What a Drag!

Weekend runs are not the leisurely product of self indulgence, late nights and lazy mornings sitting in bed with coffee contemplating the fabulous day ahead when you have kids.  Especially when your hubby travels a lot.  So my running this weekend was squeezed into the early mornings but was invaluable for my sanity as I did a lot of time feeding, ferrying and ferociously recording splits for my two swimmers this weekend.

It had been a bitter sweet moment when my first born, now a feisty sixteen year old, swore off anything to do with running, despite having enjoyed some success at school running middle distance. The previous summer we had evolved from our usually explosive running partnership which had in the past involved me pointlessly trying to give advice or motivation.  She never took my advice well, and sometimes I would find her pounding on the treadmill hanging only on to the bars, so she thought I would think she was training!  But by summer of her sophomore year, our running rapport had improved.  I learnt to be quiet and let her choose her own training methods, and the summer she prepared for her first cross country season we had finally reached an amicable accord.  Down at Valley Green we would go our separate ways, only occasionally shouting out to each other on the trail if there had been an exciting sighting of Bradley Cooper or Renee Zelweger.  We even developed and honed the 'Bradley Cooper' tempo run, that involved a sluggish teenage girl springing into life to chase down the elusive celebrity.  So when she announced a year later that she had never really liked running, she just liked winning, and that it was swimming that she wanted to focus on, I was sad to miss our times together, but happy she had found her niche and had enough sense of self to change her direction.  So here I was watching her trash up and down a pool again.  In distance swimming I started to realize there are a lot of parallels to running.  Firstly in distance swimming, you have to be every bit as anal about your equipment as you do in running. The famous marathon runner Meb Keflezeghi left a breathe right strip in his shoe just before the NYC Marathon, and then forgot to take it out!  He rubbed his foot raw during the race, despite running his best ever time, but his ability to take part in next week's Olympic trials were briefly in doubt due to this injury, from such a minor mistake.  Even small changes over a long distance can have a devastating effect.  So as I watched the swimmer girl  start racing the mile at GA's pool I was a bit disconcerted to see her swim cap start sliding within the first 4 laps.  She spent the bulk of this 66 lap race looking totally pissed off with her life, as she finally gave up the endless tugging on the cap and let it fall after the first 500 yards.  Watching her pulling desperately at the water, a huge mess of hair hanging under her goggles creating drag and turbulence, and the snarl on her face made me think about how in races you should: never do anything new (she had a country club swim cap on for the first time), do lay out and trial all of your previously tested equipment, and if necessary bring spares in case of breakage, and how, if and when something does go wrong, you simply adapt and find the resilience or as we would day in England the 'gumption' to fight on.  It was painful to watch, but she still got a PR despite her mishap, it just cost her more effort than it needed to.  I would also urge all of you to get out and race immediately, as the best thing about swimming a race on 8th January, is that she gets to (very briefly) enjoy being ranked 28th in the nation in the mile!