Hello, loyal fans (all two of you)! It’s been a while, I know, but that’s what happens when actual work gets in the way of updating my hobby blog that doesn’t help pay my bills. Oh well. I’m back now, with a goal to keep this darn thing updated more often. Here’s what’s been going on since my last post: The back is better… I got some TLC in the form of massage, chiro work, and foam rolley goodness, so huzzah for that. …but the hamstring is not. A combination of weighted one-legged squats (curse you, Eli! *shakes fist*) and lots of run mileage has led to a tight right hammy, right where it meets the pooch butt. I’ve been stretching and icing it, so hopefully it’ll play nice over Christmas break so I can get my 18 miler in. I ran the Las Vegas Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon. Jason did the full and shaved ten freakin’ minutes off his PR, thus capping off a fantastic year of racing for him (Mark has dubbed him “Mr. PR,” which is no joke — I don’t think he had a single bad race all season). I, meanwhile, did two minutes better than the Seattle half in June but was still 2 minutes off my PR. The goal for 2010 is to do a sub-1:50. I think that with my diligent training for Canada I should be able to pull it off. I’m training for a marathon in February. It’s a podunk tiny marathon in Goodyear, Arizona that should only attract a couple hundred runners. The race is February 14th — what better way to celebrate a Hallmark holiday than to run 26.2 miles? This will be my second marathon, and I’m hoping to PR by a lot (about 20-35 minutes). The pipe dream is sub-4 hours, but I’ll be happy with low fours. That’s about it for the time being. I’ll check back in after this weekend’s long run and workouts. Hope you all have a happy holiday and that you receive a stocking full of gu and PRs....

Last week I spent five (ugh) days in Las Vegas for work. There’s a conference that rolls around every late fall that dumps me in Sin City just long enough for me to not want to return until the stale stench of cigarettes, perfume and gamblin’ stank finally dissipates from my clothes and suitcase. (Unfortunately, I’m heading back to Vegas in December for the Rock ‘n Roll Marathon and AGAIN in January for another conference. Kill me.) I didn’t even bother packing workout gear because I knew I was going to be obscenely busy all week and wouldn’t be able to squeeze in a run (and I figured the casino hotel would charge so much for gym access that I could conceivably purchase my own 24 Hour Fitness franchise). I had been working out fairly steadily the weeks leading to the conference, so I figured my health would be pretty good going into the event. Naturally, I was wrong. Okay, so I’ve posted in the past about how un-humanly stiff my back is. I’ve got bad genes, I work in front of a computer all day, I slouch too much, blah blah blah, you know the drill. Anyway, on Monday morning I woke up with a ridiculously stiff back. I creaked around like the Tin Man trying to get packed for my trip, and I managed to squeeze in about 30 seconds of sad foam rollin’ before Jason shooed me out the door to catch our flight. (I paid him back by being the worst traveling companion in recent history, ginap ginapping at him in the terminal and fidgeting every single minute of our flight like Ralphie in the pink bunny costume.) We got to the hotel and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. To my horror, I was unnaturally shifted to the left like I was rockin’ a permanent gangsta lean. At this point, I was crabby as hell and just wanted to lie down, so I spent most of the afternoon on the floor staring at the carpet and wondering how clean it actually was. To make matters worse, Jason had come down with a cold so he was feeling as miserable as I was. The Gimp and The Germ made for quite the glamorous couple last week. After some sad stretching attempts and a couple of Icy Hot patches, I pretty much gave up and resorted to hobbling around Vegas with jumbo shrimp posture all week. I ran into a colleague of mine who’s an Internet marketer-slash-chiropractor, and he gave me a little TLC which helped a lot. Some of his exclamations included, “Jesus, your left IT band is so stiff,” “You’ve got muscular legs!” (always what a girl wants to hear), and “Why is your neck so STIFF?” Come to think of it, every other remark out of his mouth had to do with how stiff my body was. I think I come in just under “walking cadaver” on the Scientific Chart of Stiffness. I wasn’t my usual chummy self in Vegas because of how unhealthy and uncomfortable I felt all week. We’re back home now — Jason is still sick and miserable and my back and neck are still kind of aggravating me. I’ve been married to the foam roller all weekend long and have scheduled a long-ass massage (as opposed to a long ass-massage) for tomorrow and plan on stalking my chiropractor all week so he can hopefully pretzel my body into something resembling a normal human form again. I just want to feel healthy again so I can continue building a solid base going into next season. Grrr,...

Good lord, this post is so belated that it’s probably not even worth publishing. Oh well, deal with it — I’m pretty sure Jason poisoned me with the lunch he made, so before I wither up and die I might as well share my recap of Ironman Canada 2009. In August Jason and I headed to Penticton, BC, to watch some of our training buddies race the full Ironman and so Jason could sign up for the 2010 race (you basically have to sign up for full Ironman races on-site because they sell out so quickly). He had been badgering me non-stop to sign up as well, and I kept vehemently shooting him down, telling him again and again that I didn’t think I’d be ready and that I wanted to improve my half distance times before even thinking about tackling a full. Eventually Jas stopped hounding me and figured he’d just go it alone next year. We packed up some things for the weekend and were just about to leave when Jason randomly decided to call his dad and see if he wanted to tag along. Brief aside: Jason’s dad is awesome. He’s the kind of spectator you want watching you race because he’s genuinely interested in athletics and sports. He’ll show up at 5 am to watch things get set up and will wait around all day until the race ends. Best support system ever. Anyway, surprisingly enough, Jason’s dad wanted to tag along at the last minute so we headed to his parent’s house and picked him up for the long haul to Penticton. (Or, rather, we drove to Jason’s parents’ house and Jason’s dad drove from there. Woo hoo, free ride!) The area in and around Penticton is gorgeous — huge lakes, rolling hills and valleys, wine country galore. I’ve also never seen a town embrace the Ironman like Penticton. There were signs everywhere welcoming athletes and advertising the Ironman. Hell, the town Subaru dealership is even called “The Ironman City Subaru.” After coming from the most redneck, anti-Ironman Ironman race I’d seen, Penticton felt like I’d died and gone to athlete heaven. When we got into town, we made our way to the house that we were staying at for the next couple days. My friend/chiropractor/fellow triathlete Nathan was racing Canada and had rented a house, and he had an extra room to spare. What I didn’t expect was for the house to look like the family who owned it had just left hours before we got there — personal photos and whatnot were left out, making me feel like I had just broken into someone’s house and decided to crash there, Goldilocks-style. Undoubtedly because Nathan despises me for canceling so many chiro appointments, he decided to save this room for me and Jason: Not only was this girl obsessed with Zac Efron… …she also seemed to side with Team Brown: Jason’s dad opted to sleep on the floor since he was a last-minute house guest, so the three of us spent the night inside a 13-year old girl’s room, surrounded by glossy two-dimensional teen heartthrobs, nightmare-inducing clowns, and a lavender phone shaped like a pair of lips. Race day arrived, and we awoke to find an amusing checklist left on the counter top by one of the racers staying in the house: We headed to the start to watch the race and to support our friends. I was absolutely blown away by the crowd of people who showed up to support the race. There were groups of spectators everywhere, and they cheered just as loudly for non-pros as they did the pros. It...

I started doing Pilates (I know, I know) once a week and strength training once a week (throw in dry land and I’ve got 3 days of muscle flexin’ each week) for a pretty important reason (which I’ll get to in my next post, so stay tuned), and both my Pilates instructor and my strength trainer, Eli, keep barking the same order at me: “Remember to breathe. No, engage your core. No, your core.” Apparently, once you get serious about strength training and trying to be healthy, you have to learn how to breathe in a manner different than you have been accustomed to for the past 26 years. Who knew? Every week I meet with Melissa, she chirps at me for an hour and says “Suck in your tummy. Now inhale going down, exhale coming up…” She then watches me sucking in air like a dying fish for a few repetitions before poking my gut until I yank it in so far that I feel like my pooch is going to stick out through my back. Then she nods as if she’s finally satisfied. We continue doing this the entire hour, her poking at my stomach and me whooshing air in and out of my lungs in a highly insufficient manner until I feel like I’m going to pass out due to lack of sweet, sweet oxygen. Pilates, like swimming, is stupid — I can’t remember to breathe all fancy-like while trying to recall fifteen other things simultaneously! Eli is a bit more subtle in his breathing critique. I’ll be mid-lift and he’ll suddenly go, “You’re engaging your core, right?”, at which point I flex my abs in a knee-jerk reaction and respond with, “Uh, yeahhhhh…” Everything requires an “engaged core,” even writing a check for the day’s workout session (okay, maybe not). After our last meeting my abs were sore despite not having done any crunches or ab work — they were all hurty by proxy. Regular, lazy Becca breathing is different than workout breathing. Lazy Becca Breathing is quiet, calm and satisfying. Workout Breathing is loud, shallow, “I’m gonna pop out a baby because I’m in labor and this is how I learned to breathe in Lamaze” breathing. I hate Workout Breathing. Why can’t my belly loll up and down like a distended Somalian’s when I’m exercising? Stupid core being all important and whatnot! All I’m saying is that this fancypants new breathing better get me a sick-ass looking stomach, because if it doesn’t then I’m gonna call shenanigans on this “having to think about how to breathe” nonsense and will start gulping in air like a greedy chunkster...

Recently Jason and a number of my triathlon teammates raced Ironman Lake Stevens 70.3. I had been training for the race but decided at the last minute not to do it because I had traveled to San Francisco, Napa Valley and San Jose the week before and had too much booze and horrible food sloshing around my system to feel prepared to tackle a half Ironman. Nonetheless, I watched the race anyway to cheer on my friends and the BFG. A word of advice to any triathletes out there reading this: if you’re thinking of racing Ironman Lake Stevens, don’t. First of all, Lake Stevens sucks. If Washington state had a hillbilly cousin, Lake Stevens would be that hillbilly cousin’s poo-crusted butthole. It’s such a crappy town that the only thing the official Ironman race catalogs can advertise about the area is that it has a Buzz Inn Steakhouse, which looks about as classy as the bar where Jodie Foster got raped in The Accused. The town literally consists of this skeezy restaurant, a Subway, a crappy foodmart, a burger shack, and, inexplicably, a town museum (maybe they wanted to commemorate the day they scored a Subway franchise). To answer your next question, no, there are no hotels in Lake Stevens, so if you’re thinking of flying in to do this race then lucky you, you get to stay in Everett or a neighboring city. (And no, Seattle is not “twenty minutes away,” as I heard one race official tell someone over the phone; it’s more like 50 minutes.) Secondly, the “lake” part of Lake Stevens is filthy. It smells terrible and is full of garbage. When Jason swam in it the day before the race, he said the bottom of the lake was littered with beer cans and junk. Teresa said she spotted an old rusted chair while swimming. Jason and his dad once saw a half-submerged mattress in the lake after they finished a bike ride, and I had the pleasure of experiencing an obese kid with a rat tail throwing firecrackers into the lake as I was standing in it for a post-workout ice bath. This lake is the town’s urinal — they don’t give a crap about it and they certainly don’t take care of it, so excuse me for not wanting to pay a couple hundred dollars to do a race that involves swimming in it for 1.2 miles. Thirdly, the bike course is horrible. It’s two loops and is a challenge for sure, with a few tough hills, a lot of false flats, and many twists and turns. However, what I hate most about the course is that the town’s inhabitants are so mean and inconsiderate to cyclists that it makes for a stressful, miserable ride. Every time I’ve ridden the course I’ve had some redneck in a Ford F-150 angrily honk at me as he passes me at 50 mph. And surprise surprise, Ironman didn’t close off the course during the actual race so my friends said they kept getting passed by jerks in cars who would angrily swerve and honk at all of the cyclists who were racing. Jesus Christ, this race is one day out of the year — you’d think that these a-holes could show some courtesy and put up with a few hours of inconvenience, but no, they’ve gotta get to Walmart or a monster truck rally or a Larry the Cable Guy viewing party or wherever the hell they’re rushing to. The cherry on top of this turd sundae was the expo hall for the race. Race organizers had the expo hall in Everett, because, as I’ve...

My friend Colleen sent me this video of a triathlon trainer talking about the negative experience he and some of his athletes had while practicing the course in Lake Placid: Dude, if someone threw a tray of mustard at me while I was riding, I would freak the eff out and go apeshit on him. Then again, I can’t stand mustard, but still, that’s so not...