From A-Condition to Deconditioned

Going into the Abominable Snow Race, I was at a zenith for personal fitness. So lean. So fast (sort of). So prepared. A lot has happened since then. Let me lay down a timeline.

2/2: Race
2/3: Boot camp
2/4: Onset of DeathSoreness. I could, literally, barely move by 5 PM. Had to get a substitute trainer for my group class because I would not have had the muscle power to drive my car. It took all my focus to extend my elbow far enough to pump soap out of the dispenser. My triceps were literally at one percent function, which is about 14% lower than they've ever been before.
2/6: End of DeathSoreness, onset of DeathSickness. Horrible deep chest cough lasting all day and night. Barely sleeping. No medicine is helping.
2/11: Went to Urgent Care for DeathSickness. Nurse practitioner called me "a mess" and said I had pansinusitis, possible bronchitis, and accompanying viral infections in my chest and head. I said it was probably because I did over 5 hours of extremely intense exercise in one weekend and she said "YUH THINK?!" Went home with 10 days of antibiotics.
2/13: Took Son to doctor for possible DeathSickness, turns out he just has a cold. We are now up to $300 in medical bills for the DeathSickness, and that's WITH insurance, and not counting DayQuil expenditures which are approaching the GDP of several poorer countries.
2/14-15: Husband starts showing signs of DeathSickness, blames me and Son.
2/20: I'm finally feeling much better! Hardly coughing at all! Woop!
2/21: Onset of DeathMucus. Spoke too soon. Husband is still coughing and snoring so loudly that I'm still barely sleeping.

Also during these weeks, we have gotten about half a dozen major snowstorms in our area. Yay, shoveling.

Needless to say, exercise has not been a high priority. With my chest cough, I couldn't even work out really at all for the first week and a half, and then after that I've totally lacked energy and/or the ability to breathe. As a result, I am feeling quite deconditioned and unmotivated. When this happens to you (and it will, if it hasn't already), remind yourself of a few things.

1) Your body needs time, calories, and fluids to recover. Put all your energy into recovery, because if you try to "stay in shape" during this, you will feel even worse. Trust me, Husband has continued his morning workouts and it's not exactly helping his DeathSickness situation.
2) A person doesn't truly start deconditioning until they've taken 3 weeks off from exercise. I know it can feel like you are "out of shape" if you don't work out for one week, but that's not actual deconditioning.
3) It takes half the length of the absence to get back to peak form after you've deconditioned. So if you take 4 weeks off due to insane illness, it will take 2 weeks of training to get back to where you were. This isn't a bad deal.

So if you are dealing with a DeathSickness and have about as much energy as a cheapo AAA battery, use that energy to just get through the damn day. Don't go all Titan Games on your workouts. In the immortal words of Alyssa Edwards, "bitch, sit your ass down and shut the hell up, bitch!"

Boot Camp With Coach Pain Recap

The day after the Abominable Snow Race, we were offered a chance to take a 2-hour boot camp with Coach Pain, followed by brunch. To misquote Jerry Maguire, "you had me at 'brunch.'" So despite having sore ankles, I set out on a slippery Super Bowl Sunday morning back to the ski resort to see what Coach had cooked up for us (brunch pun).

After a quick inspirational speech (and please assume that there were several inspirational speeches throughout this event, because we certainly needed them!), we got going with what would end up being about 45 minutes of isometrics and calisthenics. First Coach told us to sit. No, not actually sit, don't be ridiculous. SQUAT. No, not that low, that doesn't use the quads. Knees at 90 degrees. Back straight. Hands up. Now stay like that indefinitely. I do a lot of hot yoga, folks, I know the drill, but I didn't see a single person there who didn't have to adjust and stretch during what ended up being over 5 minutes of a held deep squat. And we were just getting started! After that Coach was kind enough to give our legs a break by having us hold the bottom of a pushup. Indefinitely. Here I was trying to switch between chattaranga arms and perpendicular arms and everything in between, but I kept falling out of it. We were maybe 15 minutes into this boot camp and I'd already achieved triceps failure. In other words, I was having a freakin' awesome time.

The guy in the yeti costume is a sadistic voyeur.

Along with a few other isometric holds that my brain has blocked out for my own protection, Coach Pain showed us 8-count bodybuilders, which goes: 1) squat 2) high plank 3) pushup 4) high plank 5) lateral leg jack 6) high plank 7) squat 8) stand. He would call out different numbers and we'd have to get to the position that correlated. This was some complicated choreography but I learned it quickly. For a while he kept calling out "1! 5! 1! 5!" over and over, which was right around the time I thanked Jesus that there were mimosas coming soon. We recovered from that with over 150 jumping jacks.

It was around this time that our Calisthenics Crusade ended and we shifted to the next phase of the bootcamp, which I will dub FUNctional Fitness Fantasia. We ran over to the tubing hill from yesterday's race and did crab crawls up and a weird slide down. Then we army-crawled out of the area and went through the Arctic Web obstacle, which I managed to get about 90% through during the race. I managed to get about 90% through on this occasion as well, despite my triceps already packing their bags in a huff and leaving the premises. Then we went to the big black diamond ski hill and the real fun(ctional fitness fantasia) began.

Imagine seeing a bunch of grown adults doing this on purpose.

I will say this about Coach Pain: he does not need any fancy equipment. He needs our limbs and our effort and he works with what we've got. In this case, we had a steep-ass hill with a bunch of fuckin' snow and ice on it, and Coach thought "I can work with this." We must have climbed up and down that hill in a million different ways. We frog-hopped. We bear-crawled. We snake-crawled with our hands behind our backs. Crawled on hands and knees. Walked up with linked arms. Duck-walked up. Slid down on hands and feet going backwards. We were all so intimate with that hill by the end that we were seriously discussing marriage. At one point Coach had us pair up and piggyback a partner up the hill. My partner was a guy named Todd and I was quite concerned that my Amazon arse would be too much for him, but he handled it like a boss. Then we had to switch and I had to drag Todd up the hill. At this point I just felt sorry for everyone involved in this, but OCR people are total weirdos so we were secretly into it.

At another point we had to all lock arms and do flutter kicks for what must have been about 10 minutes. To be honest, having my butt on that icy hill was the toughest part. I felt like I was getting frostbite and I needed to keep readjusting and getting off my keister for a second or two. I finally found a decent position and was able to help out my neighbors a bit by grabbing their tights and holding their legs up a bit. Again, thanks, Hot Yoga, for preparing me for this insanity!

"Can't we do something easier? Like give birth without medication?"

All difficult things must come to an end, so after about 2.5 hours of ass-whupping the likes of which I'd never experienced, it was time to get our medals (in a lovely little ceremony!), have a group picture, and get brunch. That hot coffee never tasted so good. If you ever have the chance to take a boot camp with Coach Pain, jump on it. We moved in very unique ways and I learned a lot that I can use with my clients and with my own training. Plus I probably added a half inch to my arms in just one boot camp.

"Yes, officer, this is where the DOMS epidemic originated."

Race Recap: Abominable Snow Race

Abominable Snow Race 2/2/19 Merrimac, WI

Weather: 30s, foggy, calm winds
Terrain: ski mountain and forest

Distance: 7.5 miles

Course map

The first race of the year took place at Devil's Head Ski Resort near Wisconsin Dells, which is one of my family's favorite vacation spots. So I convinced my mom to come babysit my son and signed my husband up to do the Adventure (long) course with me. He's never done an OCR before but he is a great runner and a triathlete, so I figured he'd love it. Famous last words? We went to packet pickup the afternoon before, which suffered from a severe lack of signage, but once we figured out where in the lodge the pickup was and what line to stand in, it was just a (long) wait for our stuff.

The next morning we arrived about 30 minutes before my 8:45 AM wave and stayed warm by a heater in the main tent (the heaters were a nice touch, because although it wasn't still the 2019 Polar Vortex of 50 below zero from earlier in the week, it was hovering around freezing). I started on time and the first thing we did was go straight up the black-diamond ski hill. It was steep as hell. I am proud to say I managed to pass a lot of folks on that hike and got to the top in a speedy 4 1/2 minutes. My husband later reported that he was able to jog up the entire thing. :-/ At the top was a ladder wall, followed by a trail through the woods that gave us a sense of what we were in for. There was a lot of snow and it was extremely tough to navigate. You couldn't tell on any given step whether you were going to sink into powder or land hard on compacted ice, or (most likely) some horrifying combination of both wherein you land with a totally bent-sideways ankle. It reminded me very much of the Spartan Super Chicago, only with snow instead of mud. My husband started in a wave 15 minutes after me and when he went blowing past me on a descent, I only had 31 minutes on my watch. WOW. He'd be in for a long wait at the finish line.

This ladder will keep me company!

Just a programming note here: I'm not exactly sure of the order of the obstacles and I hope I don't skip any. Due to the extreme weather in the prior week, the course was changed from what was on the map. I do remember there were a lot of walls - an inverted ladder, 5-foot hurdles, O-U-T, a couple 4-foot walls with a crawl in between, and an 8-foot wall that I got up by myself easily (it was very walkable, thank god). At the top of the mountain was The Apex, which is ASR's version of Olympus and just as impossible for me. I could, thanks to my gloves (seriously, I wore cheapo stretchy gloves with Dollar Tree work gloves on top, and it was FLAWLESS), do it, but not for the entire traverse. A kind man offered to throw an elbow into my ass so I could get across it for fun. This turned out to be an obstacle that my husband couldn't do either, so I felt okay about that.

A few heavy carries finally came along later in the course. An ice bucket carry (women carry one, men two, and they're about 45 lb each) was blessedly short but still tough with the deep snow. I had Chicago Beast flashbacks to the deep sand. Another heavy carry was a wreckbag carry that was much longer, with 40 lb or 25 lb bags. I grabbed the 40 lb bag because I ain't no sissy. There were supposed to be more heavy carries (a sled pull and a tire drag) but the weather precluded them, I think. Very difficult sections of trail came in the last few miles, where you had to slide down on your butt and climb up with a net. We saw a gorgeous frozen waterfall, though, so it was very scenic when you were able to look up from the terrifying snowscape at your feet.

In the last couple miles came a Z-wall which was very difficult due to having totally blind corners. I had to get off this one and take the L. Turns out my husband "cheated" this one by holding onto the top, so we were 2/2 with matching obstacle failures at this point! After more forest, we did a longish crawl under paracord and came out by the finishing gauntlet. First thing was a slip wall (very slippery indeed, but I got up easily with my "bend your damn knees" strategy) with a cargo net traverse at the top which was creepy but fun. After that I gave my (done) husband my Camelbak and tackled the new Arctic Web, which was a cargo net that you climb underneath up a tilt, across a straight section, and down a tilt. It was tough. Very tough. Challenging on the grip and you needed to know how/where to place your feet. It also required a bit of a swing to get from the first tilt to the straight section. I was the only one on the net so it was quite loose and sank a lot, too (the men near me fell off almost immediately). I managed to get about 90% through this obstacle before my hands stopped working and my calves started cramping. Asked my husband after if he'd gotten through it and he laughed "NO, I fell off way before that." Success! And we were 3/3 with matching failures for the day!

The final obstacle was a hike uphill with a tube, then sliding down the hill. I hate tubing and am a big chicken so I didn't like that part, but I liked crossing the finish line in about 2:45! Turns out I finished in the top half of women, which was my secret goal. I took TWO bottles of water at the end, since I'd resorted to eating snow for the last hour after I ran out of my own water. Although I was signed up to go back out and do the short course, I had to get back to my long-suffering mother who had to leave for home by 2 PM and I didn't think I'd have time. Decided to save my strength for Coach Pain's bootcamp on Sunday (recap of that to follow!).

Pictured: the most stressful part of my day

Pros:

-Challenging terrain. Very challenging. The kind of terrain that'll get your ankles in great shape in a big hurry.
-Perks. Medal(s), shirt, beanie hat, chip-timed, free great pictures.
-Size. Small enough that there's no line for obstacles, but big enough to feel like you're part of something.

Cons:

-No water. This was really, really bad. I wish there'd at least been a pre-race email telling people to bring their own. I saw a lot of folks struggling out there. Medical personnel on course should ALWAYS have water!
-Packet pickup. It seemed a bit disorganized and the line was long and slow-moving.
-Put distances on the signs at the split. I had to remember whether I was running Adventure or Expedition, and it could have had the mileage on the signs (or even Long/Short). I heard about a kid who missed the cutoff and accidentally did the long course, eek.

Race Grade: B+. The race experience itself is very good, but I can't score it higher because of the total lack of water. I will definitely do this race again, but I'll bring EXTRA water next time.