City Coach | NSQ

Glass half-full

Is your glass half-empty or half-full?

It’s been a veritable petri dish in our apartment with Mr. Cane fighting dengue fever and my fighting bronchitis. With the team opener on Sunday at The Cherry Tree 10-miler, I wasn’t sure until race day that I would actually race. What I was sure of is racing once I stepped on the line. I was NOT going to line up and then pull out or make the excuse that I wasn’t well.

 

I needed to come to terms with all the excuses before stepping on the line:

•   I have bronchitis. My time will be slow.

•   I am on antibiotics. My time will be slow

•   I haven’t done a real workout this week. My time will be slow.

•   My head isn’t in it. My time will be slow.

•   I just ran a block to pick up my number and I am gasping for air. How can I run 10 miles? Uhm, slowly.

Here’s every reason why it was great to race today even though it wasn't a great race:

• I have bronchitis. This was reason enough to be slow, so there was no pressure.

• I am on meds. It’s kind of like EPO. (okay, not really)

• Being sick gave me a taper I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

• I was so relaxed, I forgot about the watch, just listened to my body, and ran a negative split by about 80 seconds.

• I got mad love and bada$$ points for being out there while hacking up a lung.

• I continued the streak of bringing home hardware from all my races (Yes, imagine that a 7:01 pace was actually 2^nd in AG. Go figure. Old is good.)
• Hopefully, the effort jump-started my fitness for the season.

• I felt really positive out there and was cheering on my competitors. So much nicer to want to pull people than crush them. (Let’s not get crazy though. I wanted to pull them in behind me.)

• I heart Brooklyn and non-NYRR races.

• This reminded me that how I feel before the race is little indication of how it will go.

• I got to bask in the glory of all my teammates running solid times and the camaraderie of it all.

• Lastly, I went out on date night (thank you Alex Nimetz!) and not once did racing come up. Had I pulled out, I am sure I would have been unbearable. And so a good day and night were had by all.

Mirror, Mirror....

I have a confession. I suffer from body distortion (and no, not body dysmorphia).  In essence, I look in the mirror and don’t see reality. But, how can I? I live in NY and am bombarded constantly by images of beauty.  Before you gasp or smirk that you knew it, I have another confession: it’s not what you think.

Let me backtrack a bit. This summer, I was gaunt. At 5’6”, I hit my lowest weight of 113lbs. Food wasn’t sticking, and the little that did was burned off with tough interval training. Gaunt to the stage that if you didn’t know me and saw me in regular clothes, you may have thought I was that certain type of New Yorker who had starved herself. If you were an athlete, you would have recognized that I was runner-gaunt, i.e. fit. I loved being at peak fitness, but did worry about how I was presenting. (My mother even pleaded with me to stop the running because it was making me look ugly.) I often asked my husband, “If you didn’t know me and saw me walking down the street, could you tell that I was an athlete?” When I looked in the mirror, I wasn’t sure if what I saw was a look of emaciation or strength.

Move ahead a few months when the training has subsided and the demands of my job have taken over. I still train, but not to the level I trained this summer. I have put on 7-10 lbs and look healthier and more substantial. It’s winter; the body knows how to pad. So here’s where the distortion highlighted itself this winter. (Grant me artistic license for the *slight* embellishment which follows.)

My husband had just returned from a 10-day training/working trip in Curacao after staying at the Lion’s Dive Hotel. Two noteworthy things about the hotel: it hosts a 50 m pool that commemorates the late Doug Stern, and the Dutch Olympic swim team trained there while Mr. Cane was there. Mr. Cane is an honorable and decent human, but he is not blind. He noticed that Olympic gold medalist Ranomi Kromowidjojo was there and showed me her picture. Below is the conversation that took place in and out of my head.

NSQ: [I don’t remember where in the islands I took that picture. It doesn’t look familiar.] Jonathan, where was I when this was taken?

JC: In New York.

NSQ: This doesn’t look like New York. (Synapses fire.) Wait, this is not I? “Uhm, don’t you think that we look alike?”

JC: (sarcastically) Yes, it must be like looking at the lost, seventh Sin Quee sister. (less sarcastically) Are you serious? She’s 20 years old, 5’10” and 150 lbs, and Dutch.

It’s amazing what goes on in my head. I think I have taken the idea of “Believe” to a whole new level. I think the distortion I referred to is also known as hubris. I would go as far as saying conceit, but it’s not as if I think I can swim as fast as she. Then again, I just took a swim lesson from Boris Talan and he does see real potential in me. 

Some call it Lazy. We call it Maize.

The winner isn't the one who works the hardest. She's the one who gets there first.Often those hard workers lack efficiency. So why reinvent the wheel? Cane describes who I am.