Really? Is this how it works?

Thngs have gone steadily downhill over the last two weeks. After my panic attack in the lake, I got ill. While I was ill, the free-floating anxiety returned. Somehow, a cut has developed under a couple of toes on my right foot, making it occasionally difficult to walk.

Does this happen to people? You train and train and train and then, two weeks before the race, everything falls apart? It can't be. That wouldn't be right.

I've probably trained too long. Looking at my log, I think I peaked about a month ago. Now, my IT bands are tight as piano strings. My knee starts to give in at 4k when I'm running. And -- since I've lost some fitness having only been able to work out four times in the last two weeks -- I can't get to 400m in the pool anymore.

I'm developing a strategy to get through this. Next week is critical. Getting back up to distance for the swim is Job 1. A couple light runs and bike rides, nothing too hard. If I don't finish the swim, my performance in the other two is immaterial. Then show up rested and zoned in.

So. If you're in your mid-40s (leave me that illusion), you haven't worked out in 20 years, and you haven't been living the healthiest lifestyle, it appears that about 14 to 16 weeks of five-day-a-week workouts is probably about optimum. This is definitely salvageable. But if I knew then what I know now, I'd have done it differently.

I'm taking the week after the race off. Annual camping trip with my daughter. And just relaxing and not working. Or working out. Maybe a trail run or two. Short.

Then I'll decide whether to enter a 5k trail run in my home town for October.

A perfect day for a panic attack

The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli.

-- George Costanza, The Marine Biologist, Seinfeld

I finally jumped in a lake, as I've been told to do a hundred times. It's critical preparation for a lake swim (duh) in a triathlon. You can log miles and miles in a pool; that doesn't necessarily prepare you for open water. I'm glad I did it yesterday rather than waiting for another couple of weeks, and I wish I'd done it sooner. I was seeking the answers to several questions: Will the shock of the cold water make me seize up? Is it more difficult to swim in a wetsuit? What kind of premium on effort do the waves make? I got those answers (No, the water was 24C; No, the wetsuit hardly affected my stroke, such as it is; and considerable), and the answers to questions I hadn't sought, such as: What is pure, blind, regurgitive terror like?

I dropped my keys off at my local, since I didn't want to take anything with me I couldn't afford to lose, and walked down to Cherry Beach. Stopped at Balzac's in the distillery to pick up a coffee and a biscotti. All very civilized. Maybe a half hour altogether.

A sign at the beach put the morning water temperature at 24C and the e coli count at 10, well under the swim-at-your-own-risk limit of 100. I felt a bit pretentious in a wetsuit. But there was another guy in a suit in the water; he looked like he knew what he was doing, so I figured I'd tail him for a while. The footing, BTW, was awful, a sprained ankle waiting to happen. Funny how none of my training books mentioned this. I guess "rocks are not smooth" is a given.

As I entered the water, a lifeguard -- lovely young thing, very blonde and owns her own kayak -- started paddling along. "You read my mind," I joked. She didn't laugh. She'd probably seen what was about to happen dozens of times.

I started out behind the other swimmer, parallel to the beach, in what I thought was about four and a half feet of water. I hadn't really warmed up, which I realized later was a mistake. Even in the pool, if I try to swim 100 metres as soon as I jump in the water, I fade quickly. I need a couple lengths to get used to the water, a break of about a minute or so, then I can pound out 400 or 500 or even 600 metres.

The chop was moderate -- it was a windy day -- but not insurmountable. But after a couple minutes, I got that fade. Aside from the effort, being in open water had cranked up my heart rate some, and I was breathing a little funny, like when a pretty girl talks to me. So I turned and headed back for shore.

As I turned, I reached down with my foot to check for bottom. Nothing.

This worried me some. I swam a few more strokes. Checked again. Nothing.

This panicked me. My coffee started coming back on me. I thrashed. The girl on the kayak was about 20 yards away. A croak came out of me that, at a closer range, might have been recognized as a reflexive and unwilling cry for help. The kayak had swung around. My conscious and willing capitulation: I raised an arm to the lifeguard.

And discovered I was in three feet of water.

How scared had I been? I wasn't even remotely embarrassed. I wasn't even embarrassed when I told the story later.

I wasn't pleased with my initial reaction to open water, but I did make a recovery. I went through this in the pool, though with less likelihood of drowning. What did I do at the pool? When I couldn't swim a full length, I started in the deep end, so by the time I'd run out of steam, I'd be in the shallow end. So, having made a mental note to update the e coli reading as a result of my panic attack, I walked as far out into the water as I could, then turned around and swam back to shore.It was about 25 strokes, so close to the length of a pool. I did 200 metres that way.

And it was cool. There was a flock of geese and a flock of ducks coasting through, so I had to make an effort to stay out of their way. (Get between a Canada gosling and her mother and tell me how that goes for ya.) In five feet of water, the waves were a foot, maybe a foot and a half crest to trough, and I let them bob me up and down. I watched somebody kite-surfing, tearing along at motorboat speeds. A couple stand-up paddleboarders went by. It's something I want to try this summer. Some friends and I are going to arrange a lesson. All in all, I just kinda felt like a beach bum. I liked it.

It was quite worrisome for me from a triathlon perspective, though. Swimming in 10 or 20 feet of water should technically be no different than swimming in four feet of water. This I know. How do I shut down that instinctive panic reaction and just swim? This I don't.

The obvious answer is to get to the beach as often as I can manage before the race in four weeks' time. It took me three months to go from 25 metres at a time to 400 metres at a time in the pool. I've realistically got only three weeks, and perhaps three swims in open water, till the race. I'm revising my training calendar, giving up on the iPod app. One, maybe two, days of running a week. Occasional recreational bike ride. The rest is swimming, swimming, swimming. I have to get more confident in the water.

Officially a tri geek -- my daughter says so

Might recall I was thrilled that my 12-year-old's Father's Day gift to me was a running hat and a water bottle that straps to your hand. This weekend, she demonstrated she is unquestionably my biggest supporter. She made me a T-shirt that shows a figure -- readily identifiable as me by the glasses and the bald head -- in the three phases of the race, swimming, riding and running. Above, it reads: "My Dad is a Tri Geek." She made this from a transfer, so had to draw and write the text backwards. It was a Herculean effort just to get the three disciplines in the right order. The shirt is hanging in a place of honour right now till I can get it framed.

(I must say, the sun in the background of each of the vignettes is a little intimidating. A la Indio, a Big Hard Sun. But that's just me being spleeny, I'm sure.)

If my daughter's declaration doesn't make me a tri geek, try this on for size: I'm going to review socks.

A few weeks back, Running Room in Commerce Court had a three-pairs-for-$15 sock sale. They were slightly irregular, and you could mix and match. So I chose three different pairs. They are before me right now. (Seriously, they are.) These are not dollar-a-pair cotton jobbies. I wash them in special athletic wear detergent and I hang them to dry, lest the dryer spin some of the magic out of them.

Pair 1 is a thin poly-blend quarter sock. Pair 2 is an Ironman branded sock that comes only to the top of my running shoe. Pair 3, the Wigwam Thunder Pro, is also a shoe-height pair, but much thicker. (I'm not playing favourites by linking to the Wigwam sock; there are pages and pages and pages of socks on Running Room's Web site. I lucked out finding the Thunder Pro.)

(If you're still reading this after two paragraphs about socks, bless you. I hope this somehow convinces you to end the punishment you put your feet through by buying cotton socks. Though I do wear cotton socks on an everyday basis when I'm not exercising. With apologies to The Tragically Hip, It Can't Be Nashville Every Night.)

I'd thought Pair 2 was going to be the sock to beat. It appeared to have it all going for it: Low profile, thin fabric, and, um, well, that's about all you ask for in a sock, isn't it? But I found it was a bit futzy to put on, not a great trait for a triathlon.

Pair 1 pulled on more easily. That was really the only difference. I really didn't notice either pair of socks while I was running. I don't mean I was ambivalent. I mean I really didn't feel the socks. I can't call them comfortable; it was like they weren't there.

Likewise with Pair 3, my winner Low profile, like Pair 2 -- just a half-inch hike on the back to keep the shoe from rubbing against the Achilles. Virtually unnoticeable when riding and running. But, they went on absolutely without a fuss. At a guess, all straightened out, four or five seconds faster than the others. And equally unnoticeable.

I've just reviewed socks. Can't imagine there's anything more to say. I've slipped into the abyss of tri geekdom.

The goat rodeo is now a zoo

Summer programs for schoolkids have started at the Scarborough Y. When I dropped on at noon, half the pool was populated by screaming, splashing tweens. Of the three "swimming" lanes, one was occupied by teens horsing around; one by seniors chatting and doing exercises in place. This left a single lane for swimming lengths, and about eight of us, all of different speeds and strokes, were trying to share it.

At 12:30, they whistled end of play, took the tweens out, and rearranged the swimming lanes. It still took a while to get back to normal. A teenager nearly landed on me doing a cannonball at one point, a crime that would have got me ejected from the William E. Legros Centre in Ajax in my day.

A lifeguard told me later that the zoo's in town from 10:30 to 12:30, and from 1:30 to 3:30, every day over the summer. This leaves me three options: either a precisely timed lunch hour arrival at exactly 12:30 (I could wear my trunks under my work clothes, and at the appointed hour, just tear my pants off and run shrieking across the street, which I might get away with on casual Fridays, but they're run days, anyway); arriving at 7:30 and swimming before work, which would take some adjusting of my diurnal clock; or going after work, which would mean I'd get home 7:30 or 8 p.m. For the time being, I'm going to try to be religious about a 12:30 lunch on swim days and see how that works out.

In the name of whatever's holy this week, I hope they don't do the same thing with the running track. They have regular sessions up there with about a dozen developmentally challenged adults, and when you combine four or five other runners up there, that's pretty much capacity. With the unruly mob of future felons -- uh, sorry, leaders of our Just Society -- running would truly be impossible.

(Don't get me wrong, I don't hate kids. I just wish they all had my daughter's temperament, compassion and consideration.)

How I spent my summer vacation Pt. 1

I did not jump in the lake yesterday. More logistics than fear. Two weekends from now, I'll have to do it twice, is all. See, you need someplace for your other stuff when you go for a lake swim. At minimum, you're carrying your house keys with you. And it wouldn't do for that stuff to disappear. I know. I've lost house keys before, and the buddy I stay with when I do something stupid like that (Hi, Dale) has moved to Vancouver. They do have lockers on Toronto Island, so I suppose I could have done it there.

Whatever. I wasn't all together at 11 this morning, so the easiest thing to do was a brick workout -- an hour-plus bike ride followed by a 10-minute run. I'm happy with how it went. The calf sleeves definitely make a difference, and it was the first time I'd run with the knee strap on. Getting a better idea, too, of what I need and don't need for each section of the race. (If it's particularly hot, I need the right cycling glove during the run because it has a sweat pad, for example. I have a water bottle in the left hand. Amazing the little things that occur to you.)

I got a couple days in on my week off where I got to work on more than one discipline -- cycling and swimming, cycling and running -- and also managed to squeeze some weight work in. I didn't manage to spring the surprises on my body I wanted to. One was the lake swim; my body already knows that's coming, so I can talk about that. The other is something a friend suggested to me that I'd planned on earlier in the week, but the knee issue kept me from trying. Week after next is a recovery week, so if I'm going to do it, it'll be in three or four weeks' time. It may have to wait till after the race.

I'd like to have accomplished more this week, but it's hard to know how much work you can put in until you've put it in. One thing I would like to have done is a mock triathlon: Swim, bike and run as far as necessary in one day. I got two-thirds of the way there today, and was considering going up to the Y for a swim, when I saw on TV that Yonge and Grosvenor was Ground Zero for the Pride Parade. Even if I could have got to the Y, that's just too much humanity to deal with.

I did gain a new appreciation for how wonderful it is to live by the lake. I rode out on the Leslie Spit to the end and got a view of the skyline with the islands in between. I wandered along Harbourfront. Tonight, after visiting my bike locker -- I've become attached to my bike in an unseemly way since I had the handlebar work done -- I walked down to Queens Quay to have a look at the water. I think that's how I'll close my evenings for the summer, rather than watching TV (I haven't turned mine on in more than a week anyway; any TV I watched, I watched at the pub, mostly World Cup fixtures) -- visit my bike locker, then go down to the water.

Back to work tomorrow, which means back to peanut butter and English muffins in the morning. I haven't had them in nine days. Lost a pound.

Having a 'Who's idea was this, anyway?' moment

Several elements have cross-bred to conceive a perfect storm of doubt in my ability to resist a brutally overused metaphor. I'm sorry, in my ability to complete this race.

First was the knee pain that shut me down on Wednesday. That meant an extra day off training aside from my rest day today. Could I have swapped them as rest days? Yes, but I would have paid for it in a few days. You have to keep your one rest day a week sacrosanct; I take a break Saturday or Sunday, even if I've had to miss a day during the week. This was a lesson learned the hard way, as in the I-can't-get-out-of-bed-after-eight-consecutive-days-of-training hard way.

Then was the fact that I couldn't repeat my 400m swim. I managed 300m, in about 9:15, which would put me at about 12:25 in the water for the race. Still six weeks off, so I can still build confidence on that.

But tomorrow, I'm scheduled to jump in the lake, and I'm not convinced that's not Insanity Lite. I want to get in at least two lake swimming sessions before the race so I don't die of shock when I jump into 65-70F water on race day. But this is Lake Friggin' Ontario. It ain't warm, even if the air temperature's 30C in July. Superior, it's said, never gives up her dead, but Ontario's pretty forsaken cold, too.

Which is why, in a weak moment, I let a voice in my head say: "What the expletive deleted were you thinking? You can't do this."

Well, voice in my head, with apologies to Billy Joel, you may be right. This was a dumb idea. I should pack up the tents and go home, Goodnight Irene, etc., right?

Fuck you, voice in my head. Did the Donner Party give up? No. Did the Uraguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes give up? No. Have I any idea why I'm choosing examples of superhuman endurance that involve eating your companions? No. Probably shouldn't invite me over for dinner for a few days.

Point being ... this is about training my will as much as my body. Am I scared of swimming 400m in a lake? Yes. Is it possible that my knee is not up to the full training plan I'm on? Yes. But I can find a way to keep training without doing more hurt to my knee and still be in shape to run 2.5k. And in two or three more weeks, I'll have convinced (or deluded -- tamayto, tomato) myself that I can handle the swim, and I can overcome the panic by remembering: It's a little under 13 minutes. Someone's written a book about survival and endurance on the principle that you must focus on getting through the next five seconds. What's five seconds? Whatever the circumstance, you can get through five seconds. Thirteen minutes is just five seconds, 156 times.

By the end of next summer, I want to be able to do an Olympic distance triathlon, which is about four to five times as long in every discipline. Wouldn't do to cough up on a super-sprint, would it?

I would also like to one day run the Beer Mile in Boulder, Colo. In the dead of winter, competitors run four circuits of a 400-m track, after chugging a beer at the beginning of each lap. That's endurance. Nobody scared of a little cold water can pull that off.