What a jackass

So IM Cozumel is supposed to be a non-wetsuit swim (I think), so I just started pricing speed suits to figure out if it was within my price range. Tra, la, la, I'm looking through all the different brands when suddenly I see... hey! Isn't that my wetsuit?

When I bought my Orca RS2 sleeveless "wetsuit" in the spring of '08, I bought it because most of my open water swims are in warm lakes and I didn't want to overheat. So I bought the thinnest material there was (it was also a couple hundred bucks cheaper). Imagine my surprise when I see this on the Orca website:
"The RS1 SWIMSKN combines Orca’s most advanced triathlon and wetsuit technology and thinking to provide you with the advantage in non-wetsuit swims. The RS1 SWIMSKN is constructed from a revolutionary new BioLite fabric, which has been scientifically treated with Orca’s exclusive anti-friction coating and is USAT and FINA approved."

Okay, so maybe I can at least save a couple hundred bucks on a swim skin. I started pumping my connections, and it only took a few minutes for PJ to hook me up with this list of USAT non-wetsuit-approved speed suits. There are 3 RS2 models on there, but none of them look like mine.

DAMMIT!

So I've got a wetsuit that's not quite a wetsuit, and not quite a skin suit. Talk about buyer's remorse (two seasons after the fact!).

Rants: Yoga and Your Useless Fat Ass Is Your Own Damned Fault!

I think that perhaps I may be in a bad mood. Either that or I'm just having a bad day. Either way, I'm annoyed at the world. I'll start with the second one first.

On Saturday I did a weights session followed by a long-ish, fast-ish run, and as a result my hamstrings (thank you straight-leg deadlifts), lats and rhomboids (thanks pullups), and pecs (thanks pushups) have been fucked up all week. Not injured, just tight and sore. I am not flexible to begin with, especially not in my neck and shoulders. I have that rounded-forward shoulder, winged scapulae thing. Kyphosis? Typhoid? Whatever it's called. I try to care, but I really, really, really don't. Nothing you can say can change my mind about that, so quit interrupting. I'm trying to tell a story.

So I go to yoga this morning to try to address the aforementioned problems in my back, chest, and legs. I do not enjoy yoga, I go because it is good for me. I also do not like the teacher. She is one of those people who fancies herself a serious triathlete, but skips 90% of her workouts. And yet she still makes excuses, like we care, or that we haven't noticed when she never shows up to swimming. When she comes to swimming, she will sit out 50 yards out of every 100 to catch her breath, but she refuses to move down to the slow lane. She loves to talk about the marathon she ran (I think it was Chicago in something like 1855), but I have heard her speak of ONE actual run that she's gone on in the year I've been going to her class. After that ONE run, she complained of being sore for a week.

But she thinks she knows everything there is to know about anything. After I ran the Boston Marathon she asked me what my time was. I told her it was just under 4:15. "What was your time?" asked one of the swimmers in the class, Susan. We like Susan, she just hadn't heard me. The World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga teacher answered for me, "4:50, anything under 5 hours is good." I didn't run a 4:50!!!!! But for some reason I didn't correct her. It seemed like it would be rude, since she does know everything after all. But it annoyed me.

I must have told her in February or March that I was training for an ironman. "You mean a half ironman?" she asked. Noooo, why would I say 'ironman' when I meant half ironman. Either you think I'm stupid or you think I'm a liar. I don't appreciate either one. Then, some time in the spring she asked me again if I was training for anything. "My big race is my ironman in August," I said. "Is it a half ironman?" she asked. Noooooo, it's STILL a full ironman. Before I left for California at the end of July she asked me what I was going for. "My ironman," I said. "Oh, is it a half ironman?" Noooooo, still a full fucking ironman! Once I can understand, maybe she just didn't hear me. But three times?!

And she says the names of stuff wrong. Granted, she's French, and I of all people shouldn't be criticizing anyone of knot knowing obscure plurals and rare eccentricities of one's second language, but she makes these mistakes in every class, and in every class they annoy me, second language or not. She calls vertebrae (plural of vertebra) "vertebras." She calls scapulae (plural of scapula) "scapulas." She calls your pelvis (noun) your "pelvic." She uses "foot" for both singular and plural, same with "shoulder" and "buttocks." And she calls your plantar fascia your "plantar fasciitis," as in "We are going to stretch your plantar fasciitis." If you don't know, plantar fasciitis is inflamation of the plantar fasciia. You cannot stretch inflamation.

So today, as I mentioned, I was stiff and sore. I'm not usually a very flexible person, but today I was in especially rough shape. That's why I go to yoga! We're warming up, doing our breathing thing (I have to cheat, I don't know how other people can breathe in for 15 straight seconds without suffocating), when she comes up behind me and tries to roll my shoulders back. I have the forward-rolling shoulder problem, I know. I don't care. I usually let her roll them back and I hold them as best I can. But today the woman was trying to break some bones. I was trying to be zen about it and ignore her, letting her reshape me without affecting my chi. You know, flowing with the river... But then she whispers, "You want to roll them back a little farther." At this point it feels like the points of my scapulae are about to puncture my lungs, and I physically CANNOT move my shoulders back any farther. "That's as far back as they'll go!" I whisper, and she goes back to the front of the room.

Then she comes back to correct me on pretty much every pose for the rest of the day. She corrects me more than the new people I have to either side of me: the woman who is twisting in complete WRONG direction, and the man who is doing the ocean breath so loud that I swear they can hear him all the way up on the Death Star. I know I'm not the best yogi out there, but I'm sure my form is better than some of the 50-year-old runner guys in the class. "Claire, keep that leg straight. Claire, flex your foot. Claire, you want to rotate your hip out more..." But when she asked about my jacket, I knew she was picking on me. See, it was 6º when I pulled in to the Y parking lot this morning. So I was wearing this warm, old, ratty fleece. I'm one of those people who's always cold, and I was still wearing my warm, ratty fleece halfway through class, because it's not like we were running or anything. I was cold. She came over and said, "Aren't you too warm in that fleece?"

"Not yet," I said. What the fuck?! Like I wouldn't be able to tell if I were too warm. Just because she's menopausal and suffering from hot flashes doesn't mean that we all are. This is yoga class, not tea in her living room. Let me zone out and feel my body dammit! Quit distracting me.

But I wasn't pissed off yet. This is just the typical yoga annoyances that I put up with every week. I'm zen, I can deal with it. This is why I do yoga, to stretch and calm down. Then, after class I sprayed down my mat, put my stuff away, and was putting my shoes back on outside the yoga studio. "Claire," said the World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga Instructor, leaning out the door. "Have you been stretching after your biking and running?"

"No," I said, because it was the answer she was waiting for. In fact I do stretch... a bit. Probably every other run I'll be feeling tight and stretch for less than 5 minutes. You know, touch my toes, stretch out my calves on a stair, stand with my foot on my butt... I'm not one of the people who starts wiping down their bike in spin classes before the stretching is over. But I'm usually too cold/tired/sweaty/hungry to stay touching my toes for 20 minutes after every workout. That's why I go to yoga! And anyway, aren't modern exercise trends moving away from static stretching?

"Well you really should be stretching after you work out," the World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga Instructor told me, like I'd asked her opinion. "That's why you're so tight. Just for a few minutes before, and then more afterwards."

She CAME OUT OF THE CLASSROOM to tell me this. This is why I go to yoga!!!!! And yes, I was tight today, but it was from fucking myself up lifting too much weight. That's. why. I. come. to. her. class. at 5:30. in. the. morning. EVERY. WEEK! I come to yoga to STRETCH, you blockhead!

Rant: Spinning

I love spin classes. Not as much as riding my bike outside, but it's good for the wintertime. Having someone yelling at me to go harder is a hell of a lot better than trying to suffer through long sets in front of some DVD in my living room. And for some reason, I'm far more likely to go to the gym and do my workout than just sit on the trainer at home. I have done spin classes from California to Barcelona. Once I did 5 consecutive hours of spin classes. Like I said, spinning is great... BUT some things really bug me about spinning.

1. What in the hell is first position? Third position is something like having your hands on the brake hoods. I get it. Second position is like having your hands on the crossbar of your handlebars. Okay, I do that sometimes. But first position is like holding your handlebar stem. What the fuck is that?! You get on your bike and you ride 100 feet standing up with your hands in "first position", and when you get out of the hospital, you tell me how it worked out for you. Now tell me why my spin instructor wants us to spend all our standing time in first position. And that's not just this one instructor either, it's everywhere!

2. I spend about 5% of the time on my bike standing when I'm on the road, and even that's a bit much. Why do I spend 60% of my spin class standing up?

3. The music that you like to listen to in your car is NOT necessarily the best music for your spin class. I do not want to do a tough climbing set to Dave Matthews Band's Crash Into Me, nor do I want to climb to anything by Cold Play (who cares which song, they all sound the same anyway). I don't want to sprint to Matchbox 20. When I'm spinning, I want to listen to music that makes me want to dance, not music that makes me want to run out of Abercrombie and Fitch screaming. The cheesier, the better: Madonna, Come on Eileen, One Way or Another, It's Raining Men, Super Freak, that sort of thing... There is no excuse for Smashmouth, ever. There! I said it!

4. If someone walks in to your class wearing a cycling jersey, bike shorts, cycling shoes, and a heartrate monitor, do NOT ask them if they are new to spin and offer to help them adjust their bike. Just don't.

5. People should not be bouncing on their bikes, least of all the instructor. There's this one instructor at the Y who bounces so hard in her saddle I think that the whole seat is going to break off. She looks like a woodpecker with her head bobbing back and forth like that. Is she riding with NO resistance on her flywheel? And your elbows should be relaxed, but you should not look like a meth head doing the Chicken Dance. It makes me want to walk up to her bike and give the resistance knob a big, fat turn. Then I will tell her that I will keep turning it until she can sit still!

6. Only insecure guys with small penises put their bikes away without taking the resistance off. Only insecure guys with even smaller penises turn the tension up before getting off the bike.

7. In theory the resistance (in spin classes I've been in anyway) is on a perceived exertion scale from 1 to 10. But if we never, ever, ever, ever go past an 8, even in the most extreme circumstances; and we never, ever, ever go below a 4 , even when we're warming up. Isn't that really a scale from 4 to 8? And, really, if we're only using a 4-point range of our 10-point system, why do we go from 5 to 5.5 to 6 to 6.5? Why don't we just start at 1 and use all the numbers?

8. And while we're on the subject of resistance: let's talk about sprints. If, according to my friendly spin instructor, a 4 is that level where the pedals are doing half the work for you, then it's fine to make us pedal as fast as we can, but please don't call it a "sprint". On a real bicycle if you got in your small ring and were riding in your easiest gears and spun out at 130 rpm, you probably wouldn't get above about 12 miles per hour, and you would probably fall off your bike. So we can call it a drill, but please, let's not call it a sprint. Let's save the word "sprint" for when there's resistance on the pedals, okay?

9. People who whoop and yell in spin classes make me cringe in embarrassment, but if no one whoops or screams in your spin classes, then the class is BORING and the instructor's not making us work hard enough!