Apparently, it turns out, that peeing when you are super-dehydrated can hurt. And it can hurt a lot. I mean we’re talking burning sensations where you should not have burning sensations.

And while you’re in that kind of pain, your brain ain’t doing too well either. It’s a bad scene that will refuse to get better…

Let me rewind the clock a little bit.

This week was a down week. And like all down weeks when you’re training for an absurd event like a half-ironman, you still have long runs and long bike rides.

On Thursday I decided to do my long run instead of my long bike ride. And it turns out that weather in the bay area had gotten really really hot all of a sudden. Global warming and all that sort of thing.

A weird side effect of all of my dieting and training is that I am perpetually slightly dehydrated. Mostly because I can’t be bothered to drink enough water during the day. At Zynga we had calorie free drinks available all over the place, at Juniper being old school we don’t.

So on Thursday I decide to go for a run. And it was hot. And I forgot my water bottle. I thought, what the hell, how bad could it possible be.

It was bad. Really really really bad. Painfully bad.

Of course like the obsessed triathlete I am, instead of worrying about my pains in wrong places, I was more frustrated with my heart rate and pace. Turns out that an elevated heart rate is another side effect of dehydration. So is stupidity.

The good news is that I didn’t hurt myself even more. You can actually hurt yourself pretty bad if you’re not careful. And I am very lucky.

So after consuming an ungodly amount of water, I felt a lot better. And over the next few days, I started drinking a lot more water.

My boss gave me this really cool water bottle on my first day, so I am making extensive use of that.

New PR

This week I had a 500 yard time trial. Time trials suck. It’s 10 minutes of your life where you are going all out and your reward is this brutally objective measurement of your progress or lack thereof.

My basic challenge in swimming, running and biking is my posture. Basically a life time of being hunched over and a big belly have given me a horrifically poor posture. My shoulders are hunched, my hips are in the wrong place and my head hangs over like a vultures.

The good news is that I have been working on posture. Loosely that translates into being in pain a lot as your body gets used to a new natural pose.

Meandering notes aside, I had this aspiration of going fast and using good technique.

Well 1/2 is not too shabby.

The technique was there for the first 25 yards, but I went so fast that my heart rate made it really hard for me to focus on technique until about the 400 yard mark. Good news is that my core technique has improved enough over the last year that I was able to go faster and maintain a better technique than I had in the past.

So like I said the other day, I crushed my PR 🙂 

And I do admit that when I saw the 8 in the minute section, I started splashing in my lane like I had just won a race 🙂

As a minor note to myself, I did some math … My fastest ever 25 yards is basically the average pace for a professional ironman triathlete. I feel slower already…

Weight update

Because the internet of things still sucks, I was only able to get a few data points …

The good news is that I dropped some weight, the really exciting news is that I am now 2.5 pounds from having lost a 10kg 🙂

On a more mundane note, ever since I discovered that eating is the key to losing weight, my weight loss has accelerated.