Early stages: Getting into the Workout Groove, Squeezing into the Running Tights
by Alix Weisfeld, Chicago Tri Club Member 

Yesterday I got my Inside Triathlon magazine in the mail.  This is always kind of a letdown, especially when I look at the “Sample Workout” section.  Now, I don’t have to tell you I’m no Mark Allen, but I do still spend a lot of time Sampling the idea of Working Out.  To be a good triathlete, it is apparently not possible to also have a job.  Most weeks, I devote about one hour five days a week to training.  If you count showering, that is like an hour fifteen.  And if you were really generous, you could add ten minutes to account for walking to and from the gym.  That makes a grand total of an hour and 25 minutes, five days a week, committed to working out.  If I compare this with Mark Allen’s chart, I see that he recommends 11 workouts a week, and one of them is less than one hour and ten minutes.  I guess that means I am above average 1/11 times, right? 

Luckily, my paltry figures don’t discourage me because I do what is called “competing against myself,” but since at this point I am only in training, I guess that means I am “training against myself” or something.  What this means is that I keep a very strict workout diary that I look over once in a while.  I decided to start when I realized I couldn’t remember if I had worked out the day before or not, and I kind of got the impression I was taking more days off than I was actually doing something.  I like keeping track of what I have done.  For example, if I turn back to September 2002, I see that I used to run 1.5 miles, twice a week.  This Saturday, I went on the longest run I have ever been on: almost eight miles.  

This would not have been possible without the right outfit.  For a while, I was running in long underwear and sweatpants, but it was kind of like bowling in Jimmy Choos: no one said you couldn’t, exactly, but there’s a better way.  I trekked over the Fleet Feet one day and put myself at the mercy of the nice salesguy and his special, aerated polo. (I’ve been there three times, and every time an employee has mentioned the exceptional fabric the Fleet Feet staff wear.  Some of us may be stocking up on duct tape and plastic sheeting, but what we should be doing is waiting in the alley behind Fleet Feet for some hapless employee to walk out and then stealing the shirt off his back.)  As I said, they know fabric at Fleet Feet, so I got good help buying a shirt that is more intelligent than I am.  My shirt (purple) is made out of something called Dryline, which the Brooks website tells me uses “push-pull” technology.  The inner polyester layer pushes water from my body, then uses the outer nylon layer to pull moisture to the surface, and occasionally restarts my computer in DOS mode, just because it can. 

I also got some of those “runner’s tights.”  Unlike my regular tights, I don’t really mind when they kind of bag at the crotch because there is not much danger of them falling down, they are so tight.  These tights do a good job of keeping me warm, even when I go running in the snow.  They are made out of dri-release, a material that specializes in wicking.  This is a new word for me: wicking.  If I were a little braver, I might apply use it to describe my shirt (isn’t that what all that pushing and pulling business is?), but I am not quite wick-savvy enough yet to do it with confidence.  What I do know is I can wear them for several weeks at a time without them smelling too bad, which means they must be doing a pretty good job getting the moisture out.  My tights are not, however, particularly flattering, but I suppose they were designed for moving and not for standing in my apartment lobby looking in the full-length mirror, so I try to keep the time I spend marveling at my own particular shape to a minimum. 

Writing about all these “Dri” products makes me think there has to be some environmental way to deal with the disproportionately large amount of moisture we triathletes wick away.  Maybe I will start attaching a straw to strategic places on my fancy clothes.  You know, recycle a little.