Finally a Run!

Since I had written yesterday that I would run this morning, I could not really go back on my word, and I set off a little later than expected (at 6:53 am) with a camera, cell phone and a little money in case I needed sustenance. The weather was excellent for running (cloudy and even a little rain at times), but it was not very good for photos and because my camera wasn't set properly the photos are not good enough to post. Instead I will post a couple of photos of a meal I had with my family last night in celebration of Father's Day in Taiwan which took place on August 8th.

As for the run, the main thing was that I was on my feet for almost two hours. I may have only covered about 8 or at the very most 9 miles. The plan was just to get round a certain course, which involved running around a huge lake, and hence there were few options to shorten the distance. I felt my knee a little as I left the house and again about two-thirds of the way through, but apart from that I have felt fine. Stair climbing at home is fairly OK this evening, though I wonder whether I will feel more uncomfortable tomorrow morning. I'll just have to see. Anyway, hopefully I won't need to use my legs too much swimming except when pushing off the wall.

I figured that since I normally swim close to two hours, to spend about the same amount of time on my feet should not be a problem. Certainly my lungs did not feel tired, only my legs.

The reason for all of this is because I have the opportunity to take part in a running race in Hualien in early November, and I can choose either the Half Marathon or the Marathon. I will need to ask Bree which one I should do, so I am undecided at the moment. The course is apparently beautiful -running alongside a marble gorge as it twists its way from about sea level to at least 2,000 meters above it. There are a lot of good spots for whitewater rafting, too, though I would prefer just to watch that.

I probably won't run again for several days, but when I do I may just run the same course and try to get round it a little faster. I will also try to measure it with a motor scooter or something.

Today I was able to watch just about all the swim races that were held in Beijing live on TV (no time change, here). It was indeed exciting. Phelps and Co. just won the 4 x 100m freestyle, Kitajima won the 100m breaststroke gold medal, and an English girl caught Katie Hoff at the end to win the gold in the 400m freestyle. I watched Natalie Coughlin in the heats for the 200 IM. They were some amazing races. A Taiwanese guy reached the last 16 of the men's 200 butterfly.

The only problem is that life gets a little busy trying to watch all that on top of all the other things one has to do every day.

The beautiful Taroko gorge in Eastern Taiwan. I walked some 19 miles of it in the mid-1980s. Soon I plan to run it.

Still a Long Way to Go!

Our new sofa and coffee table (we bought the last one 20 years ago). Now we can watch the Olympics in style.

I am about one-third of my way into my one-year-plus training program for some swim races in summer 2009, and I am glad I have seen at least some small improvements. With the Olympics taking place and being fortunate to be able to see some swimming on TV being broadcast live from Beijing, I have been able to think a little about how I can move forward from here.

In the past whenever I watched the Olympics or even golf, I would get somewhat discouraged as my skills were so inferior to those of the world's best. However, rather than sitting back on our new couch and feeling discouraged, I am recharging myself with new insights and goals. Here are a few things I have learnt these last couple of days.

Observation 1: Those (male) swimmers look so strong (meaning that I look really weak).
Response: To get faster at swimming, I need to be stronger physically. Besides maintaining a consistent swimming distance in my workouts, I need to do more strength-building exercises at home and also eat more and more often.
Results: A day is too quick, but I have been aware of this for at least a couple of months now, and I am about one kilo heavier than I used to be. Besides, I am eating potatoes, bananas, granola and various other foods rich in carbohydrates on a fairly regular basis (at least every day) and I am not wasting much time in preparing them (I peel potatoes pretty fast now).

Observation 2: Those women freestylers are not lifting their elbows really high (like I have been). It is difficult to see clearly when they are gliding through the water so fast. But I watched Stephanie Rice of Australia win an IM400 heat yesterday and her freestyle (as well as that of all the others) looked so much more efficient than mine. Maybe in an effort to rotate my body or avoid waves in choppy oceans or because my arms are too weak, I have been wasting time and effort by raising my arms too high.
Response: I need to focus on technique, one thing being to swim a little flatter with my arms while focusing on rotating my hips as opposed to trying to turn my shoulders 180 degrees every stroke. Of course I also need some professional help, but since this is likely to be occasional, I will endeavor to try to understand things myself, too. I will try to film it one of these days, too.
Results: This morning I first swam 3,650 meters non-stop in about two minutes faster than I think I would have done if I had lifted my arms higher. Then my friend timed me a little later over 200 m, and I went 3m 04s, which was my fastest time so far (by one second), and while it is hard to say if I went faster because of technique or just because I felt less tired than yesterday, at least it was an encouraging sign.

So the Olympics is giving me new energy and a new determination. And let me not think that I am too old for this. Someone in the 65-69 age group went about 28 minutes in the King's Swim and it wasn't Bob Momsen or someone 7 feet tall. So it can be done, and I'll give it a go.

Recap on the last week: I swam a total of 26,300 meters (4,250 + 4,400 + 4,350 + 4,250 + 4,550 + 4,500). On one or two days I swam a little easier, but I mostly tried to meet certain standards as regards time, etc. On Thursday I went 3m 05s for 200m, on Friday 3m 06s, on Saturday 3m 05s (despite feeling weak and tired), and today (on Sunday) 3m 04s. I was somewhat tired but sensed I had it in me to break my record at this distance, and tried to swim more efficiently in terms of moving my arms.

Tomorrow (on my day off) I'm going to try something different - a run! For me this is like starting out as a complete beginner. I'll try to go easy on myself and I hope that it does not mess up my swimming on Tuesday. I hope to be out running - and perhaps walking! - for about one hour. There will be some hills, but some nice scenery and so I may get a few pics.

All the best for Mark and the other English Channel swimmers. I don't know if the weather is good enough yet for them to make the attempt.

The Olympic Games Start

Our new 37-inch flatscreen TV bought just in time to watch the Olympics

After being without a TV set since we moved to Kaohsiung at the end of January, we finally bought one (we had to sell a house to be able to afford it), just in time for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. I am so unaccustomed to TV now that I forget we even have it and if I watch for more than ten minutes I seem to feel dizzy. It is a bit like my swimming was after an 8-month layoff earlier this year.

I understand that the local Taiwanese TV stations will together be broadcasting various different events. At least it's all in Chinese and so there won't be any need for translation. Fortunately, I won't be needing to get up at 3 a.m. to watch something. The opening ceremony was very interesting to me. How that country has changed since I first started studying China seriously in the mid-1970s. It was interesting that they picked as one of their themes "All men are brothers" (四海之內皆兄弟也). This quotation from the Analects of Confucius was something I studied when in language school in Taiwan in the early 1980s. I certainly would not have got to study that had I studied on the mainland.

The Olympics are so vast with so many nations represented and so many different sports. It hopefully makes us think about how our own training fits into the grand scheme of things. At least triathlon involves events in water and on land, and pretty good all-round body training, and it is also something we can do as we get older. However, we should not let ourselves get sucked into just one event or a particular format for an event. Enjoyment should be the overriding consideration, and not just because the rest of the triathlon community only do certain events or because we may think that the best races cost the most.

To briefly recap on the last two mornings, I swam 4,350 meters on Thursday (yesterday) and 4,250 meters today (Friday) despite a slightly later start. As with other recent workouts, I swam steady for about the first 3,000m, and then took rests between faster 50s and 100s or 150s. Finally, I raced my friend. Yesterday, the plan was to race 100m. I found that I was swimming comfortably, but was not going fast, and towards the end of the 100m, my friend was about two body lengths ahead of me (about 6 seconds roughly). So instead of stopping, I just continued and tried to maintain my steady rhythm. In the end I finished 200m in 3m 05s, knocking 2 seconds off my "record" of less than a week ago. Today I tried to do the same again and went 3m 06s. The improvements, although small, are still coming, so that goal of breaking 3 minutes is looking all the more possible.

For the last several days, my training has been "lighter", in that I have continued with the morning swims, but have not done dry-land exercises at home. It is mainly that I have been trying to get on with my work when not doing something related to our house (which fortunately is not very often, but still consumes a chunk of my time) and I have not had a lot of free time.

I am not sure if I will watch a lot of the Olympics except around meal times. However, I will try to follow specific events (swimming, triathlon, modern pentathlon, etc.) by watching YouTube in the hope that I will be able to get a reasonable amount of work done. Some of my friends will be training for their Ironman events over this period and others will be attempting to swim across the English Channel, so I guess we will all be rather busy.

Anyway, if I watch something that drives me wild (like a particular swimming world record), I will probably try to post it for those who might have missed it. Hope you enjoy the show, whetever you are and whatever you are doing these next few weeks.

Swimming, Work and Feeling Tired

The air-conditioned reading room on the end of the Golden Lion Lake featured at the top of my blog. This is a great place to spend some time at just to have a change from working at home. It also has a few Chinese newspapers so I can catch up on the local news.

I guess there is only so much we can do in any given day. When reading some blogs, it seems that some people are super-achievers, working at a job 50 hours a week, commuting over one hour each way to work, maintaining the training regimen of an elite Ironman athlete - you name it, they are doing it.

As for me, a little under two hours in the pool most mornings requires me to catch up on the sleep I missed the previous night at some point (or several points) during the daytime. Even when I was young, I remember sleeping a lot after long exercise. I rode my first hundred miles with a couple of friends in one day on a bike at the age of 12 (just a three-speed bike that was my mum's). After I got home at about 7 pm, I could barely keep awake for 15 minutes while I ate something before falling into a deep sleep. In my mid-20s, I tried leaving on one of my 180-mile bike trips at midnight instead of going to bed. At about 3:30 am I fell asleep at the wheel and woke up suddenly when the front wheel hit the kerb. Luckily, I did not fall off, and I immediately and desperately looked for cover as it was drizzling. After sleeping on a pile of hay in a barn for about 90 minutes until daybreak in the middle of nowhere, I set off again and reached home (my destination) somewhere around 5:00 pm (the last three hours on the bike I was only able to keep awake by taking large quantities of Dextrosol (glucose tablets)). After getting my bike into my rented room, getting changed and eating a bowl of cornflakes, I went to bed and woke up 14 hours later.

I have rarely felt as tired as on those occasions, but I am often finding myself daydreaming and half dozing off when I am trying to do my work. My work requires a lot of concentration and has little excitement, and so, if I am tired, doing my work is probably only going to make me more tired. Still, I am glad I am not doing a job that requires me to rush around here and there. Hopefully, I can channel more energy into my swimming and other sports, and I will need to if I am to get any better.

After returning from Taipei on Monday evening, I got slightly less sleep than needed and swam 4,250 meters on Tuesday. At the end of the workout, my friend and I raced only over 50 meters as he claimed to be tired. I went about 39.5 seconds which pleased me. On Wednesday morning (today), I swam a total of 4,400 meters. At the end of it, we raced over 100 meters, and while I thought I swam well, it took me 1m 30s. Maybe I was a little too comfortable, I don't know. Perhaps I should have done 200 meters instead. Certainly I need to do more speed work.

There are still some things we need to buy and have done for our new house, so there will still be some running around to do on top of training, work and daily activities like food preparation and eating. On the subject of running, I want to get back into it, and will probably try to run for one hour early next week and see how it goes. At least if all goes well, I will feel better prepared to face the challenge of a Peaman should I have to go to Hawai'i by the year-end.

May I wish the English Channel swimmer friends, Mark, Enda and Maggie, the best of British (and Irish) luck, and also thank them for expanding my horizons regarding the realm of possibilities.

Day Trip to Taipei

View of Taipei 101 building and most of Taipei from the hills behind our old apartment in Hsintien, Taipei County (click on photo to enlarge)

One of the banks with which we have an account located in Taipei

Taipei sky at night near the train station. The cloud formation suggests that a typhoon is coming soon

Hsiu-chin and I travelled to Taipei and back today, by shinkansen both ways, in order to finalize the sale of our old apartment. While that has been sorted out, there is other paperwork to be done in Kaohsiung, while I try to make sure we don't go on a wild spending spree while being deluded into thinking we have made it. Hopefully, life can get pretty much back to normal starting tomorrow, although I won't be too demanding on my morning swim in case I feel tired. In some ways I am glad I don't have a coach, as then I feel I would be serving various masters.

I am pleased to have bought a new camera, which I believe is capable of taking some good shots. It seems, though, that while today was a nice, clear day for photography, I was never quite in the right place at the right time. Today was my "rest day" as Mondays I usually do not do any training. However, I walked about 30 minutes mostly uphill to get the panoramic shot of Taipei. Had I gone two or three hours earlier, I think the sky would have been clearer. Rarely does one get a clear sky over this busy city of 3 million.

Taiwan has a lot of beautiful scenery especially in the less visited parts. I really hope to be able to travel the island on a bicycle with a camera and a computer so I can keep in touch with the world and work a few hours a day on trips.

Torturous Training Needed?

Part of one of Hsiu-Chin's paintings, painted using the acrylic medium while in Hawai'i.

This morning I finished off my swim training for this last week, adding 4,700 meters to bring my total for the week up to 26,150 meters. Add the 26, 750 the previous week, and that makes a total of 52,900 in the last two weeks.

However, I did not find the training particularly difficult. I only had to make sure I got up in the morning and got down the pool, and I kind of went as I felt, rather than being tied to some rigid workout. This morning at the end of the main workout and after I had a several minutes' rest (including in the jacuzzi), I raced my friend over 200m and one of the lifeguards timed us. My friend must have been a bit tired today and was not his normal speedy self, but I went 3m o7s, for the second day running. So at least yesterday's swim was no fluke. Today I felt the swim was smoother and the turns better, which probably meant that I put in slightly more effort yesterday. I have not felt any discomfort today.

So at this point I ask myself the question: in order to get better, do I need to engage in torturous training sessions? I am constantly reading about people whose arms are about to drop off, or who are doing sets on wild send offs, or suffering a lot of discomfort from various kicking drills. So I don't know. I will have to see what is necessary to get this swim time down to 3 minutes.

A couple of days ago, our elder son came back from teaching an English class to a third grader. As he prepared the lesson, he learned the meaning of some fairly basic English words for the first time. He said to us that he was glad he was getting a chance to learn what children in English-speaking countries learn when they learn English in school. He did all of his elementary school studies in Chinese. What was even better, was that he was also being paid to learn things related to the English language that he missed when growing up.

Today at our church, the theme of the message was Father's Day. In the US, this is in June (I always remember because I did the Peaman biathlon race on Father's Day). However, in Taiwan, it is on August 8th, as 8-8 is pronounced "pa-pa". Our sons were away for the weekend. I must admit the whole idea of Father's Day is a difficult thing for me. Rather than write a lot of what will appear very negative, let me just say that we can't change the past and what the past generations did, but we can control the present, and hopefully, while we are by no means perfect, we can have a positive influence on our own children. Our pastor at church (who grew up in the US), says he believes we live in a fatherless generation. Particularly in the last ten years or so, I have heard enough sad stories to realize that there is some truth in such a statement.

Tomorrow morning Hsiu-chin and I have to take the bullet train up to Taipei to hopefully finalize the transfer of our old apartment to new owners. We recently bought a new camera, too, and are trying it out. It is small enough to carry when on a run, so if I do any longish runs, I may take a few pics, too.

Swim Times Show Slight Improvement

View of Kenting in the distance in the southern part of Taiwan. I'd love to swim this stretch of the ocean, but I am told strong currents exist, it is rarely this calm, and an escort boat would be needed.

Not having a swim coach to follow my progress at swimming or otherwise, the only thing I can really do is write about it, and then hopefully forget about it as I get on with the many important things I need to deal with in my life.

My swim practices tend to be mostly focused on LSD (long-slow-distance) with one or two fast short sprints thrown in at the end. This is in large part due to the fact that the pool can get quite crowded and because I swim six mornings per week, meaning that, if the practices were too demanding, I would probably opt to stay in bed more often. In addition, I don't want to get injured (my stomach muscles are particularly sensitive) doing some unusual and stupid movements in the water. I am training to be an open water swimmer and not a 200 IM specialist.

A few months ago I set myself a goal of getting my time for a 400 meter swim in a pool down from about 7m 00s at that time to 6 minutes by about May 2009. Several weeks ago I swam 6m 40s, so at least some progress has been made. The only difficulty with the 400m swim is that I always have to do it alone, so there is sometimes a little less incentive to try to push it, and there is always the feeling that someone might get in my way when I am just half way through it.

Fortunately, a local swimmer at the pool, who is quite accomplished in all four strokes, has been in the habit of challenging me to freestyle races (I only swim freestyle with any seriousness) at the end of my daily workouts. We started with 50m, and then it became 100m, and the last week or two we have been racing over 200m. We always race during the last 5 minutes before the pool closes at 8 am for the first morning break, and so we usually have the two middle lanes to ourselves. Currently, our times are pretty close and sometimes (usually) he wins, and occasionally I win.

So I figure that I could set myself a goal of getting my 200m time down to 2m 50s by the end of next May. Since I am a long distance swimmer, if I can do that, I should have little difficulty breaking 6 minutes for the 400m.

Some time when I feel inclined I intend to draw a graph depicting my gradual progress. For now I will just mention some recent times. On July 24 I swam the 200m in 3m 12s (my best time at least in the last two years so far), then after some slower attempts, I went 3m 10s on July 31, then 3m 09s on August 1, and then finally 3m 07s on August 2 (today). These improvements may seem small but they are improvements at least. The times can vary of course depending on how I feel. At a workout, I usually swim around 4,000 meters (sometimes more and sometimes less), then have between about 3 and 8 minutes rest before we race. Some days I feel more tired (either from swimming or insufficient sleep the night before), the swimsuits (some of which are quite inefficient) can vary, I occasionally make a really bad turn off the wall, and in some workouts I may do more speed work which leaves me more fried. The day to day times are really not that important. It is the end result next May that is going to matter. The more I swim (the last five days 4,000 + 4,650 + 4,300 + 4,200 + 4,300 = 21,450, and tomorrow morning is yet to come to finish off the week), the more I realize that there are no gimmicks or quick fixes. I spend much of the early part of the workout just focusing on smoothness, on the mechanics, stroke count, hand entry, the catch, the pull, the rotation of the hips, inhaling and exhaling, etc. Only later do I apply force or try to swim fast. I do various land exercises at home, without special equipment but just improvising on various exercising tools that have been lying around the house. I try to eat a balanced diet with a focus on consistency. I try to get enough sleep with sometimes several "cat naps" during the day. I watch footage or world class swimmers and read the blogs of people who have been there before. There are many areas in which I still need to learn so much, but I am getting better, both physically and mentally, albeit slowly.

In a couple of weeks, I want to set aside the time to have my own "Swim Week" or "Swim Camp". I probably won't be able to get anyone to join me, but I will swim with the usual people in the mornings and then go back to the pool for a "lighter" but equally focused workout in the afternoons. I can't do a lot else for this year, but at least it will be good training. The aim of these workouts will be to provide more time in the pool for additional drills (maybe using hand paddles, etc., or doing some speed work, etc.) with a primary emphasis on injury prevention. While I had some shoulder troubles a couple of months ago, I have found that my shoulders are fine now since I stopped doing warm-up exercises at home in the mornings before I set off for swim practice. Currently, my 10-minute bike ride to the pool gives me a chance to feel relaxed before I start swimming, and then I swim at least the first 300m very conservatively to allow myself to gradually feel where I am at on any particularly day. Days lost through injury will mean valuable lost time which will make those ultimate goals all the more difficult to achieve.

If anyone wants to swim with me in Kona, Hawai'i, we can probably arrange to meet some time over the next year. All the best with your swimming adventures.