Well if you can't be nice about it...

Mary/IronMatron wrote this great post back in March about sandbagging. Okay, I'll admit it, "sandbagging" is a term that I pretend to know what it means, but I'm never quite sure. Does it mean "secret training"? And how did it get the name? I picture a guy running around with sandbags hidden in his sweatpants to get stronger. But anyway, in Mary's brilliant post, which you should have read by now (have you?! No? Go read it, really!) she talks about how she lies about her training. She says, "Oh, I'm just going to the supermarket," when secretly she's really going for a hard run. Why? Because people think we're nuts. Why would you WANT to run in your spare time? You must be insane. And leave your KIDS (with a perfectly capable chaperon) to go for a bike ride?! People are pretty sure that that constitutes criminal neglect.

I'm lucky. I'm young-ish and single, and I can at least admit that I run, swim, or ride my bike sometimes. I suppose people think, Well, when you're single you have to keep your figure. She's not getting any younger and she STILL doesn't have a man. But when she settles down... But distance, people can't deal with. So I withhold information. "What did you do this weekend?"
"Oh, I just went for a run in the woods. The weather was BEAUTIFUL, wasn't it?" Note the change of subject to bring up a topic everyone can relate to. Most people will assume you ran a couple of miles, or whatever distance they can get their mind around, and then they move on.
"Yes, the weather WAS beautiful. My snot-factory brats did [insert innane outdoor activity] all day on Saturday." Did you notice how it's not about what they did, it's about their KIDS. Ugh, if I had kids, I'd ditch them from time to time too, just to get my own identity back. Well anyway...

A story: I'm poor, so after I did Vineman (that's the full iron distance, for those of you who are just tuning in) I flew home the very next evening. The race was on a Saturday and I flew home on a Sunday evening. Sunday morning was the San Francisco marathon, and Shane and I got to see all kinds of marathon runners hobbling around the city all afternoon. When I went to the airport I was wearing my Boston Marathon jacket. I was walking down the jetway, waiting in line to enter the plane, and the woman behind me asked, "Did you run the marathon this morning?"
"No," I said. Which was true. Then I said, "If I had, I wouldn't be walking this well now." Immediately I thought, Why the hell did I just say that?! I didn't run a marathon this morning, but I ran a marathon about 12 hours before these folks on Saturday afternoon, and that after biking 112 miles and an extra long swim as warm-up. To the naked eye I was walking fine, but if I sat down for too long it hurt like hell to get up, and it took me about a minute to bend down far enough to reach my shoes.
I got into the plane, sat down in my seat, and the guy next to me asked, "Did you run the Boston Marathon this year?"
"Yeah," I said. Then I explained that I ran it as a bandit, as I promised Mindy I would do EVERY SINGLE TIME someone commented on it.
"Congratulations!" he said.
"It was 4 months ago," I said, perplexed.
"Congratulations anyway." Then his fiancée came back from the restroom and sat down. "Hey Julie, she just ran the Boston Marathon!" he said.
"Congratulations!" she said.
It had been four frigging months ago. I'd run 2 races LONGER than a marathon since then, one of which was just yesterday. And they thought I'd still be reeling from Boston?! But I didn't say anything. I smiled, thanked them, and went back to my book. Why would I do that?

Now, a little perspective. I'm from the same town as Alicia Sacramone, the gymnast. You know, the first gymnast in history to have a set of tits. The one that was always doing the inappropriate touching to the other girls and giving them kisses that looked more like headbutts? I was friends with her brother in high school, but the connection ends there. So anyway, although I have never met her, this gymnast who went to the Olympics is from my same little podunk town, where the only reason we get on the news is because the middle school vice principal decides not to let the 7th graders go see Miracle on 34th Street at Christmastime because of the religious nature of the play. As you can imagine, it's been huge. Banners were put up downtown on the train overpass that said "Congratulations Alicia on your silver medal!" There are like a dozen shops downtown, and each one had a big-ass poster in the window that said, "Congratulations, Alicia, you made Winchester and your country proud!" One restaurant (whose owners are close to the Sacramone family) even put up their own giant banner. Then, one day I come home from work and there are cops everywhere stopping traffic. There are hundreds of little kids in the street holding tiny American flags. Turns out, Alicia, Olympian and darling of Winchester, MA was coming home, and so of course they threw her a parade. The whole town practically shit themselves with delight.

I am not criticizing Alicia Sacrimone. She has worked DAMNED hard for what she achieved, I'm sure she has sacrificed a lot to reach the highest level in her sport, and she went to the Olympics and was successful. She deserves to have the whole town shitting themselves over her, because I'm sure that for the past 10 years she has worked her little ass off and no one outside of the gym has recognized her accomplishments. I am also not saying that ANYTHING I've done is a hundreth as impressive as going to the Olympics. But you've gotta wonder... what if it hadn't been gymnastics? What if she had medaled archery, or decathlon, or fencing, or even rhythmic gymnastics? What about triathlon? Or the marathon? Or the 10K open water swim?! Then she might have gotten a full page in the Winchester Star, but certainly not a giant banner, a parade, and hundreds of elementary school children waving American flags and asking for autographs.

Now I don't think I'm any Olympian, and I certainly don't think anyone should be throwing me a parade. But to talk about something I've done the weekend before, that would be nice. As it is, I'm afraid to talk about it. Because you know what people do when you tell them that you ran a marathon or rode your bike 100 miles or did a half ironman? They get MAD! But it's even worse when other athletes do it:
"Are you completely INSANE?!" (Alison, the best swim buddy a girl could have).
"Why the hell would you do something like that?" (Andrew, an elite-level 70.3 athlete).
"I hate you." (Judi)
"You're nuts!" (Rocketpants)
"And you call me a freak!" (Anne, who makes me take it to the next level every day)

Non-athletic people don't even know how to react. They go through disbelief, and then awe, and then anger. "You're nuts. That much physical activity isn't good for a person, you know." (Don't even get me started on that one!) The other common reaction makes me even more uncomfortable: "I could NEVER do something like that!" Of course you could, you just haven't decided to dedicate all your free time to doing it, that's all. They kind of get this glazed look in their eye and then begin a conversation that can basically be boiled down to the word, "Wooooooooooooooooooow..."
After I rode the 12-hour race in New York, all I wanted to do was go to bed. I was getting set to do just that when one of the guys in the house said, "Come out here. I want to see what someone who rode their bike 200 miles looks like!" How do you react to something like that?!

Sometimes on the Monday after a great race, I'm still sore and still proud of an accomplishment, and I just want to tell someone about it. I want to talk to someone who gets it about how hard I had to work, the things I saw along the way, how fun this part was and how painful that part was. I don't want a "You're crazy!" or a "Wooooooooow!". I want to... relive it. It makes me sad that once you shower and take off the finisher's medal, the glory is over. Hell, the Olympians get a fucking PARADE. I know that after a tough weekend I'm stiff and walking funny, and I just hope that someone will ask me about it. But my parents don't understand. My mom is still convinced I'm going to drop dead from exhaustion in the middle of a race one of these days. My dad still thinks I suck at this sport. My co-workers, well my co-workers couldn't even wrap their minds around exercising an hour a day.

Hmmmm... one of these days maybe I should start a blog...