Daily Archives: May 1, 2016

One more post about diet, exercise, weight…

A few weeks ago, I wrote about leaving Weight Watchers in search of a program more appropriate for my goals. These days, at age 60, I’ve decided to take athletics and fitness seriously. I want to continue to improve in running; I am trying out the sport of triathlon (because I’m cross-training with cycling and swimming anyway, as a way to keep fit and balance my muscles without getting injured) (and because I’m hoping it will be fun). Yes, I’m sixty, so I’m late to this. (I regret having given up my competitive running back in my twenties, but I couldn’t run and have the jobs I had then–so the running went. Intriguingly, I’ve recently been reading a history of the early days of women’s running, and at the time I thought I was slow, but really, I wasn’t that slow, so I’m hoping I can become not that slow again. Back then, I was running with a pretty fast crowd. Some of the women I ran with went on to hold records.)

Weight Watchers is not a good place for an athlete. That’s my opinion. Feel free to ignore.

I like to read blogs, and my blog reading lead me to SwimBikeMom’s blog. SBM is a triathlete who started out at 265 pounds and is now way more fit and way less heavy than that. And a lot faster than she used to be. She’s way younger than I am, and probably cuter. None of that matters, since she is also obsessive about becoming more fit. She’s teamed with a nutritionist to create a whole-person-nutrition approach for triathletes, for any endurance athlete, including cyclists, runners, long-distance swimmers. It’s my opinion that we dog agility handlers also benefit from endurance training. Agility is a long day of walking interspersed with sprints.

The program is called SwimBikeFuel (because we need fuel for our endurance endeavors). It’s a one-month series of daily lessons and a very active Facebook group where the nutritionist answers questions early and often. It’s very expensive, probably overpriced… but.

Why but? Well, because I haven’t felt this good in months, I’m running and cycling and swimming strong, I’ve lost three pounds in the last month, and I’m eating more food, too. There are subtleties here, and the program deals with the subtleties. It’s not (really not) one-size-fits-all.

If you’re interested, you can check it out at this link. If you decide to sign up, use my name (Diana) and tell them I sent you, please.

Team work and a five-year-old poodle

Friday and Saturday I took Rush and Dancer up to Argus Ranch (Auburn, WA) for the Puget Sound Poodle Club’s annual agility trial. This is always a serious poodle-fest, with many poodle people making an effort to show up. It’s not often I get to compete against other poodles in the 24″ class, and there were three others! Rush made me proud both days. While we failed to Q on Friday, it was near-misses in our runs: my stupid mistakes and a rickety table that Rush jumped off of when he hit it too hard. (It happens.) But he was running well, and I was running well, and it was just this close to a Q in all our runs.

Saturday was a different game entirely. I felt fast, I was on time with my cues, Rush was listening really well; for the first time, we were 100% in sync (by my views). I’m pretty sure he didn’t bark at me once during our runs. We Qd in Time to Beat, Jumpers, and Standard (that would be double-Q number 2). In Jumpers, the two dogs that beat us were border collies, one of whom has won AKC nationals, and the other of whom has been on the European Open team. Yeeha!

It’s a routine line among poodle people, that standard poodles “don’t get their brains until they’re five.” Rush has always been such a determined dog that I honestly figured that the brains he had at two or three or four were the brains he’d keep, but in recent months he has really steadied down and started to think. He’s told a few poodle jokes in the last months, but yesterday? Yesterday, he was absolutely the strongest member of the team that he could be.