Back Spasm

This is the third in a series of three cat posts in the blog. I don't particularity like or dislike cats, but my roommate/part-time housekeeper always seems to find a non-rent paying cat to move in and freeload and that bothers me. This money-suck feline appendage wasn't in the marriage contract that I remember and honestly, I feel a little bit ripped off. I never agreed to cats. Anyway, this post is sort of related to cats.

I guess I was a little over-excited when I first heard of Schrödinger's cat in my psych 101 class all those years ago. I was eighteen or nineteen years old and for weeks after I heard about it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. If you don' know the what-for of this Schrödinger guy and his cat, it goes like this; Build a box and in the box put a geiger counter. Then hook up to a hammer on a hinge that can swing and will whack a sealed vial of deadly poison if the geiger counter detects the presense of a decaying atom. Then put in just enough radioactive stuff so that there is a 50/50 chance that the geiger counter will see a decaying atom in an hour, which makes it swing the hammer, which breaks open the poison which kills whatever is in there. Get it? Whatever is in the box will stand a 50/50 chance of getting a bad case of dead in an hour. Then grab a cat and chuck it in the box and shut the lid. Don't open the box for an hour.

That's it. That is the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment. Now, you might ask, why you would do that? You wouldn't, it's just a theoretical experiment, but the idea is really just some crazy rainy-day fun for the kids. Is the cat dead or alive? There is no way to know unless you open the box, which you can't do because it ruins the experiment. That's it. That, and the dangling question that calls for an answer; Is cat dead or alive? There is no such thing as an unknown amount of dead. You are either are or you aren't. The fact that you personally don't know the state of the cat has nothing to do with the actual state of the cat. It's the same thing as being a little bit pregnant; There is no such thing.

So why bring up the question in an Ironman blog? It's this question: Is your training plan going to get you there? There is no middle ground. It's a yes or no question. Is it enough, and, is it the right kind of enough? It's one or the other. It's going to get you to the finish line intact, or it's not.

In my past training endeavors, I was riding a hope and a prayer. I did as much as I could and I hoped and prayed that it would be enough. If I was exhausted at the end of the day then my plan must be working. Right? At the end of the day, I would leave my sweaty clothes on the floor in a pile with my fragile emotional state and wait for my housekeeper to clean up the mess.

I have a different plan this year. So far, I am barely hanging on. The training calendar I am on is harder this time. I think the Navy Seal training guys looked at this plan and decided it was too hard. Maybe not, but it feels like it. Here is how my week shakes out.

Work – 40 hours

Commute – 8 hours

Sleep – 50 hours

Houseduty (cooking, eating, taking the garbage out, cleaning something) – 7 hours

Training – 15+ hours

Getting ready to train (packing a bag with shoes and shirts, finding my HR monitor) – 8 hours

Remodel (we are remodeling the house) – 7 hours

Bloggin – 1 hour

Offering unsolicted advice – 7 hours

I am over budget on my schedule.

I ran yesterday, my back sort of seized up, so I limped home. I got up this morning with the intention of running, my back sort of seized up, so I limped back to bed from the bathroom. Maybe I need to do more core work to keep the joints and wires and strings in my back all lined up.  I wonder if Schrödinger ever volunteered his housekeeper's cat to get in the box, and, if he did, did the cat have back spasms?  Did the cat feel like I do?  I think ya.