Hunkered Down for the Winter

Many years ago, I was a novice in a religious seminary that always seemed to be under construction. The bathrooms had 1950s aluminum windows that wouldn't shut all the way and bricks missing in the wall, open to the frigid New England air. Since I was the main breakfast cook, I had to wake up at 5am and take the first shower in the dark, so as not to wake up the other brothers and fathers. "Dark, cold, silent, early, wet, poverty, chastity, obedience"-- the worst words in the English language and,  coincidentally, concepts loosely associated with winter triathlon training.

Hanging out and meditating with the seminarians.

I last raced in September and now it's almost St. Nick's Day, but I still haven't done a whole lot to speak of blog-ably. It kind of feels like the last few minutes of sleep before the alarm clock goes off-- when your body is revving to wake up, but you can still squeeze in five extra minutes of pure do-nothing rapture. My body is still in off-season mode, but it's juuuust about ready to wake back up and start training again. I can read the signs and I'm excited to be turning the corner on the funk of lo-mo (low motivation).

In the meantime, I've been finishing up some good books and doing body/home repair projects. I thought I took care of the source of the water damage above the fireplace with my brother, Matt, this fall. We rebuilt the chimney, supposedly saving ~$5000. I've earmarked that magically materialized $5000 for a trip to Kona one day, but I'm not quite convinced the water issue is solved, so the house resembles a New England seminary. I just need a dry weekend to finish up more chimney work.

Without fixing the water problem, we can't insulate the walls, so it's pretty cold in the house. The dang bananas just sit there like big green popsicles and the stone-hard persimmons tease me to death. It makes me want to kick Old Man Winter right in his stones. Luckily, we treat our bedroom like a winter fallout shelter.  We pretty much get home late from work/workouts and hunker down in our warm little cave. The walls have poster paper on them and we're busy dream crafting as we do once per year, talking about bucket lists and goals and dreams for the future. So, it's also most wonderful time of the year.

You've heard of breakfast in bed. Well, now there's dinner in bed and compost in bed. Date pits anyone?

I've been using the winter downtime to stay on top of my vision exercises every night.

Unfortunately, in my quest to resurrect elementary school flag football glory over Thanksgiving weekend, I pulled my hamstring while sprinting back for a failed interception attempt. It's close to being healed, but superfluous injuries certainly weren't on my bucket list. And in other bodily misadventures, my physical therapist homeboy, Eric Oliver, finally evaluated my pestering toe problem. He's narrowed it down to nerve damage from last season. Supposedly it's a long and annoying route to recovery. It was all the excuse I needed to go ahead and pamper myself to my latest footwear purchase-- my Vibram naked shoes.

So far, I and black women LOVE them.

I'm not exactly allowed to wear the Vibrams on dates with my wife, but I continue to negotiate what constitutes a "date." Apparently, a trip to the gas station constituted a date the other day. I am allowed to wear them to work (between construction site visits) and around town. They are much cozier than being stuck in stiff dress shoes or steel toed boots. Since I keep my toes wiggly all day, they are prepared to wiggle even harder at night if I feel like going for a run. Otherwise, I am occasionally stopped dead in my tracks by throbbing pain of cartoon-toe-throb-proportions.

As an experiment, I ran two miles on the treadmill with the Vibrams, and quickly took them off to run another two in my favorite (supposedly "minimalist") shoes-- the Saucony Kinvaras. Night and day! The regular running shoes felt clumsy, like running on half-inflated balloons. There's just no way I can believe that long hours of training in one shoe or another won't effect my mechanics. So my goal is to build up my treadmill mileage in the Vibrams and do my pavement runs in the Kinvaras, pending Eric's approval. Hopefully, before the last snow of the winter I can run at least a couple of miles barefoot in the snow. It's not necessarily the ultimate rush, but it will put hair on my chest and it supposedly feels like running through fields of cotton balls. Or maybe piranhas. We shall see.