weekend's 90-minute progression run (first third easy pace, second third medium pace, third third medium-hard) I'll mimic on the bike in both duration and intensity.

I shared this idea with Matt. He said it sounded good. He said the key thing about running is the superior aerobic fitness it builds. "That will be the hardest thing to get back," he said, "so do whatever you can on the bike to get your heart rate into the zone where it's working as close to as hard as it does when you're running. When you come back to running, your legs will feel weak--that muscle strength comes back fast. But the aerobic fitness can take a really long time once you start running again if you don't work hard on it."

This makes total sense to me. So I'm going to dig out my old Polar heart rate strip and wear it on the bike, and work to keep the heart rate above 115-120 (Matt said that's where the benefit will arise, that you don't gain that much more by pushing it higher). I'm also going to stay indoors for this. Biking outside is more fun, but I can't afford any "coasting downhill." Staying inside will assure I'm working hard the whole time I'm at it.

Which brings me to my other issue with the stationary bike: boredom. A 40-minute run outside? Paradise. Too short. But the 40 minutes on the bike today felt like it would never end. So I'm going to do as much of it as possible in spin classes. For the first time, I'm glad that the longest runs planned for the next few weeks never topped two hours.

So, yeah. Add me to the DL list. The half-marathon on April 15 isn't likely to happen.

A good attitude will be really important. I'm cultivating that in two ways. One, by trying to see this six- to eight-week period from the perspective of my 65-year-old self, who of course will be fit and running races and doing all this with a nice, steady sacro-iliac joint. It's best for the long term.

The second attitude adjustment is this: On the drive out from the clinic, I saw a guy running in a Boston Marathon shirt. Cathy agrees with my doctor that fixing this will make me faster. Solid back=solid running. That's what I'm hanging on to.

The Shuffler Returns

After an unexpectedly nice 5-mile run on Tuesday, my first back at altitude, I knew I had to find some equally satisfying cross-training on Wednesday. And I couldn't quite face dealing with the rowing machine or the swimming pool yet. What I wanted was a sweat-soaked spin class with lots of good music.

With Tammy's class over until the fall, I had to look beyond my beloved (and affordable) rec center. Lo and behold! I still had the pass to Flatiron Athletic Club that Christine gave me for my birthday back in January. This club has a spin class at 6 a.m. on Wednesdays, and since the pass was set to expire at the end of this month, I decided there was no time like the present.

Knowing what I do about Flatiron's running clientele, I was prepared to find that all of my classmates there would look like Lance Armstrong and his female equivalent. I arrived early, wearing long black yoga pants and a black shirt so as to fade nicely into the background, and entered the former racquetball court that they've converted to a spin studio. The lights were dim, and only two other people were there: the instructor (a cut guy in biking shorts named Dave) and another more mortal-looking guy (wearing cotton clothes) already on a bike warming up. So far, I didn't feel too intimidated. I climbed on my bike (in the back row of course, and away from mirrors) and got going.

Other people trickled in, until in the end there were about 14 people. I was one of only three women (both, of course, more fit-looking than I; I told myself I could take them in a running race), and one of only two people NOT wearing those special clip-in biking shoes. The music, despite a track at the beginning that disturbingly resembled something Smoove B might choose, ended up being really good. Two songs were ones I'd heard Tammy play. Especially relevant after my bad run last Saturday was "I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again" by Chumbawamba. My favorite among the new songs was a fast Cajun number with an accordion.

After the class, I weaved my way through the lounge area and juice bar, where well-heeled retirees with rackets and yoga mats were reclining, to the front desk to ask how much it is for non-members to drop in to classes. The answer, unfortunately, was that you have to pay the $20 daily drop-in fee. Not gonna happen. So I am hoarding one more pass...for the next time I really need a spin class.

Seen in Boulder: The same day, I also hauled my children, who together weigh about 75 pounds, up the mesa to their preschool in our bike trailer. On the way, I saw a 50-something man with a salt-and-pepper beard walking his dog on the bike trail. And he was wearing a Boston Marathon jacket. I recognized the green trim and the unicorn logo instantly.

My dad used to say that seeing cardinals on our lawn was a good omen for our favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals (this wasn't always true). Could spotting that gent been a good omen for me?

Cross-Training Crossroads

The FIRST program, which I'm following for all of my races at least through September's Top of Utah Marathon, calls for at least two days a week of strenuous cross-training. All winter, my cross-training of choice has been a spinning class twice weekly.

This is what our spin bikes look like.

These classes have been perfect. Unlike running, which is just viscerally interesting to me, cross-training is hard: hard in the sense that I hate activities that require more equipment than I can afford to buy or maintain on my own, and also hard in the sense that I have trouble pushing myself enough to get anything out of them.

Spin class takes care of both problems: it's at the rec center, which is free for me, so no equipment or cost issues, and the instructor, Tammy, is a bad-ass motivator with a great sense of humor and taste in music. Also, my good friend Christine usually comes, too, so for this portion of my training I have a workout buddy.

But at yesterday morning's class, Tammy announced that instead of going through May, as it has in the past, the class would be wrapping up at the end of this month, something the rec center bosses decided would work better. I knew I'd have to find another cross-training activity in June...but I didn't think I'd have to think about it so soon. And I'm frankly scared that I won't be able to keep my fitness at the same level trying to do something on my own.

The FIRST book details some cross-training workouts that in principle would work well. One involves the rowing machine, which appeals to me because it would work my arms and back as well as my legs and because I could listen to music while doing it. But that might get awfully boring done twice a week. Stationary biking without an instructor would be certain death-by-dullness for me. So that leaves....swimming.

Swimming. I loved it when I was small. My mom said I was a fish. And then I started having one ear infection after another, at a much older age than kids are supposed to have them (age nine). So I had to have tubes. Which meant wearing silly putty in my ears whenever I entered the water. If water did get in my ears, it was painful. I developed a phobia about water (and any object, really) getting into my ears that has never really dissipated. Unlike small children, who grow fast enough that their tubes often come out on their own, older kids like I was may have these things in the ears for a long time. Mine didn't come out until I was 14 years old.

Of course I know it was a good thing I had them. I was apparently suffering with a 40% hearing loss that they entirely corrected. But to this day, water sports are not my thing. I'll never do a triathlon, mostly because of the swimming portion. That static-y sloshy sensation of water in my ears still sets my teeth on edge. Yes, I've been told that there are very good ear plugs out there now that will keep all the water out. But putting ear plugs in my ears gives me the heebie jeebies too.

I'm not afraid of water per se. I'll put my head under water gently, and if I were lost at sea, I could keep myself afloat for a while. I do get into the lap pool with a kickboard when my kids have a swim lesson, just to burn some extra calories. But the splashing and head turning, not to mention the quick diving movements, that go along with truly exerting swimming....I just won't do it.

There is a kickboarding workout included in the suggested FIRST cross-training. It looks like that will be my next best option. I'm just afraid it won't be hard enough. If anyone has an opinion, please share it with me! Remember, this cross-training isn't just an extra. It's key to getting me to a faster marathon time.