happy birthday andrea! i love you so much and couldn't imagine being in this crazy training program without you. actually, make that: i can't imagine pretty much anything without you. and i want the whole internet(s) to hear about it: I LOVE MY WIFE!!! love, john

So this is Murph with his bike. Mine is exactly the same but much smaller. (Notice all the cars that I've mentioned before)

Last night we took the bikes for a ride in the park at dusk and we survived. I continue to be terrified but a little less so. I am now starting to trust my bike a little more. And I am starting to figure out how to work with my bike and the more I figure that out the better I'll be at this. So I'm keeping at it and encountering my fear head on every couple of days.

And this is Murph blogging while he is waiting for me to be ready for a bike ride. I came around the corner and found him at the computer with his bike helmet on and found the image so hilarious. He was a good sport about letting me take a picture.

SNAKE SWIM. that's all i have to say about tonight's swim practice. it was called a 'snake swim.' i am terrified of snakes, so i was terrified before practice. but it turns out we just swam in a sort of group-snake-like formation, everybody in the same direction at the same time. so we were on top of or beside or kicked in the face and bumped by one another. it was to simulate the race and it was kind of awesome but totally not awesome. (bet you can't wait to try one!)
anyways, thank god there were no actual snakes involved in the swim itself. i'm terrified of them. and don't even get me started on sharks. -- john

So this is spring training... I (Andrea) just walked out the door set for my run and the sky opened up. I don't really have rain gear and its not quite warm enough to make the rain refreshing so I am blogging instead and hoping that the rain stops shortly--before the scheduled window of time in my day for training closes. Another option would be to go run on the treadmill but I would much rather do a 40 minute run in the park. Dare I say that I was even looking forward a run in the park. This is progress!!! I am actually feeling really good about how my running is coming along. I had a terrific 4.4 mile run on Wednesday night. Not fast, but faster and I ran every step and never once felt as if I might die.

For those of you unfamiliar with Prospect Park, it is Brooklyn's Central Park. It really is a wonderful place. There is a wonderful lake in it and my preference is not to run around the perimeter of the park but to run on the trails in the heart of it. You can look up and not even know that you're in the middle of Brooklyn because all you will see is tree tops.

On another note. For those of you who are donors that have requested a CD from the Survivor Series, the first compilation, SWIM has been created and will be mailed out shortly to those of you that requested it. But I want to put in a good word for it--thus far it has been the least requested CD and I gave Murph a hard time that his language for describing it may not have been compelling for those who are not familiar with DJ lingo. I have been listening to it all weekend. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I have been. For those of you waiting for the others, bear with us...art is a process.

murph says: i need to see the 1986 movie Quicksilver for the following two reasons.
1. to step up my game for the next time i play 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
2. it's about a bike messenger in nyc. and he goes really fast and it's dangerous all the time, and that's what it feels like to be on a bike on these mean streets. you're kind of always going too fast, and it always feels dangerous.
i have to be careful. there is a thrill seeker side of me that totally gets off on the elements of speed and danger. so: keep that in check!
in related news: (this is not gloating, it's honest.) i was blown away by how NOT hard the bike is for me. i guess i have the right kind of legs / leg muscles for it? now, i was not like an undiscovered lance armstrong, but i was going along at a decent clip, and it didn't cost me a whole lot of energy.
someone, please, write this down somewhere where i can't come back and edit it, bc i'm sure it will come back someday to haunt me. but for now i feel very lucky and happy that the bike is not kicking my keister, like i expected it would.
meanwhile, i practically drown at every swim practice, but that's a whole other story.
seacrest. out.

I (Andrea) just discovered my new weakest link. Running is nothing now in comparison to biking. Or at least that is how I am feeling right now--5 minutes after hopping off my bike. It probably wasn't the best day for a bike ride...37 degrees, quite windy, light snow flurries, St. Patrick's Day parades, etc. But we thought that we should give our bikes a test drive so we'd know what the kinks were to have our coach help us out with.

Well it seems that one of my kinks is that my handle bars like to spontaneously spin around on their axis, leaving me with no ability to steer--happened while a fire engine was passing me on its way to the parade. And another kink is in my own head that I'll have to work out for myself, but I am pretty much terrified of being on Brooklyn streets on a bike. I'd much rather be on the sidewalk--thanks to several years of my parents' insistence that it was the better place to ride (thanks mom & dad) who were proven correct when a classmate of mine was hit by a car when we were in the 8th grade and was severely brain damaged. This rule kept me alive and unharmed for about 28 years, but now its sort of a phobia--but in Brooklyn, as opposed to West Des Moines, Iowa, the sidewalks are for people. And being one of those people often using the sidewalks to get around I appreciate the no bike rule.

But basically I just feel/felt like a wimp. I had convinced myself that it was going to be easier to be out there on the road than it has been to be on the stationary bike. Its not. For as stronger and faster that I have been feeling this week swimming and running, I couldn't make it up the hill in the park without a pit stop. It is early in the training and its good for me to realize that I need to give this part more attention. Lots of room for improvement. Now there was an award that I was always a good candidate for, Most Improved. Here's hoping.

Remember when a couple of weeks ago I (andrea) said that my only source of pride as an athlete would come from the swimming portion of this? well, rumor has it that I've been deemed an excellent swimmer. The disclaimer to this is that this is a comparative assessment. But still I've never been considered an excellent swimmer (by myself or anyone else)...decent or maybe even good but certainly not excellent. So that feels good, especially when I am at the back of the running pack. maybe I can gain a little time/distance on the swim to make up for my slow and steady pacing.

I'm also thinking that I'm not going to be the fastest cyclist and by not the fastest, I mean one of the slowest. I am trying to stay focused on how amazing it is (especially for me) that I am even doing this. I'm not really someone that thrives on competition. I see that others do but I don't really get it. Competition doesn't drive me. I compare myself to others (see above) but its more to figure out how I'm doing rather than to motivate myself to beat them.

What is motivating me is the cause. I have committed to doing this for a very important reason. I wasn't getting to the gym or to the park for my own health (and that's a great by-product for me) so now I'm getting there for other people's health. Finishing this is the only option and that means training and pushing myself physically through the workouts is the only option.

i've begun ("i'm" john, btw) looking at this blog as more than just a way for us to announce our good news (bikes, yay! long distances, yay! big money, yay!). there is a lot of good news, and i love announcing it. in part because it makes me feel superior to you, the reader / our supporter (just kidding). no, seriously, it feels good to have good things to say, to say them, and to invite people into them. our experience of my cancer was like that, too - it always somehow made the good stuff better when a lot of people knew about it.
the thing i'm really understanding about the blog then, is the invitation it can be to share the struggle with us, the not so great stuff. i did not like sharing that part of my cancer experience because i did not like feeling that part of it - i cried a total of three times during treatment. but i could've cried everyday, and sometimes i wish i had. sometimes i wish i'd allowed myself to feel the hurt the way it really felt at the time. i was just so numb, and already felt so vulnerable. it was always really hard to share struggle, is all i'm saying. which is why now it's really empowering to do that.
having said all of that: i'm struggling right now! we are expected, on our own, to do what's called a BRick practice, aka a BR practice, aka a Bike Run practice, aka a practice where we practice riding our bikes and IMMEDIATELY practice running, just like we will in the race. i am exhausted right now. i am totally deflated from this week, and though i know that exercise will recharge me, i am just completely flattened right now.
or, i was flattened.
writing this has begun to begin to inflate me. just enough to get out the door. and go bike - and run! - and call it a day. imagining somebody (anybody) reading this, even if no one ever does, puts a little extra faith in myself, because i know you're (somehow) in it with me, helping me out. so, long story short: thanks for the support.

Finally. We've put our bikes together completely--minus one screw from Murph's bike that seems to have been lost somewhere in our livingroom and some spare washers that I can't figure out where they should go. I would even say that I will ride them with moderate confidence that they'll work.

Part of the challenge has been that the instructions for assembling our bikes were not written or illustrated for our particular bikes they were just general and generic suggestions about how it should go. So they've ended up to be 2 giant jigsaw puzzles more or less. Puzzles that we will now risk life and limb on...so we're going to have our coaches double check our work before we get going.

as promised: a pic of me mugging for the crowd at connection to the cause, loving the spotlight. (thanks for the photo, jonathan!) it's great to be in a position to put a face (along with cynthia and huong, who you see here, as well as i think 9 other honored teammates!) on the fights we fought, the fights we're fighting, to survive.

as i said just after begging for more applause (above), there are many ways to fight cancer, 2 of which i know from personal experience: living with / through cancer, and participating in team in training to raise funds for the other fighters (researchers, doctors, patients, their families). i much prefer the team in training route, and i stick with it (and i hope we all do) because i know people on the other route right now, and i want them to be okay.

if that means i get to a be a very little bit famous, too, then hey. bring it on. but meanwhile, let's cure some cancer, shall we?!

hello hello hello,
it's john / murph, chiming in roughly 24 hours after our most recent group training session - it literaly took that long to recover!! our coaches have started abusing us, basically: we run little 5 minute chunks of leg-loosening, then do a bunch of lunges. then we run another 5 minute chunk followed by several minutes of squats. repeat. repeat. repeat. then run 2-3 more miles. what?!
okay, but then after all of that, we 1. learned how to change a flat tire (educational AND entertaining), and 2. went to a sort of motivational roundup to ground the teams in our larger purpose and cause: the search for a cure. two honored team-mates spoke about their experience in treatment / survival. they were amazing. all honored team-mates got up and added our thanks to the runners, bikers, and swimmers working to raise $9Mil all told this year. it was awesome.
afterwards, we mixed it up a little bit with other participants and staff (in the midst of a growing grumbling beginning about sore legs). we had a ton of laughs, i got invited to speak at a future leukemia-lymphoma society event, and i found out that one participant, who likes my nickname A LOT, encouraged her parents to name their new dog Murphy so they could call it Murph. i'm still totally weirded out by that; it makes me feel semi-famous. i secretly love it, too, though! (we'll post a picture later of me working the crowd for proof)
later today we'll ride gym-bikes for an hour. an hour!!! on these legs?! yes. and it will be good.
PS - we have reached the $1500 mark in fundraising!!!! thanks loads for all of your continued support.

okay, john again. post-practice this time. we made it after all! and here's proof... more in a second, but first:
forgot to mention earilier: our bikes are about 90% put together (still waiting on some engineering genius to suddenly kick in for andrea on how to assemble our brakes. owise we're off to an actual mechanic, bc brakes are pretty much, well, essential). so anyways: we're raring to go on those things! it'll be good to bike a little on a saturday morning, too - these runs are murderous.
all in all: just a quick note to say, we made it to practice (WAY tough today) and got the job done - 30 minutes of running, stop and do a set of 10 squats every few minutes. OUCH.
afterwards, andrea bought her first pair of shoes from this store called jack rabbit sports in bklyn where they videotape your feet while you run on a treadmill, then play it back in slow motion to show you how effective a given pair of shoes is on keeping your feet strong and supported. the store is amazing, and also very supportive of team in training. so, much like gorilla coffee (see my last post), jack rabbit goes on the 'must do' for anyone in bklyn with a reason to be there. or even a pretend reason to pretend to have to be there.
no swim for us with the team monday (we're going to a concert), but i promise soon: photos of us getting wet. the pool where we swim is really something to see, to say nothing of our athletic physiques. so keep an eye out. - j

Just finishing the last of the squats looks something like this

john here, pre-saturday practice. i'll pop in again after practice, but i just had to get on paper (screen?) and say: IIIII AAAAMMMMMM TIIIIIIIRRRRREEEEEDDD!!!!! we were out late last night - well, late for us, not late for new york - and only ended up with 5 hours sleep. is that wimpy? maybe. but wimpy or no, it's painful this morning.
one of the comparisons i draw for participants in the program, as an honored team mate trying to shed some light for people on the value of the money we're raising from first hand perspective, is to draw an analogy between a training regimen and a medicine regimen (chemo or radiation). the challenges of both, the changes both bring, the light at the end of each tunnel. the major difference that i can see is choice: practicing today is definitely a choice (and, admittedly a difficult one!), but chemo never was (unless you count "live or die" as a choice. i didn't.)
and so one of the best ways that i can think of to honor the people who have no choice in their challenge - people like our cousin angela! - is to take on a challenge by choice, and to use that challenge as a way (through cash and consciousness raising) to lighten her load in some small way, and make it lighter for all the millions of choiceless others.
for me, too, it's a way to honor the old me, the choiceless chemo / radiation me, by making the lessons i learned by accident about challenge during that time bolster my will when it comes to other challenges i rise to on purpose.
WOAH. i am about half way through a cup of coffee (from a place called gorilla coffee - if you live in or visit brooklyn, don't let another day pass without trying) and it is working miracles on my energy levels - but moreover, writing this out has really grounded me in the reason why i'm even awake right now. so: onward, into the day and the miles (and miles and miles) of running in the early, cold, icy new york morning - BECAUSE WE CAN.

As you might be able to tell from this picture of me at last Saturday's practice this has been a rough week. It has been cold (yes, I am wearing multiple coats). And I have been tired, bone tired.

But it should be cold, it being winter and all. And I should be tired because it very well may be true to say that I am exercising harder and more than I have in my life--possibly with the exception of when I was a high school athlete.

Even though I'm tired and getting out there in the frigid wind is a little tough, I still want to do this. I want to do it because the fundraising dollars are starting to roll in and you've committed to me. So I won't let you down. And I won't let myself down. And I won't let the people who've been through things much more difficult, not to mention not of their choosing, I'm talking about muscling through chemo and radiation and surviving cancer (you know who you are).