Another break-up, another 50K

I apologize for my last post being boring. My housemate has this annoying habit of talking to me constantly whenever I'm awake, whether I'm clearly trying to concentrate on something or not, weather I'm a grumbling bear first thing in the morning or not... I get easily distracted. The result is crappy writing like my last post. Oh well.

This week was a rest week, and while in some ways I'd planned it perfectly (it was rainy and shitty all week and I was on the rag), it also would have been a great week for a crash week. The reason will be clear in a second... If you read only parts of this week, read Monday and Sunday.

Monday: Nothing

Valentines Day. Fuck Valentines Day. Last year Lindsey and I had joked that we were going to break up on Valentines Day. We didn't but she didn't even buy me a card, and broke up with me 2 weeks later. This year, I really did break up on Valentines Day.

Scout had been out of town for almost 2 weeks on a trip to Belize with her brother and his family (they pay for her trip so that she can watch the kids). Since she couldn't be reached by phone, e-mail, or any other means for 10 days, I had all my free time to myself. No having to pack 6 changes of clothes (2 days' worth of working and work-out clothes) and drive around her neighborhood for half an hour looking for parking so that I could stay over her house for the night, going to bed at midnight and waking up at 5 to get to work. No more having to go out to eat when I couldn't even afford gas because she keeps no food in the house. Having my whole weekend free and not having to give up my one precious morning off. No missing an opportunity to race because we never had time together. I realized that I really, desperately didn't want to answer to anyone but myself when it came to my free time.

I had been breaking up with her in my head for a week before she finally came home on Sunday afternoon. When she called, I didn't pick up because I knew that my voice would betray that something was up. When I listened to the message, it was filled with "I've missed you"s and "I can't wait to..."s. I felt so rotten I wanted to disappear. I got in the car and sent her a text to say I was headed into the city and did she have a minute. She didn't respond. I got to her neighborhood, parked and called her. No answer. She's got this annoying habit of turning off her phone when she's not using it that always makes me want to scream at her. It's the only thing that really annoys me about her. I sat around waiting for about 15 minutes, and when she didn't call back I turned my phone to airplane mode so it wouldn't even ring for the rest of the night and drove home. I was so frustrated that I was thinking about doing it in a letter or over text message. In reality, I was just scared and wanted to do it in the most yellow-bellied way I could think of so that I wouldn't have to deal with her pain.

I had some morning appointments, and then a Spin class, and then I was going to have to dump her. It was rainy and ugly out, which put me in an even worse mood. I didn't know how I was going to get all cheery for a Spin class in this state of mind. Then a Valentines Day miracle happened: no one showed up to my Spin class. I packed up, got in the car, and drove to her neighborhood.

I had her meet me in the Starbucks. She came in and smiled when she saw me, giving me a kiss. I immediately dropped my head into my hands and couldn't speak or even look at her. After several minutes she asked, "What is it?" I couldn't get the words out. I shook my head and was silent for several more minutes, at a loss. "Is it cancer?" she asked. Whaaaat? The first thing you come up with is cancer? What the hell is wrong with you? I thought. It was so far off her radar that even cancer seemed more likely. I shook my head. "Are you leaving me?" she asked slowly. I nodded and burst out crying.

There were several uncomfortable parallels between what was happening right now and what happened with Lindsey, so I wasn't taking any of this lightly. I felt terrible for blindsiding her, and it broke my heart to see the waves of realization crashing over her over the next hour or so. One minute she'd be fine and try to change the subject, then she would realize something else and start crying or say something desperate or walk away with her hands in her hair. I wanted to hug her and protect her from anyone ever hurting her again, but I couldn't. "It has nothing to do with you," I promised her, but that means nothing when someone's breaking your heart, I guess.

We walked around for about an hour in the rain talking and not talking. Right before I got in my car to leave she told me, "While I was gone I had a dream that I was trying and trying to call you and I couldn't reach you. I was searching for you frantically in my dream because I thought I'd lost you..." The desperation in the dream and the defeat in her voice broke my heart all over again. I kissed her, told her I loved her (something I'd never told her before, but it was true... but not like that. Whoever coined, "I love you but I'm not in love with you" should be shot) and got in the car. Ever since I've wanted to go back over there and take it all back, but I can't.

Tuesday: Nothing

Every moment that I wasn't working, I was in bed. I'm a rotten piece of shit. I didn't want to work out, I didn't want to work, I just wanted to curl up in bed and be comatose.

Wednesday: Swim 2100 yd and Spin class

I can't avoid workouts when I'm being paid to be there. After teaching my corporate bootcamp class outside the city, I could have gone home and taken another nap, but that's what I'd done all morning. I could have done some work, but making my head work seemed even more painful than making my body work, so I went to the pool before my spin class.

To be honest, I wasn't all that depressed over the break-up. I was mostly depressed because the sun was gone and because no matter what happens, money doesn't grow on trees and everything always feels like a fight. Suddenly I wanted to curl up with anyone and everyone just so that someone would give me some attention. I swam lots and lots of drill, and for the first time since I started swimming again in December I felt like I was "swimming on my side" again. Maybe, just maybe I'd be able to swim again someday.

The Spin class had grown even more than last week, and I had designed a workout to explode everyone's hearts in the room. When I want to do that, I alternate between accelerations and higher-resistance high cadence sets that somewhat approximate outdoor climbing. It turns everyone's ears off and means I don't have to talk much during the class. So that's what we did.

Whenever I do really high-cadence pedaling in my classes (at a cadence fast enough that the "official" Spinning literature tells you not to use because someone might get hurt), I always take a minute to explain safety. "If you're a beginner, go as fast as you can without your butt bouncing and keep your pedals in control. Intermediate, try to hit 120 rpm..." (we've got electronic consoles on our bikes). "If you've been riding for at least six months, try to make that top number on your console disappear..." (which happens at 140). "If your feet come off the pedals, hold your legs out to the side and use your resistance knob as a brake like this."

I had given that talk, but that was before 3 teenagers came into the class 12 minutes late and sat in the opposite corner of the class from everyone else. I usually scan back and forth, but I guess I hadn't looked at them in awhile, until I saw that the girl was off her bike and limping around. Aw fuck. I went over and made sure that she was okay, helped her stretch out the charlie horse, and told her to take it easy. Then I gave the safety speech again. Next acceleration set you know what happened? Another one of them bashed himself in the leg. His damned basketball shoes were too big to fit into the toe clips and he'd ramped his pedals up to about 150 rpm. Idiot. I hate teenagers.

Thursday: Spin

This time there were no accelerations and everyone survived.

Friday: Swim 1900 yd

With the weather alternating between hail, cats, dogs, and cold winds, I wasn't in much of a mood to do anything outdoors with my 8-hour break between clients. I still had some 1900 yards to swim to meet my quota for the week, so I went to the high school pool in Pacifica. This is a real 50x25 yd pool with at least a dozen lanes, diving boards, and blocks. It's also not a salt water pool like the one I swim in at the Y, so it feels like I'm swimming through corn syrup. I wasn't really in the mood to have to fight through another workout where everything feels harder than it should be. I know that the best way to get back to where I have been is just to be patient with my body and not compare myself to where I have been in the past. But there are days when you don't want the adjectives "patient" or "forgiving" describing your workout. I wanted something "punishing" that would squeeze out anything yucky still buzzing around inside my head. If I tried to swim some fast hard freestyle sets I knew I'd just be more frustrated with myself than ever before.

So what to do? These lanes are nice and wide, and I felt like doing something that involved a lot of thrashing and kicking: butterfly!

This is what I used to think about butterfly: there is absolutely no rational reason to do butterfly. It's the most inefficient stroke, taking massive amounts of energy to cover a distance that you could cover much easier with any other stroke. It's not the fastest stroke either. It's a short axis stroke, deriving its power from bending rather than twisting in the water, giving it almost no carryover to freestyle. Unless you are a specialist or an IM swimmer, there is no reason to swim butterfly. This is why I swim butterfly: because it creates a lot of waves and you are likely to get smacked if you try to share a lane with someone doing a fly workout. I felt like smacking someone today. And it makes me look cool.

After a couple of 50's, I had the lane to myself. I bobbed at the end of the pool until some old lady thought that she might want to share the lane with me, and then I would do another 50 and by the time I got back to the wall, she'd be gone. I did a total of 625 yards of twitchy, sloppy, gasping, thrashing butterfly before I'd hit the number of yards I wanted to swim that day (1900). Then I went into the locker room and I looked into the eyes of each one of those water aerobics ladies thinking, You wanna fuck with me? I'll fucking eat you. You better tell your friends that any lane that I'm in from now on is off limits! Then I went home and shirked more busy work to climb into bed and make the world go away for a few more hours before I had to return to work.

Saturday: Trainer 1.5h

It was pouring with rain, but I had about 20-25 miles to make up. I was feeling droopy on the inside from all the rain, and for once I didn't want to watch crappy reruns on hulu, so I did something that I judge other people for doing at the gym. I brought a book.

I set up Mark Allen's Fit Soul, Fit Body on the handlebars and I read that book for the next 90 minutes. The book isn't wonderfully written, and having a rather low opinion of both of the writers' personalities, I wanted to think that I was better than them. But my head's been my biggest rival lately, and my newest project is to end the constant state of crisis in my life, so I read. What I read about will become relevant in the race report to follow.

Sunday: Run 29.25 miles

I had a problem. I had a big black hole in my thoughts and I had a marathon of running to make up this week-- a rest week. Swimming isn't tiring enough to have an effect on a rest week, I was already ahead on my cycling and the Spin classes would take care of the rest, but what about the running? The Claire answer: a 50K.

We will go through the first part of this race report with a focus on clothes:

It was cold as I drove out to the East Bay for my race. It being February, I suppose that I should admit that "cold" is a relative term. It wasn't mid-winter Boston prep series cold where your snot freezes to your face at 19 degrees, it was a California 'should I or should I not have worn shorts' 36 degrees. I'd gone for the shorts and a tank top, with a light jacket to go over it. As we started running, the jacket got warm, and when the sleeves started sticking to my arms like shrink wrap, I peeled it off. Then the shade came back and my nipples and goose bumps were hard enough to poke your eye out. It would be like this for the rest of the day, too warm for a jacket but too cold for a tank top. There are worse things in life than being moderately too hot or too cold, but this was a long day to be uncomfortable for any reason other than running.

I tried to get this pic without anyone in the frame, but it looks like I just caught this guy red-handed coming out of the wrong bathroom or something.

It had rained all week, turning the trails into slippery sludge. It wasn't as muddy as the last time I'd tried to moon walk up these hills, but the back portion of the first loop brought us through some fields. We kept having to open and close these heavy gates where the springs on the latches were all rusty and I had trouble opening them. On about the third gate I noticed the sign; something about cows. Then I realized what I'd been seeing. In the past half mile I'd seen as much volume of shit as three entire horses. And not that straw-y dry horse shit that I was used to seeing, it was this wet, black shit that looked like horse diarrhea and the horse had been eating Odwalla Superfood bars. And it was everywhere. I wondered what they were feeding their horses out here, and now I realized that this was cow shit, over the trail so much that you almost couldn't avoid stepping in it between the puddles.

The fields were sopping wet, and right before the nine mile mark I lost it. SQUELCH! Suddenly I was ankle deep in mud. No fighting it now. Squelch, slurp, squelch, slurp, squelch, I got to the other end of the puddle and felt the water sloshing around inside my shoes. Fuck! Only 9 miles in and my dry socks were a thing of the past. Twenty-two miles is a long way to go in wet socks. I hadn't been so covered in cow shit since my parents took me to a dairy farm when I was 5 and a cow lifted up its tail and projectile shit on me from head to toe (I didn't even get to eat an ice cream cone that day because my parents thought my hands were dirty). I got to the next gate and there was a giant mud puddle several inches deep right in front of the gate. I stood in the solid-ish mud at the hinge end of the gate and tried to pull on the latch. I couldn't get the leverage on it to move it, because every time I leaned my weight against it my feet would slip in the mud. I sighed. Splash!

Finally I managed to pull the gate open and started climbing the small hill on the other side. I was walking the hill, staring at the ground like you do when you're feeling sorry for yourself when I noticed my shoe. As I came up over the ridge there were three cheerleaders yelling and ringing cowbells. "WOOOOOOOOO! You can do it!" they yelled.

"Fuck that, I'm just wondering what the hell is on my shoe?" I said, pulling out my phone to take a picture. A minute later I got to the aid station, "I mean, what the hell is that?!"

"I've seen mud before, but I've never seen it foaming," the aid station guy said. It looked like sea foam was on my shoe, only it was cow shit foam and it took the next five miles to finally melt away into my socks.

Right around the time I covered myself in cow shit, I was starting to feel a pre-bonk wooziness. I had felt kind of hungry at the start, but had chalked it up to the caffeine. I was only drinking water, and when I ran out, all they had was more water. At the first aid station I'd been trying to keep up with a New Friend, so I'd just grabbed 3 Shot Blocks and 1/3 of a Payday bar and tried to shove them in my face as I trailed my New Friend up a hill. And I still couldn't keep up with my New Friend and wound up alone. At the cow shit foam aid station I could see nothing that I really wanted to eat: no cookies, no potatoes, no peanut butter sandwiches, so I just grabbed 3 more shot blocks and kept going. About half a mile later I figured out that I might be in a bit of trouble and thought about turning around, but I really didn't want to tack on an extra mile to what would already be a really long day.


I was all by myself now, not a soul in sight and I was starting to get the headache, irritability, and wooziness of a low-grade bonk. This was no good at all, I was only about 10 miles in, and there wouldn't be another aid station for miles. I tried to draw on the lessons that Mark Allen and The Voice had taught me in the book yesterday. I tried to concentrate on the sunlight and the nature around me, but all I could think concentrate on was how I wasn't quite warm and wasn't quite cold and how I wished they wouldn't put shooting ranges right out in the middle of my nature like this. I tried to concentrate on the bubble of my life force out in front of me, extending out from my heart. It drew me forward for a minute, but then it popped. I tried to feel lucky for being able to do what I was doing today, and give thanks to the Universe, God, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster for my body and my life, but the "Poor Me" was just too loud. I concentrated on how I would yell at the volunteers at the next aid station for not having enough food or any sports drink.


Fifteen miles in and I did lay into the aid station volunteers, but with a smile on my face and in that 'shucks this is hard, why in tar-nation did I sign up for this' way that aid station volunteers love. "Only 4.2 miles to go!" a volunteer told a guy that came up behind me while I was drinking Coke and eating as many cookies as I could shove into my face. He was doing the 30K.

"It's the .2 that'll kill you," said the other volunteer.

"So get the .2 out of the way first," I said around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly, like it was the most normal suggestion in the world. The 30K SMOF (straight man over 40) and I set off together, and I even managed to hold it together for the next .2 miles or so, but when he began running up a short, steep hill I had to walk and I was alone again. I would be alone until mile 28.5.

I finished the 30K loop and at the finish line aid station I stopped again to get as much food into my face as I could. "It's just 10 miles to the finish, a short 20K." I must have been hearing things. I looked at him, confused. This was too good to be true, surely I was doing the math wrong. "The course is a couple miles shorter than we thought," he explained. I tried to do the math in my head, but all the numbers had already fallen out of my brain.

I felt so low, so tired. Ten miles was so far to go. I'm such a weak, pathetic loser. What the hell is wrong with me? My knees hurt so much, my legs were aching, my ankles hurt, I couldn't take another step. I felt like those terrible last 10K of a marathon when someone puts industrial strength magnets in your shoes and turns up the electromagnet in the ground. You're so weak! You're fucked! I told myself. What the hell were you doing signing up for this thing? Don't you realize that you're not in the same shape you used to be in? If you feel this way after... I looked at my watch. ...after 20 miles...

Twenty miles. It sunk in. I'd been so absorbed in the next 11 miles that I'd completely forgotten about the 20 behind me. Hang on a sec, this is how you're supposed to feel after 20 miles. This is how you've always felt after 20 miles. Do you realize that you just did it again, you rocked up on no training to speak of and you peelled another one of these things out of your ass? It set me to thinking, and I definitely had time to think. I started thinking about how everyone gets all worried about overtraining, but what is overtraining anyway? I mean, in some corners of the sport the only competition lies in getting to that uncomfortable state and being able to stay there. This was not a new thought to me, but one I hadn't thought in awhile. Fuck everyone who called this overtraining. I can be uncomfortable. I don't want to do these attrition races forever, but dammit, I was darned good at being uncomfortable and no one could stop me.

The last 10 miles were brutal. It was a slow death plod with feet barely clearing the ground, but slowly, glacially the miles started to spread out behind me. I thought I would never hit the "4.2 miles to go" aid station. When I finally did I asked, "Am I the last one? I haven't seen another soul for hours." It was okay for me to be last, but I at least wanted to be prepared for it. If you're going to be DFL, then you have to start preparing yourself for a different kind of victory when you're still out on the course. DFL is a very different thing when you don't find out until after you've finished.

"No, there are still people behind you," she told me.

Every time I started walking up a hill, my hips would seize up. Every time I ran downhill my knees and ankles would feel like they were being beat to dust. When I hit the last 1.75 miles paved road, I descended to another ring of hell. I started to trudge at a slow walk up another short roller when two older women came around me. I rallied and caught up with them. "How are you guys doing? How's your race going?" I asked.

"Great, really great. We aren't as trained as we like to be, but we got lots of leg up time yesterday, so things couldn't be better. How are you?"

"Having a tough day, to be honest. It hasn't gone as well today as I hoped and I'm hurting pretty bad," I admitted. I could draw myself out of my pity party, but only if someone was there to tell me that they were hurting too.

"Well you're almost done," she said. "Look, only .75 miles to go!" She pulled the pace up to 8:30 min/miles. Really? I thought. But if I wanted the company I was going to have to keep up and I was going to have to think of positive things to talk about.

"My depth perception is all off," I said as we came up on yet another family taking up the whole road and I had to figure out a way to get around them (very difficult). "I've been convinced that every cyclist on this road has been aiming right at me. Does that ever happen to you?"

"No, can't say that it has," The Cheery One said.

"Maybe it's just that I know that my reaction time is slowed..." I said. "If you hit a grown-up you're alright because you just bounce right off. You've gotta watch out for the kids, because if you trip over them they'll send you ass over teakettle." She pulled away from me after that, and then so did her friend. And I was alone again.

I crossed the finish line about 50 yards behind the Silent Cheery One in about 5:47. Wait a sec! 5:47?! My best 50K time on a flat course was 6:01:03. I probably couldn't have run the 1.75 miles to a full 50K in under 14 minutes, but with all the hills and stopping that I'd done, this was probably the strongest 50K I'd ever done! Sure, I'd finished 31st out of 40 overall and 11th out of 14 women, but hey I was there at the end and I'd done better than your average Claire.

Trails, trails, trails, trails!

Do you ever have one of those weeks that just goes on and on and on forever, but when it's all over and finally done with, you realize that you got way, way more done than you would have thought humanly possible? How does that happen? This week was one of those weeks. My body is crying out for a rest week, but I managed to swim 4500 yd, bike 163 mi, and run 27.61 miles before my body finally gave in.

Monday: Swim 2500 yd, Spin Class

Mondays make me want to bash my head against a wall. It's my day with the most clients, and the most stops all over the city. It's my day with the most paperwork, and the most emails coming in and going out. I never get naps on Mondays. This particular Monday, some drama made it feel like I would never get to the pool. I don't even remember what the drama was, just one of those minor aggravations that needs attention and eats up precious time in my split shifts. When your "off" time are the hours when everyone else is at work, you never really get off time. I felt particularly uninspired by the time I got to the pool, and much to my dismay I'd managed to arrive with the full hour to swim. Now what am I going to do?! I wondered. I swam a ladder set of 100's to 500's, still stewing about the money I'd lost over the weekend. I was supposed to do some fast swimming too, but my body just won't go fast in the water these days, and I just don't have the energy to push it. Then I taught a Spin class. There were two people. It was one of those "why do I even bother?" days.

Tuesday: Run 6.2 miles

Tuesday is my reward for Mondays. I have a big, gaping hole in the middle of my day where I'm home before most people get to work and don't have to go back to work till everyone leaves the office again. I love Tuesdays. This particular Tuesday I got an extra present when I discovered another trailhead that led to a completely new network of trails right near my house. I'd been staring at these trails crawling over the hills for months trying to figure out how the hell to get to them, and here they were! I tramped and tromped around the trail that was either up or down and never flat. I ran off on side trails just to see where they would go, and for once they all turned out to be real trails (not the kind where the trail disappears into some shrubs after a quarter mile) that all orbited the main trail. I ached so hard to have someone to be running with, and had imaginary conversations with people I knew and other people that I hadn't met yet about what a great time we were having out here. It was a little sad to tell you the truth. No one will ever be able to run on my weird schedule.

Wednesday: Run 5.08 mi, Spin Class

Wednesday was another day of misfires. Even though my morning client had rescheduled and I had the morning off, I got up early to make sure that my last post would get out on time. Then I got dressed to go on another trail run. I was already dressed and reaching for my phone and keys when the phone dinged: a 2 hour reminder for one of my irregular clients. Shit! It was a beautiful morning and now I'd fucked it up! With a heavy heart, I changed and went into work. Five minutes before the session was supposed to start, I got an email: "Claire, I'm held up at the Indian consulate, can we push it back half an hour?" Ugh, fine! I could push it back half an hour, but not more. In the end, he wound up missing the appointment altogether, and I pouted about my missed run and relaxing morning. I did eventually manage to squeeze in a run on the treadmill (ignoring a phone call, 3 text messages, and who knows how many emails that reached me in that 45 minute window). I longed for a time before people could even interrupt me on my runs, when my phone, laptop, and mp3 player weren't all the same device.

I hadn't run fast since a handful of short workouts back when I still couldn't afford food, so I decided to do the only speed workout that an endurance person knows how to do: Yasso 800's (the treadmill version, where you pick your dream pace and try not to fall off the back of the belt before the computer clicks over to half a mile). I put the treadmill on 9mph just because it was a pace that I had never dared run on the treadmill before. Much to my surprise, I didn't fall off for 5 intervals. I was a little disappointed to figure out later that it was only 6:40 mile pace. On the bright side, I'd gotten so rusty at thinking about running faster that I'd forgotten how long my rests were supposed to be. I guessed and decided to walk for 90 seconds, or less than half what my "official" rests should have been. So I was pretty proud of myself after all. I'm an expert at only seeing what makes me look coolest.

Immediately afterward I had to teach a Spin class. I don't know where the crop of participants for this class comes from, but it seems to be different people every time. This time, I had a whole bunch of Spinning newbies who didn't line up their bikes in the way they were supposed to. Instead they just rode the bikes where they were stored next to the wall. I would have corrected them, but they all showed up late. They had also fixed the broken speakers in the room, so life was going to be good. On the first high-energy set, I yelled for everyone to "STAAAAAAAAAND UP!"

"Can you please not yell?" a newbie grimaced. "It's very loud."

My face fell. I'm sure I gave her a dirty look or rolled my eyes. I wondered if I could tell her to move her damned bike from under the speakers if she didn't like it. It wasn't so much the yelling that I was afraid of (I could always adjust the mic volume), it was the fact that I don't bother to find the "clean" versions of the songs on my playlists, so half the songs have an f-bomb, shit, or some sort of politically incorrect term like 'ho, or the "n-word" (never outside a hiphop song!). I could tell that this old geezer was going to rat me out. Why do people always have to rain on my parade?! Doesn't she know that I'm the best ever and she should feel honored to take my class rather than one of those soft Spin classes taught by an instructor that doesn't even own a bike???

I don't deal well with criticism. At the end of the class she apologized. "I don't want to sound like an old fuddyduddy. I actually liked the class very much. It's just very loud now that they've fixed the speakers. Is the mic tied in to the master volume?" She used the word 'fuddyduddy.' She was redeemed.

Thursday: Swim 2000 yd, Spin class, Run 5.4 mi

Which brings us to Thursday. Thursday is a clone of Monday, only in lieu of emails, I finish with my latest and most pain in the ass appointment. This particular Thursday featured a 6am start and a 9pm finish in addition to some very annoying work responsibilities having to do with the company newsletter.

The only interesting part of the swim was that I swam 3x200 IM. I did every inch of the fly, because I am that cool.

I thought for sure that this was going to be the Spin class where no one would show up. It was 11:58 and I was still by myself. Half way through the warm-up, however, I was still pulling bikes out of the closet for latecomers. Since this is a new facility, they are still building a membership base and I had just set the record for the biggest Spin class ever! I made sure that the mic volume was low this time.

After my class I had 3 hours where I didn't have to be anywhere. It's not usually enough time to leave the City, but it was a beautiful day and after yesterday's forced indoor run I was determined to avenge myself. I drove the half hour home, drove right past my exit and took the next exit toward the only trailhead where the hills are runable. At the first detour I saw off the main trail, I took it having no idea where it went. Immediately it turned into scrambling terrain with deep grooves in the rocky soil and the grade was probably north of 25% (look at the photo to the right, then really look at how steep it is). It stuck me on the back side of another hill that I'd never seen except from a distance and wondered how to get there. I didn't see a single soul on those trails, and found myself running out toward where the hill dropped off into the sea. Eventually it was time to go home again, and I bombed down the mountain feeling like the luckiest mofo on earth.

Friday: Run 5.93 mi

Fridays are supposed to be another light day, like Tuesday, but this Friday was different. It was bottom-heavy, having me work deep into the night with people who had already paid for late cancels this week, but still wanted to pay for another session to get it in. I begrudgingly obliged. Also, the newsletter, which I had been prepared to send out on Tuesday was still hanging over my head.

I'm sure everybody has this guy at there office: the guy who takes 15 different steps to sharpen a pencil. Well all I was waiting for were some photos from our company's version of that guy. He had dicked me around for days, then when I told him that he had missed his deadline, he sent me off on this wild goose chase that had me sitting in a loading dock outside a locked office with a contraption that let me plug my computer into my car's cigarette lighter and trying to pull off the office wifi. It didn't work. I arranged to meet him at the office Friday morning. When I texted him, he didn't reply. I circled for half an hour looking for parking, then called him. He didn't answer. I drove home. I got all the way home before he called. "I'm in Pacifica. There are three ways to do this: you can hand me the CD tonight at the location that I'll be working at, you can upload them to flickr your own damned self, or we can let it go till next month."

"I've got a better idea..." he said. So I wasted half the day setting up a drop box (whatever that is) and then calling him to get him to actually drop the shit in it. Then he had another brilliant idea...


When it was all said and done, I only had another hour to run. I had planned to explore another trail, but with little time to spare, I was going to have to go to the nearest trailhead and see if I could find my way across. There is a trail in there that they have locked off and fenced in with barbed wire. I figured that if I ran far enough on small enough trails that I could find my way in through the back way. It must be thousands of acres in there, and I wanted to see what was so special. I ran and I ran and I ran over trails so faint that you could barely see them and over hills so abrupt that you'd have to be crazy to climb them, but everywhere I went there was that same barbed wire fence. What's so special that they put up a fence miles long in the middle of nowhere? I'm determined to find out. Needless to say, I didn't even make it across to the trails I'd originally meant to run and for the first time ever I repeated a trail run in Pacifica.

Saturday: Bike 103.? miles

There was another SF Randonneurs 200K. I looked at the map, and it was to be nearly identical to the ride that I'd done a few weeks ago to Point Reyes (and every other long ride I've tried to do out of SF), including my favorite highlights of the Golden Gate Bridge, downtown Sausalito with its unfriendly cops and clueless pedestrians, and that damned chipseal bike path with the rotted wooden footbridges. Fuck that!

I decided that I would save my money, sleep in an extra hour, park at the end of the damned bike path, and wait for the riders to come by. When I stepped off my bike at the end of the bike path, I saw a swarm of day glow jackets and a motley clump of bikes (some $10K full carbon deals, others steel frames with racks) that could only mean one thing: brevet riders. I couldn't have planned it better if I'd known what I was doing. I hopped on.

The one problem with an otherwise perfect plan: We were at the bottom of the first real hill, and while the fastest guys in the brevet had 10 miles of 20+ mph riding under their belts as a warm-up, I'd only ridden about 3 blocks and was cold as ice. The hill did not work out the way I wanted it to. For awhile I managed to keep Natasha in my sights, but only managed to catch them at the bottom of the hill because of a traffic light.

I decided only to ride as fast as the slowest guy with a cue sheet, so as soon as one guy fell off the back, I pounced on him. "Is this pace pretty typical for a ride like this?!" the guy asked me.

"You're in the lead pack, man," I told him. "If you wanted 'typical' you should have slowed down a long time ago." I felt sorry for him. When he told me that this was his first brevet, I wasn't surprised. With his beat-up aluminum frame, rear rack, backpack pannier on one side, and worn-out clothes he looked more like a commuter that had gotten lost than a long-distance rider. In fact, later he told me that that's just what he was: a commuter who had been riding the first hill ouside San Francisco every single day to train. He was strong. I hoped he wouldn't lose heart, but still, I ditched him at the first station when a more experienced Straight Man Over 40 came along.

This guy had introduced himself as Mojo before I had even been dropped on the first hill, and it wasn't till later that I noticed that he was riding fixed: 49x17, "gangster gearing;" the gear ratio that I had found too tall to even commute around SF and here he was riding 125 steep, rolling miles on it. For many miles it was just the two of us, and when he came around me to take his turn at pulling I rolled up next to him. "To be honest, I'd rather ride next to you than behind you. This is a long day to be staring at a stranger's ass..."

Not much else happened. We passed the spot where I went down a few weeks ago. I almost got dropped at another rest stop. A couple of women, one with a steel frame and one with a big, fat ass passed me so I dropped Mojo for a few minutes until they couldn't be seen anymore over the horizon behind me...

Sunday: Run 5 mi
Not much running was happening on this hill.

This run was originally going to be a 10K through Chinatown put on by the Y where I work, but when I saw that they wanted $35 for a 10K "fun run/walk" I decided that they could go fuck themselves. That's more than they pay me per class and who wanted to drive into the City on my day off? So I went back to the trails to do more exploring.

I went to a trailhead that I had found by accident on another day when I was lost, and tried to connect Friday's dots from the other side. This trail climbs 1000' in the first mile, and it became clear pretty quickly that there wouldn't be much running today. My legs, which had felt fine when I woke up suddenly began burning from my hips to my toes even when I was walking. I did eventually manage to find my way from one trail to the other (over about a mile of improbable paved road up on top of the mountain), and then turned around to start exploring the side trails. The paved road curved down the side of the mountain to a lake I'd never seen before. I took a picture of it, but since I couldn't see an obvious route down to it, I decided to turn around and follow a better marked trail that I'd passed on the way up.

When I got to the turn-off it said, "Something something something Point: 2 miles." I stood there at the top of the trail just looking. I could see where the trail probably ended on a bald hill overlooking the water off in the distance. I looked and I looked and I looked. Two miles down, two miles back, another mile or so back to the car, nine miles total today. I've done about 3.5. Do I really have another 5+ miles in me? I knew I didn't, and got frustrated with my body for giving out on me. Some days when my brain is full and the sun is out, I just want my body to go on and on and on and on forever. I sighed and headed back for the car.

There's a trail that goes around the whole bay. You really could run and run forever!

When I got to the parking lot, I had run a total of 4.85 miles. Well come on, Claire, at least make it five! I thought. So because I had stood at the top of a trail that ran down to the ocean and had decided not to run on it, I ran laps around the parking lot for .15 miles until my watch clicked over to 5 miles even, then I pooped in the porta-pottie and went home.

Coming Back

This week was the first week that I committed to doing at least an Ironman a week to raise money for the SF AIDS Foundation (Click here to donate). Just 4000 yards swimming, 112 mi biking, and 26.2 mi running? This should be a cinch, right? Ideally, I'd like to overshoot it and swim some 50 miles, bike 2500, and run 500 before the AIDS LifeCycle in June, but it turns out that an Ironman is still a really long way to go when you try to spread it out in a busy work week.

Monday: Run 5 miles

I decided that a Spin class counted as 20 miles, since I also had to ride to and from the gym (about 4 mi round trip) and indoor rides have no coasting. But the Y was closed on Monday, meaning that I would be short both a swim and a bike for the week. Instead, I ran 5 miles barefoot on the beach. My plan was to run for an hour, but 50 minutes in my big toes were so sore that I was afraid that I had open sores on them and was rubbing sand into my wounds. Can sand get picked up in your bloodstream and kill you? It probably can. When I got home, I saw why: Giant, twin dime-sized blood blisters on each of my big toes. I was hobbling for days.

Tuesday: Run 10 miles

The next day was a running day as well, and I hit the ancient "paved" road through the trails. This used to be the old Highway One before they carved the new one into the sides of the cliff. The road is so narrow and windy, that it's no wonder that there are pre-war car carcasses rusting out all over the hillside. The trail leaves from near my house, climbs over a mountain, and drops you a few miles down the coastline. I had wanted to run all the way down to the ocean, but ran out of time only a mile or so from the end and had to turn around. Every time I run these trails, I'm blown away by them. I spend half the time with my head up looking over to the next hill and wondering how to get to the trails I can see going up the side, or wondering how long the little trail tributaries go and what's on them. I ran 10 miles that day, but I wanted to keep going and going forever. I hadn't even wanted to go on this run when I left the house.

Wednesday: Swim 3000yd, Bike 20 mi

The next day I did a boot camp-style class with my new corporate client. The class went really well, but I'm embarrassed to say that I managed to make myself sore with the jump squats, lunges, Spiderman push-ups, and abs circuit. (Really?! An abs circuit made me sore?!) Then again, what really fucked me up was the Spinning class that night where I almost made myself throw up. I realized half way through that five and a half minutes of "Don't touch that dial, we're building leg muscles here!!!" was a bit intense, but if I touched my own resistance knob, the class would know. The next morning I couldn't walk down stairs.

Oh yeah, and I swam that day.

Friday: Swim 2000 yd

Friday I still had 1000 yd I had to make up on the swim, so I joined the old ladies during lap swim at the local high school pool. It was a fantastic pool, but I hadn't realized how easy the salt water pool at the Y had made swimming. Now that I was in a regular old chlorinated pool (and a deep one, no less), I felt like I was swimming in baggy clothes. Originally I tried to tell myself that it was a 25m pool, not yards, and that's why my times were so slow. But no... I just sucked. After a warm-up I swam 10x100 IM. I love IM because I love swimming butterfly, but can't do it for more than 50 yards on the best day. IM lets me swim lots of butterfly without having to look like a fool hanging onto the deck and gasping. I don't know when I started loving butterfly so much. I used to hate it. But then I just woke up one day and I could swim 25 yd no sweat, and now I do it every chance I get. I think it makes me look cool. (It's probably better that I never see myself swim fly and preserve my self-delusion on this point.)

Saturday: Bike 75 mi

Which brings us to the weekend. It was going to be in the 70's all over central California, and with no clients or races for the weekend, I decided to go down to Santa Cruz to ride through the mountains. You can't look in any direction in Santa Cruz county without seeing some sort of park or nature preserve, so it was no problem planning a route that took me through Henry Cowell Redwoods state park, Big Basin state park, Castle Rock state park... I knew it was going to be hilly. What I didn't expect was a 40-mile climb. Right: The new white bike. As my friend Tommie said, "Only virgins get to ride white bikes." Well, after what happened to my last bike, I don't think I can be called a bike virgin anymore.



I started near sea level a few blocks from the base of campus at my alma mater. In 2005 when I first started riding, I had ridden up Empire Grade (the road that climbs the mountain behind the university) twice: Once I took my ancient Pugeot that was 2 sizes too big for me, whose brakes didn't work, and whose friction gears kept ghost shifting so often that I carried a screw driver with me at all times to tighten the shifter bolt. I had gotten part way up the mountain, given up in despair in someone's driveway, and then ridden down the hill trying to make myself as big a sail as possible because my brakes didn't work and I still hadn't mastered descending. I thought I was going to die that day. The second time, Lorraine led me up there on the carbon fiber bike I would later borrow for my first half ironman (and then carelessly ditch at the side of the road with a spectator when I blew my spare tube). I had gotten off the bike in that same driveway and refused to go on until I caught my breath. Then she had flown away down the other side while I gripped the brakes so hard that I thought my arms would fall off.

This time when I passed the driveway, I was surprised at how high up it was; about 10 miles into the climb (how the hell did I get up this high on that 54cm steel Pugeot?!), and how I was still riding as hard as I could to get up the grade. Either I was stronger back then than I give myself credit for, or I'm weaker now than I thought. After 17 miles of climbing, I turned toward Big Basin and again rode down the steep, winding hill full of blind turns with my hands gripping so hard on the brakes that I was sure that they would fall off. At one point I tried to come to a stop to give my forearms a rest, and was unable to stop at all.

For another 20 or so miles I rode through the redwoods, climbing slow, grinding, relentless hills with reprieves that always came too late and were too short. I was running out of Chewy bars, and pretty soon I would be out of water. I hadn't passed a single store or gas station on the entire ride, and wouldn't find one until mile 60. Luckily, though, I finally reached the top of the ridge at mile 40, and hardly had to climb another foot for the rest of the ride.

Life was perfect out here. All I could think about was how lucky I was to have this weather, this bike, this body, and the time to be doing this. I hardly got any sun on my bare arms and legs because I was under the canopy of redwoods almost the whole time, but every once in awhile there would be a break in the trees and I could see the entire Santa Cruz Mountain range spreading out around me (given, I was afraid I would have to climb another mountain and wondered which one of those humps would be next every time I looked over the views). I kept thinking about how far I had come since I lived in Santa Cruz and started riding and running for the first time. I kept thinking about how this was exactly what I'd been trying to get back to for so many years, and how lucky I was that I was finally here, despite the misfortune that it took to get me here. I wished Lindsey could see me now and eat her heart out. I couldn't believe how good life was.

When I got back to town, I met up with an old friend and Shane's ex girlfriend, Kat. We had both worked at the same gym in 2004-5 when I first got my personal training certification. I had done nothing with my credential back then and eventually let it expire, while she had been working in gyms ever since. Now we had both found our way back to personal training, her as a powerlifter turned martial artist and me as... Claire. She suggested we go to a tea room with a jacuzzi and catch up.

Slowly the conversation turned to training, and eventually body fat measurements. "I was below 15% before I moved out here, but now I've gotten so fat.." I told her. She looked at me in the borrowed bikini. "Yeah, there's no way you're 15% now," she told me matter-of-factly. It was a wake-up call. I was smarting from it for the rest of the night, until things went even worse and I had other things to feel bad about.

We went to dinner and to a small show with a bunch of bands whose songs all sounded the same and pretty much sucked. Suddenly I had a feeling, There's something wrong with my car! Kat had told me to leave the car in a shopping center where she promised that they never ticketed. I thought it was stupid to leave my car sitting there with the brand new bike in the back seat, right near where the junkies were known to hang out, even though downtown Santa Cruz looked like a church picnic compared to the San Francisco Civic Center area. When we got back to the parking lot, though, my car was gone altogether.

"Kat, where's my car?" I asked.

"What are you talking about? It's right there," she said.

"My car's not blue." Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! I had been working so, so, so hard to put together a savings account, to start to pay off my debt, to park carefully in San Francisco so that I wouldn't get towed or booted because I couldn't afford another setback like this. As with any misfortune, I wanted to blame someone else. I wanted to blame Kat for making me park there. I wanted to blame the towing company for being a bunch of fucking assholes who just steal people's money. I wanted to blame everyone I'd ever met in my life who I had willingly or unwillingly gone out to food, coffee, or drinks with. What I needed was to be alone and punch things, but instead I was in Kat's car having a panic attack about where I would get the $380 it would take me to get my car back.

Well-meaning, she tried to talk me down. "How can you be working so much and not have any money?" she asked. Because my life is out of control. I have so many business expenses that my real income is half of what it appears, and because I keep having to absorb financial setbacks. Because I constantly eat out because I have no time to cook. Because no one around me cooks either, so every time I want to hang out with someone, we have to spend money at a restaurant. Because I spend $50/week on gas. Because $380 isn't chump change! Then she started trying to solve my problems, which only made me feel more helpless. I can't cook! I don't have the time or energy or organizational skills or resources to be cooking for my schedule. Yes, I'm sure there is a way, but I sure as hell don't have the energy or the appetite for it. Because I have been emotional eating to get through my day and please, oh please, oh please don't make me face that demon too... I'm so exhausted from all of the things I've had to face over the past year. I just want things to be easy! Why oh why am I such a fuck-up. I recognized what she was trying to do; that I was stuck in my thinking and things are always better than you think, but I was just digging myself into a hole of frustration and self-loathing. I couldn't snap myself out of it.

I got my car back, and as I drove back to her house I figured out my real expenses in my head. I couldn't believe how much less money I really had than I thought. No wonder I still felt short so often! Why do you fail so badly at being a grown-up, Claire? Why can't you figure out this simple subtraction and addition? Kat continued to try to solve my mental block, but eventually she had to admit that I just needed to sleep it off. I didn't sleep it off, and was in a rotten mood all the next day (and deep into this week).

Sunday: Run 12.5 mi

The next morning I met up with Lorraine for the first time since the AIDS LifeCycle in 2008. We had a lot of catching up to do over our 12.5 mile trail run. "This has been my year of surgeries," she had told me over the phone. When I saw her in shorts and a tank top, I scanned her body for scars. I thought for sure that after all these years of ultrarunning, that her knees had finally given out, but her knees were unblemished. Her old shoulder issues maybe? But nope, those were good too.

"So what did you have operated on?!" I asked.

"My brain."

"WHAT?!" She had had a noncancerous tumor pressing on her facial and auditory nerve. They had had to sever the auditory nerve, which affected her balance making her run "like an old lady," as she put it. Well this 60-year-old woman who was running "like an old lady" after brain surgery still schooled me on the trails, but at least I was stronger than her dog, who was also getting old.

It was good to talk to Lorraine. My life would be very, very different if I'd never met her. I don't know if I ever would have gotten into trail running or even ultradistance stuff... or even cycling if it weren't for her. She taught me to change my first flat. She made fun of me for not having the right bike etiquette. Today I was telling her about my cracked frame and all the memories I had on it. Lorraine, who is not a very reflective person said, "You know, it's important to take a second to look back at how far you've come. When I met you, you were still riding that bike with a kickstand," (the Pugeot).

She was right, of course. "Lorraine, you've finished every 100 miler you've ever done and won your age group at Western States. You've gotta be so proud of what you've done, but no one can even conceive of what an achievement that is. How do you handle the problem of when people don't even know how to measure your successes. I mean, you've got to have bad 50 milers, right? For you, 50 miles doesn't even register as an accomplishment to finish. So how do you deal with the people who can only think to say, 'but that's amazing that you even finished at all! I couldn't even drive 50 miles! (harharhar)'"

"I had that conversation with my doctor just a few weeks ago," she told me. "I was telling him that I felt like I still didn't have my energy back" (the surgery was almost a year ago). "He asked me what I was doing and I told him trail running, road biking, lifting weights, but I still wasn't mountain biking. He said, 'I have trouble feeling sorry for you because you're doing so much better than 99% of the other patients that I see."

"But he doesn't get that your life was bigger than 99.99% of the people that he sees," I pointed out. "You had so much more to lose! This is your life." It was impossible to stay angry around Lorraine, although I was still a bit sullen about my predicament. It really would have been the perfect weekend...

Sobriety: Epilogue

Last night I found myself with a consecutive evening and morning off. Ever since I realized that my 6-month sobriety Birthday had gone by without my ever even noticing, I've been looking around at my life and realizing how little it resembles the disaster that I was living through the first few months that I was here. It's been making me realize how happy my life is these days, and spawning daily Mary Tyler Moore "You're gonna make it after all!" moments. And while Boston (and the rest of the country) is buried under about 6 feet of snow, we've been having clear, sunny days here in San Francisco. I've actually had some free time in the middle of the day to go out and enjoy the views (views are something you don't always get in Fog City, so I enjoy them when I can).

The other morning I went to the beach to do a barefooted sand run in the waves (in January! Life is so good!). I was in the extreme southwest corner of the city when I got in my car and realized that I'd done the math wrong. I needed to be in Chinatown in the extreme northeastern corner of the city (about 13 miles away), parked, changed, and ready to teach a Spin class in 34 minutes. Oh. Fuck.

Once I realized how fucked I was, things started going wrong. I started hitting every light wrong. I kept winding up in the wrong lane. I blew out my flip flop. People (old, slow people) always wanted to cross the crosswalk when I wanted to make a right turn. I was working myself up into a frenzy when suddenly I remembered, Oh yeah. God. It's not that I started to believe in God when I was in AA, but I saw the value of turning over things that were beyond my control to some force greater than myself. It didn't really matter if it was true, at least I'd stop making stupid mistakes because I was frustrated. I did make it to my Spin class with a couple of minutes to spare, by the way.

I hadn't given any thought to God since I spent all that time in churches when I first got here. I'd forgotten all about Him, or that I had ever even considered a spiritual corner of my life. I had also completely forgotten about all the other AA skills that I'd learned, and hadn't even thought of most of the people I'd met through AA since I stormed out of my last Meeting. I wondered if they thought I'd relapsed. I wondered if anyone even gave it a second thought. And didn't I have a chip coming to me?

So last night I went back to the Meeting that used to be my "Home Group" (not because I'd chosen it to be so, but because it seemed to be the one I could make it to most consistently). This was the Meeting where all the same girls said all the same things every week and I could never get called on. Before I even went to the church, I went into a market to find myself some dinner. I remembered with some satisfaction that the last time I had gone to this Meeting, I had mostly gone for the free cookies because I couldn't afford food. Thank god that I wasn't trying to go to Meetings anymore, because all the Meetings are at times when now I'm with clients and earning money.

While I was skulking around the organic foods, I saw one of the Super Sponsors that always gets to talk waist deep in the refrigerator case. I ran around the corner into the cracker aisle before she got a chance to see me. As soon as I saw her, I had that yucky feeling under my skin that I get when I revisit a really unpleasant time in my life. I wanted nothing to do with this Fellowship! However, hiding was ridiculous and finally I let her see me, waited for her at the door to finish paying, and then walked to the church with her.

She asked how I was doing. I felt positively buoyant compared to how I'd felt the last time I made that walk. Once I let go of all that AA rigidity, life had taken on a momentum of its own. I asked her how she was doing. "Wonderful. It'll be four years next week, God willing," she said. God willing?! I thought. After 4 years can't you take just a little bit of credit and trust just a little bit in momentum? Maybe if she hadn't been so preoccupied with thinking about how close she was to her next drink all the time, then she could have actually enjoyed her accomplishment, but whatever. It made me pity her.

In the church I found the Girl Who Used to Stare at Me and caught up with her. "Are you still going to a Meeting every day?" I asked.

"Yep, pretty much. I find it keeps me much more sane," she said. For real?! I thought. My skin was crawling more than ever breathing the same air that I used to when I was going so crazy. Looking back, I feel like the sun came out and everything started working out for me when I dropped AA. When you're on the right path, doors open automatically...

There were some new faces, but most of the same chicks who always talked in the Meeting were still there. I wondered how many of the missing faces had relapsed and how many were just going to other Meetings. We read a short chapter from the Big Book, and in my head I thought, "Just my luck, I came for a boring one." There was just nothing in this whole story that I could relate to at all. I thought that everyone else must feel the same. The guy didn't even talk that much about drinking, it was mostly just about the logistics of getting AA off the ground in the early days in Canada. Who cares about Canada 80 years ago? I figured it would be a quiet day, since you had to at least make it seem like you were relating your Share to the Big Book reading.

The first girl spoke. "I am just so, so, so, so blown away by this story. I actually started getting teared up at the part about..." Huh? Even more so than ever before I felt like I'd wandered into a cult meeting.

All the same girls made all the same Shares about all the same vague shit, dropping in their AA jargon and saying, "Welcome to the newcomers..." and "thanking everyone for their shares." Some things never change (God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...).

By the end of the Meeting, I couldn't have been more certain that I'd made the right decision about walking away from AA four months ago, and wondered why it had even taken me that long. I needed an alcohol-free life to get sane again and move on. These girls weren't living an alcohol-free life. They were coming back to alcohol at every single Meeting. Even after four years, the girl in the market's entire life still revolved around booze. I wondered if you compared all the time she spent going to Meetings and talking to her sponsor and sponsees, if she had actually spent that much time drinking four years ago. I doubted it.

Still, when they passed around the collection plate for the Seventh Tradition, I put money in. And in the final Serenity Prayer, I held everyone's hand and chanted, "Keep coming back, it works!" with everyone else. Because it does work for some people. I was just so, so grateful that I wasn't one of them.

After the Meeting was over, I tracked down the girl that I had spoken to before my last Meeting; the one who had warily given me her blessing to leave AA. "I'm glad to see you," she said. "I was worried about you."

"I am so, so, so good!" I told her. "It was the right decision, for me. Life is falling back into place like I hoped it would. I just thought I'd swing by now that I finally feel like I've got my head on straight to see if it changed anything. I don't think it would be wise to close the door on AA altogether," I said, although I was pretty sure AA would never be a part of my daily life again.

"Well I worry about all alcoholics who are out there on their own, but I'm glad you're doing well. Come back and visit again sometime."

"Sure," I said. "I'll have another milestone in six months."