"Recovery"

Life is hard.

Sometimes life gets really rough and it's not any one thing that puts you (me) over the edge, but the fifth, or tenth, or forty-second thing in a row where you finally snap and no one quite understands where it came from. It's kind of like overtraining in that way. How can you put your finger on the one workout that made your knee hurt? You can't. It just happened. Wherever I've worked I've been known as "moody." Goodness knows why people continue to put up with me, but I try to do my part to keep it under control by stomping off to stew in private until I eventually get over it and there is no need for confrontation. Every once in awhile someone will interrupt me in my private sullenness. It's like they stepped on a landmine and don't know what hit them.

I don't know how I get away with it, but I try to apologize sincerely and articulately enough and then paste a big smile on my face and make fun of my temper. Really good people (especially men) can chuckle at my "hotheadedness."

This week not one but three of my coworkers were the unsuspecting victims of my vitriol. I was in rare form and had to do a lot of mental acrobatics before I could see another point of view and apologize. What the fuck is wrong with you? I ask myself frequently. I'm surrounded by a group of the most positive and driven people I've ever met, and they never seem to throw cell phones across the room (my housemate says I should be a commercial for Apple for the number of times my phone has survived this treatment) or tell each other to fuck off. I can't imagine how I'll ever adjust healthily to the pressure and responsibility of being my own business.

But the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a way of reminding you what it's all about sometimes. And He has a twisted sense of humor.

Late fall 2006

I woke up on Saturday to a Facebook message from the psychotic (not an expression, really psychotic) ex in Spain. I hadn't seen the girl in three and a half years and hadn't heard from her in about two. I had told her some time in early 2008 that I didn't want to hear from her until her life was sorted out, and since there was no way that that was ever going to happen, don't bother contacting me with your lies either. The profile picture that she'd chosen was a close-up of her middle finger and the message was to-the-point. "¿Es difícil mantenerse recta en bicicleta cuando estás borracha? Aún me debes mucho dinero, vigoréxica." (Is it hard to stay upright on a bike when you're drunk? You still owe me a lot of money, [and then something like] you exo-rexic bitch.")

Usually when someone picks a fight with me I can feel my face flushing, my blood pressure rising, and adrenaline spreading on the sides of my tongue, but this just made me simmer. For half a second I wanted to respond that I'd been sober for all but two months of the three years and seven months since she'd seen me, and that clearly she was as fucked up as the day I'd left her to rot alone in her apartment. Obviously this was a clear case of drunk and coked out facebooking if there ever was one.

A little history about the psychotic (no, for real psychotic!) ex:
At various points before and while I knew her she was diagnosed as bipolar, borderline personality, bulemic, clinically depressed, obsessive compulsive, paranoid schizophrenic, sociopathic, and batshit crazy. She'd fried her brain completely with hash and spent six months in rehab (where she even tried smoking goat shit to get high), then went out and got hooked on coke on purpose. She'd had multiple psychotic breaks (including one when I was there). She was 33 years old and her parents still controlled her bank book and made her take a piss test every Monday and Friday. She gained 40 pounds in the year that I was stuck with her. She was a hot mess. She dragged me down with her.

May 2006

When I met her, I wasn't drinking and was training like crazy for a half ironman that I never got to do in Portugal. I was traveling all over Catalonia almost weekly for biking, running, and swimming events. She hated that. She hated being stuck in the apartment by herself. All she used to do all day was sit in bed smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall, and when I was out doing my thing, she had to do that alone. We would rent movies, and then I would wind up watching them alone because she preferred to stare at the wall than follow the plot of a movie. It was fucked-up shit.

She could have come along on my adventures, and occasionally she did but I always regretted it. She came to the Pyranees with me for a bike race and slept the entire 8 hours that I was riding, even missing the finish. She came to the finish of a half marathon in Tarragona, stood there for 5 minutes and decided it was too crowded. Then she went home and when I didn't show up right on time she called the Tarragona cops to see if I'd died. "The people I was seeing cross the finish line looked terrible. I figured that if you were behind them, you must be dead," she told me. Once I ran the Barcelona Marathon, which passed within a block of the apartment. She didn't even get out of bed to watch. Instead she'd spent the night doing coke behind my back because she knew that I wouldn't get out of bed to bug her about it.

Later she admitted that she purposely got me back drinking so that I wouldn't leave to work out so much. She thought I was addicted to exercise, and wanted me to just act normally already (which meant partying like crazy, chain smoking, and eating crap food). She told me that exercising that much just wasn't healthy. Another time I bet her dinner that she couldn't run a kilometer without stopping. We went to the track and she did it, but her lungs hurt for two days afterward. Her conclusion: running (not smoking) is bad for your lungs.

Since her parents tracked every penny she spent, we came up with an arrangement whereby I would buy all the drinks and she would buy all the food. Of course she didn't tell her parents that she was drinking, and instead told them that I was having a tough time and couldn't afford food. They would tell her terrible things about me, and she actually began to believe them. I began to dread every time she went to see her parents because she would come home and rail on me for a day or so about things that had only the slightest resemblance to reality. As she got fatter and fatter and her parents started to criticize her, and it also fell to me to buy the junk food (I was eating less and less at this point because I was drinking more and more). She would eat until she was sick. Once she ate two hot dogs and a giant bag of pork rinds in one sitting. When she went to work the next day, she felt sick to her stomach. They demanded a doctor's note before sending her home, so sent her to the company clinic where the nurse asked if it was something she ate. No... she lied. Then she came home and ate the same thing that night and had to go through the same routine at work the next day. She was the most addictive personality I have ever seen.


Meanwhile, as she got crazier and crazier I became more and more trapped in the apartment. I was even afraid to leave for work because she would pitch such a fit every time I tried to walk out the door. She frequently begged me to call into work and stay home drinking with her. I couldn't sleep. I was hardly eating. My drinking would start with breakfast (or in lieu of breakfast) and go into the wee hours of the morning. I couldn't write in the morningsbecause my hands would shake so badly. I woke up every morning with a feeling of impending doom because I didn't remember what I'd done the night before and I was afraid of what might happen today. More and more I was stuck in that bed staring at the wall too. The only hope I ever felt was when I thought about escaping and getting sober. That thought was why I got up every morning.

Winter, early 2007

When it was all unraveling so quickly that neither of us knew what to do with ourselves, she admitted, "I had no idea that you had such a problem with alcohol. I thought you were exaggerating about being an addict. I mean, how could you be if you stopped on your own and exercised so much? I had to go to rehab for 6 months to quit hash. But you really have a problem." Now neither of us knew how to stop it.

One night about a week before I finally left, she went to her parents' house and I came home from drinks with a friend to a particularly evil look in her eye. "I cheated on you," she said.

"Oh?" I asked, disinterested.

"When you were home for two weeks I went out and found a guy and I fucked him in our bed all night for free coke." She'd never even been with a guy before. It all sounded like the most terrible night ever for her. I had no pity, only disgust for her.

"Well that sucks for you," I said. I really could not have cared less.

When I moved back to the States, I was so happy to be free that it gave me the fire in my belly that I needed to sober up on my own and the willingness to go out and try anything. I beat my mind into submission, and that fire took over a year to finally die down to the point where I felt like I could really touch it. My "Recovery" was from alcohol, but it was also a second chance at life and I understood how precious it could be to go out and see the world. But that was almost four years ago. Life changes. You forget.

That Facebook message brought everything back, and suddenly life looked bright and shiny again. That morning I laced up my running shoes and made it out for the first trail run I'd been able to squeeze in all week. I ran the most direct (but also steepest) route up the tallest mountain on the peninsula, and found that I was able to run almost the whole thing. The trail starts in a eucalyptus grove, the moves up the side of the mountain through manzanita trees with views of waterfalls and the steep ridges next to me. Then you tromp through the brush and onto the sandstone as the brush gets thinner and the trail gets thicker and you pass old hermit caves and skeletons of half-century-old car wrecks. At the top I could see the bay to the east, the ocean to the west, Half Moon Bay to the south, and past San Francisco to Marin to the north. It made me furious that I'd even had to argue about whether this was healthy or not.

After my run, I showered and met up with a client/friend to go to the rock climbing gym. At one point I fell off the wall and collapsed onto the mats in a fetal position, which got us both rolling on the mats and laughing hysterically. We climbed until my rhomboids exploded and my forearms were so useless that I couldn't even tie my shoes. Sure, I'd spent the afternoon sitting there staring at a wall, but then I'd gone and climbed it.

My life may be hectic and I may be barely keeping it together most of the time, but that's because I'm trying to cram so much in. Despite many of the speedbumps I've encountered, I have pretty much the greatest life there ever was. Even on the shitty days I have at least one moment where I look around and think, I am so lucky that this is really my life! And look at the cool shit that I get to do with it! I've gotten to ride my bike over the most famous mountains in France, done an Ironman in Mexico, driven cross-country as part of a RAAM crew and saw the sun set over the Grand Canyon and the sun rise over Monument Valley the next day. I have the endurance to run for hours through some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and within an hour I can ride from where I work to a 2500' mountain top. And people pay me to play with them all day. How many jobs can you say "fuck" in front of a client?!

I wish that I could take all the bright, vibrant colors of my life and put them up against the dingy yellow cigarette-stained colors of the psychotic ex's life and rub her nose in it. I wish I could take the full magnitude of it, bottle it up, and spray it in the middle of an AA Meeting and scream, "FUCK YOUR 'PROMISES,' HAS A MEETING EVER GIVEN YOU THIS?!" I wish I could drag Lindsey around on my shoulder for one single day so that she could see what is possible when you just get out of your own head and let opportunities come to you. But most of all, I wish I could just figure out how to shut up that little voice in my head that compiles tiny imaginary tragedies to compound them on one another and tell myself the story that my life is drama. I like the Epictetus quote, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." And then there's the Martha Washington quote reminds me that it's the stories I tell myself about my life that are what matter: "I have learned that the greater part of misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition."

Cyclist Interruptus

I've been having bad luck with my long rides lately. It just seems that every time I try to do a long ride, something happens and my willpower is to squishy to deal with it. First, there was the day of the many flats when I missed the last control point and was listed as a DNF. Then there was the rainy day when I drove all the way to Santa Rosa before dawn only to find that I had a slow leak and decided not to risk it. Then there was the day when I found myself alone with the most confusing part of the ride ahead of me. This weekend I decided that if I wanted something done right, then I was going to have to do it myself -- or by myself.

The first double century of the California Triple Crown is on April 30, and it's got tons of climbing. So I not only had to ride long, but I was also going to have to ride long over hills. So I designed a punishing 170-mile ride that left out my front door, rode 80 miles south, and then turned around into the mountains to come home. For the most part, they were roads I'd ridden before and they were nearly all numbered country highways, so I thought I was safe, right?

Right?

Right?!

I rolled out the door at 7:18, only about 18 minutes after my projected leaving time and headed off into the world. Only about 9 miles into the world, I was riding along happily on my highway when suddenly I found myself on a freeway on-ramp. I didn't even realize I was headed for the freeway until I was already on it! I slammed on the brakes and tried to figure out what had happened, then I backtracked. There was a bike path that I could see only a few feet away to my right, but there was a barbed wire fence in between me and it. I rolled back until I found a spot where the top wire was torn, then I hiked my bike over the fence, through a bog, and onto the bike path. An old couple out for their morning walk looked at me like I was swamp thing emerging from the murk.

Eventually I found my way to where I needed to be and rode on for a few more miles until I found... a detour. Goddammit motherfucker! I thought as I rolled down a steep hill and then back up the other side. This detour went on for about 10 miles. How far off course was I riding? It was pretty, but 'pretty' wasn't what I was after. I wanted simple and flat at this point in the ride, since I was going to have to ride back over these roads in the first few miles home when I would be blind and foggy with fatigue. Eventually, though, I got back on track and I zipped along in wonder at how good my body felt. Then I realized that I'd only gone about 30 miles. Of course my body felt good now!

At mile 50 I hooked up with Highway 1, the coastal highway that has been thrice bad luck for me in the past. Back in college, this was the stretch of road where I used to yell at the wind, but I was going south, so the wind was at my back and I enjoyed effortless supra-20mph speeds. I'm so glad that I'm not riding north on the coast so that this wind can't come back and bite me in the ass, I thought and rolled along merrily. I thought I'd outsmarted the wind. You never outsmart the wind.

The hills started at mile 80 when the elevation goes from 60' to 2500' in 8 miles as you climb up from the beach into the Santa Cruz mountains. Since these roads were just behind the UCSC campus, I had glossed over the particulars of the route on the cue sheet (that was written in Sharpie on my arm). These roads were my old stomping grounds... sorta. I mean I'd been there once or twice. Then I reached a fork in the road. Pine Flat Rd or Bonny Doon Rd? They both sounded familiar. I tried to check the map on my phone, but I had no reception (reception would be the problem again and again on my ride as I rode farther and farther into the sticks). A man was walking down the road toward me, "Which one of these goes to Empire Grade?" I asked.

"Es lo mismo," he said, making a big circle with his hands to indicate that the roads came back together.

I switched to Spanish. "Well then which one is less steep?" I asked. He shrugged and pointed at Pine Flat road. "Gracias," I said. "Que vaya bien" (have a good one).

"You're welcome," he said in English. That pisses me off. You ask a question in Engish and someone responds in Spanish. So I assume, alright, this guy's not comfortable speaking English. I speak Spanish. This is fine. Let's communicate. Then they clam up and refuse to speak Spanish and respond in English. WTF is that all about. You started it! I would have liked to ask him which one was shorter, which one spit me out further north, and was he sure, but he didn't seem to want to talk to me. Instead I stopped at every bus stop along the way to make sure that he hadn't given me wrong directions. And in case you're wondering, Pine Flats road is not flat.

When I got to the top I made a right on a road that I'd forgotten about and hated with every fiber of my being. It's a twisting, narrow, one-lane back road through the woods that is so steep that I couldn't stop my bike even if I needed to. In some 3 miles it drops almost 2000'. As I descended every muscle from my wrists to my shoulders and down my back to my hips ached from pulling on the brake levers and shivering like mad as the wind cut through my sweat-soaked clothes. The climb up from the beach had been sunny, but now that I was under the redwood canopy, it was pretty damned cold today come to think of it. I fucking hate that road.

Now I was riding through the giant redwoods and sequoias in Big Basin state park on a 15-mile loop. In a well-intentioned but misinformed attempt to see more scenery, I turned off the main highway and took a back road. While this road was "paved," the neglected asphalt was about half way through its transformation to gravel with squishy, wet blobs of old pine needle pulp covering half the "road." Even when I crested the climb and started coming back down the other side, I had to slow down to zigzag my way over the real pavement and pray that there was nothing sharp hidden in the shadows. I was beginning to see that even though I can usually polish off 220 miles (50 miles more than my route today) in the 12 hours of daylight that I had, time was still going to be an issue today. If you were looking at my speed profile, the downhills were barely distinguishable from the uphills. At 120 miles into the ride, I could feel that I was right on the edge of losing it. But luckily, I only had a few more uphill miles and then it would be a long, gradual downhill home.

Right?

Right?!

When I turned out of Big Basin, I saw that I only had 6 miles left on Highway 9 before I turned onto 35. I knew that the intersection of Hwy 9 & 35 was the summit of the ridge, and then there was nowhere to go but down. Right? Six miles seemed like nothing, until I looked down at my watch and saw that I was riding along at about 6 mph. At this rate I'd never get there! Somewhere in there I started to crack. Just 6 miles, and then another mile or 2 on Skyline (Hwy 35), and then it's down, down, down to go home, I kept telling myself. I tried to hold it together.

Then I turned onto Skyline. Skyline is not named because you can see the San Francisco skyline, it's called "Skyline" because you're riding along the spot where the land meets the sky. I'd thought I'd dodged a bullet by not riding back north along the coast, but what I'd neglected to think about was that if there's one place that's windier than the coast, it's when you're the tallest thing around. I was met with an icy full-faced headwind that felt like it was in the high teens to low twenties mph. The problem with the wind wasn't so much that it was slowing me down, but that it was fucking cold up here! I was still in the shade, some clouds had rolled in, and it must have been in the low 40's.

And that part about the hills? Well I was wrong. For hours and hours and hours I crawled along as the ridge undulated up and down 2-500 feet at a time. Through the trees I could see the bay way down to my right and the ocean way down to my left and the sun shining on the buildings on each side, but I was stuck up here in the cold and the wind and the hills, hills, hills, hills, hills! I wanted to check how far I was from home, but I still had no reception. By this point I'd lost it.

"LET ME DOWN OFF THIS FUCKING MOUNTAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I yelled out loud. I yelled it again and again.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I screamed every time I came around another bend and there was more climbing to do. "NO MORE FUCKING CLIMBING! I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"GIVE IT BACK!!!" I yelled when I came around another bend and I found that I had to keep climbing. ("It" being the elevation. I wanted some free miles already.)

I was sort of crying, but not crying tears, the kind of crying that 5-year-olds do when they're looking for attention. I wanted out of this ride. I wanted to go home. "I WANT TO GO HOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I yelled. Still, whenever a car came around I tried to put on my poker face so that no one would see me throwing a temper tantrum. It was fine only so long as I was alone.

Somewhere around Palo Alto I was riding along an exposed section of road with a sign that said "Windy Hill" when I got hit face-on by a mighty gust of wind. "I'M FUCKING COLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I yelled at the wind.

Just then another rider came around. "Cold up here today, isn't it?" he asked cheerfully. I wanted to disappear. Luckily I was in no mood to be trying to keep up and he wasn't around for long.

I realized quickly that I wasn't going to get home before night fell, and that I was pretty much fucked. I decided that, pride be damned, I was going to pull over at the next gas station or coffee shop that I saw, order something warm, and call someone to come pick my ass up. My legs felt fine, but I was cold and miserable and had no lights. I wondered if when I got home there would be a genuine way to kneel down and kiss the ground that wouldn't look overly dramatic. And still, for what felt like hours I didn't pass a single business and my phone had no service.

Finally the mountain let me go. Before I realized what had happened, I was in San Mateo, only about 20 flat miles from home with about an hour of light left. But with this headwind I knew I wasn't going to make it.

There was a Starbucks.
With a fireplace (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog).

I pulled over. It was over.

In less than a month I have a double century coming up with over 18,000' of climbing. What did I learn during my ride this weekend?

1. If I go my own pace, then my energy will last but I have to be prepared for hours of speeds under 10 mph.
   
2. Even if you have to pay $3/bottle of Gatorade, the electrolytes will save your ride. Time to start springing for Nuun again.
3. Go your own pace on the hills and you won't blow up, idiot!
4. I'm fucked.
   

Starbucks, please sponsor my blaaaaaarrrrggg!

This race report may or may not be related to my last post about not feeling too well. For those of you unlicensed doctors out there who love giving advice, that's the post for you. This one's mostly about barf because barf is funny, as is anything that belongs in the toilet but didn't quite make it.

I signed up for the Rhodes Race 5K in Oakland mostly to support the race director and fellow blogger ClaireB, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. However, with my ride the day before getting cut in half, my legs were freed up to run a little faster. What "fast" meant today was anyone's guess. I've probably run fewer 5K's in my life than there are K's in a 5K, and with most of my training lately being on trails, I had no idea what my body was going to decide to do. As I told fellow Girls on the Run people (GOTR is where ClaireB works and Speedy Claire volunteers) at the start, I could either come in really slow, or I could run fast then crap my pants at mile 2 and have to walk it in. Hahaha, I'm so funny, right? Well if you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I was kind of serious.



The gun went off. Since there were 3 GOTR staff and volunteers around me and Claire B would also be seeing me suck or not, I made sure that I was out in front of our little cloud for at least the first minute of the race. Then I decided to try to figure out a plan. The plan was: don't look at your watch (which I suppose means "run on feel" but my "feel-o-meter" has never been calibrated, especially over short distances).

After ducking and dodging through the crowd to a pace that felt "comfortably uncomfortable," my watch sang. Thinking it was the one-mile alarm, I looked down astounded: "6:06" it read. Then I realized it was the six-minute time alert and went back to the race plan. Mile 1 felt good, and had I looked at my watch (which I didn't), I would have seen that my split was 7:22. (Exactly my 5K PR pace, but I had no idea at the time since I had to go look it up the next day.)



Then at mile 2 the Phantom Poo started its insistent rotting in my digestive tract. I'd broken Claire's No. 1 Rule of Public Pooping: Don't twice this morning to avoid this problem. I'd gone once at Starbucks (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog) before hitting the freeway, and then again when I got to the race venue. And yet I felt like a slippery, slidy turd slug would slough out of my normally iron-like sphincter if I didn't concentrate. And concentrate I did as the slight downward grade from the first mile turned to a flat road for the second mile and keeping up with the guy in front of me didn't feel so easy anymore. My split for mile 2 (which I didn't see) was 7:31.



The next mile I was searching longingly along the outskirts of the lake we were circling for the dock that was the start/finish. The pond had that festering duck pond smell and it was making me feel nauseous. Or maybe that was the running that was making me feel sick. I was continuing my campaign with the phantom poo, but the phantom poo had allied itself with my muscles to call an end to my race, and I hoped I could hang on for long enough to not have to slow down precipitously. I tried to lay ever so slightly off the gas.



As I approached the 3-mile mark, I had time to formulate the thought into words, The phantom poo wants out, and it's going to get out any way that it can. I just hope I can hold off until the finish. Then I crossed the 3-mile line (7:38), and suddenly, BLAM! The phantom poo said, YOU'RE GONNA PUKE RIGHT NOW!

"BLAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG!" I said, vomiting up mostly Starbucks with little flecks of strawberry in it (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog).

"BLAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG!" A little less Starbucks this time (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog).

"BLAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG!" No product at all in this attempt, just lots of noise. This was not the silent, private kind of puking where the food silently leaps out of your throat. This was violent, yelling, vomiting from the bottoms of my toes kind of puking.

Then a guy came up behind me to pass. "Come on! You can do it! You're almost there!" he said.

I wanted to say, No, I clearly can't do it. I'll get around to it when I'm finished with this. Instead I said "BLAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG!" and saw a little more Starbucks (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog).

I threw up a few more times, and just as quickly as it came on, I was fine again. As I turned around I noticed that a woman about my age wearing a pink top had just passed me. I couldn't let her go, and dashed off after her at mid-6 pace. But she got away. "Way to go, Molly," they said at the finish (her name wasn't really Molly). Then the guy who tore off my tag handed it to the other guy and said, "Hers goes after Molly's."

To Molly I wanted to say, "BLAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG!" but I was finished puking. All told, I think that 23:38 had passed when I chased Molly into the finishing chute. Claire B later told me that that was good enough for third in my AG, but I'm not about to gloat since about half the people in the race were under 12, over 65, or dogs. Still, I wish I'd stuck around for the awards ceremony.

I was proud of my performance. This was the first time that I had pushed myself to vomiting in a non-hangover-related incident. The pride was slightly diminished by the fact that I felt ill for the rest of the day and into the next, but I have decided to see the sunny side of this cloud and call it a really hard run.

Go me!

Is it bad, doc?

Something is wrong with me -- very, very wrong. If it's not some ghastly parasite or illness, then at least a debilitating case of hypochondria complicated by a crippling unwillingness to take responsibility for my shortcomings.

This is a race report of a DNF, but it is also a big, fat, protracted excuse. And this excuse picks up from my last post 2 weeks ago. My slothfulness has not improved. Mom came to town for 6 days last week, and in those 6 days I slept 10 hours per night and did nothing but sit on my big, fat ass for all but 2 of those days with a headache and feeling like I could curl up and fall asleep in the first available doorway or park bench. The one non-work-related workout that I did was a 9.75-mi run up Montara Mountain. Parts of this trail are steep, but never you fear, I walked those parts as well as a great deal of the more "runable" sections. I felt like the batteries in my legs needed to be changed and I was breathing through a fluffy towel. I stopped on an easy bit to shed a layer and almost threw up in the brush at the side of the trail. After that 10 mile run I felt like I'd run 18 hilly miles without a walking break. My calves were sore. Stairs were a chore. I was stiff. My knees hurt and my quads hurt.

Then there was the crushing, blinding fatigue. Despite all the sleep I've been getting, I felt like I could fall asleep at any second. I had headaches. Smells were making me dizzy and nauseous (like the old lady soap and halitosis smell coming from my mom in the passenger seat of the car). It felt just like a hangover when an hour after you wake up, your eyes are closing on their own and you feel like your limbs are filled with concrete.

Flash forward to Friday. Insomnia was back and I'd only slept about 4 hours, but at least I didn't feel hung over anymore. It was a beautiful day so I went on a hike with two trainers from work in lieu of a run. We hiked five miles over trails I run all the time, but afterward I woke up sore after my fitful nap. My calves felt like rocks and my feet hurt. The tops of my calves never get tight. My feet never hurt. I ran a marathon in racing flats a week after buying them and another in Nike Frees when I'd never run more than an hour in them in training, and even then my feet didn't hurt, but they hurt after a 5 mile hike?

Alright, alright. I'll get to the race report.

Another night of insomnia later, I got up at 3am to make the 6 o'clock start of the Santa Cruz Randonneurs 300k. I made it to the start early, pissed, checked in, pissed again, and then waited for the start. I was planning on riding conservatively, but fell in comfortably with the lead group. "Were you at the ride a couple of weeks ago?" a SMO40 (straight man over 40), or "SMoFo" asked me. "You were the one riding with the lead guys who kept getting dropped and then catching back on, right? And then you just disappeared."

A quick look at his ass and I recognized him. I explained about the flat tires and how I'd covered the distance but DNFed all the same. "I won't be riding that fast today though," I explained.

"Me neither! Those triathlete guys were pushing 25 mph all the way to Half Moon Bay and then they just dropped off some time after you disappeared," he explained. Well no wonder then! I thought. And here I was beating myself up for being out of shape, but when they said we were still holding 24 mph at mile 50, they had meant the average pace, not the current pace. If you remember, I was riding blind without a computer that day. Then the SMoFo and I made the usual excuses about how little training we'd done in the rain so that we could be friends. "I haven't been training," means, "be nice to me and I'll be nice to you. We can work together to get through this easier rather than dragging each other's asses through the dirt."

SMoFo and I eventually found ourselves in a group of six guys at the front of the race. Every once in awhile that thing would happen where I would realize that I was sitting on a wheel that was dropping off the pace and have to come around. Then I'd catch another wheel just as he also fell off the pace and I'd have to come around again. "Thanks for pulling us up!" one guy said.

"Pulling?! I've been sucking wheels this whole time!" I said.

I was sucking SMoFo's wheel when suddenly I heard a nose noise and got a wet spray all over my face. "Gaaargh!" I yelled. Nothing says "I love you" like a snot rocket to the face. He apologized profusely and I said it was okay, these things happen. Because what else can you say when someone is genuinely sorry and getting mad won't get the snot off your face. So now he was obligated to be nice to me out of guilt, and I was obligated to be nice to him just to prove that I wasn't the sort of person who could hate you forever for blowing mucus straight into my face. I could imagine a romantic comedy starting this way.

The course went 50 miles north, turned back to Santa Cruz, then went 50 miles south of Santa Cruz to Marina before heading back again. About 5 miles shy of the first turn-around in Half Moon Bay we hit a 1-mile gradual climb. As I do, I slowly, slowly fell off the pace, despite riding so hard that I could taste the ocean in the back of my throat from snorting my own sweat (I don't do snot rockets). At the top of the hill I was probably about 15s down (a difference that I can usually make up, but not in today's stiff headwind.) SMoFo hand fallen away a few miles back, and the 200-rider-strong pack had long ago whittled down to the 3 men ahead of me who I just needed to ease the fuck up a second! I sat there bitching and whining at them in my head. What fucking gentlemen! You wait up for other riders, but you won't softpedal for half a fucking minute for me. But they weren't listening to the thoughts in my head and before long they were gone up the road.

At Half Moon Bay I had to pull out my cue sheet (which I had this time), and finally my SMoFo caught up. Together we rode right by the control and had to turn around.

The three fastest guys pulled out of the control point as I was refilling my bottles. If I had arrived thirty seconds earlier then I would have been with them, but instead SMoFo and I set out alone. Over the next 50 miles I would go over and over in my head how I could have made up that 30 seconds to stick with the 3 other SMoFos. Not that Mr. Sniffles was a bad guy, just that there was only one of him, and I'd already proven myself stronger. I would much rather be the weakest in a strong pack than the strongest in a weak pack over this kind of distance, where I could usually count on my legs giving up more slowly than the big boys.

We had a tailwind now, so SMoFo spent the next 10 miles riding next to me and telling me about why he hadn't been training. His brother the lifelong smoker had gone in for bypass surgery. Then he'd developed blood clots in his legs in the hospital. They became gangrenous. They cut off toes, but then they had to cut off one leg, then the other to save his life. SMoFo had had to sign off on all the amputations and had gone to the hospital every day for 45 days to visit him. After a month, when his brother finally came out of his stupor and discovered his legs were gone, he'd told SMoFo that he should have just let him die. Neither of us really wanted to talk after that, so I pulled for a long while.

When SMO40 rolled up next to me again at mile 70 I told him, "I'm already counting down the miles."

"My legs don't feel good," he confessed. "I think I'm going to stop when we get to Santa Cruz. Do you want me to pull you until then so that you can save your energy? How's this pace? 20 mph?"

"Feels good," I said. Then he took off at 21. Before I'd realized it, a gap had opened up and when I couldn't even make myself care, it was the first hint that I was already cooked. I knew that I had to keep eating if I expected my legs to continue to work for me, but now that I thought about it I realized that I was nauseous too. When SMoFo finally noticed that I was gone and let me catch up, I told him that I didn't think I was in the right frame of mind to concentrate on staying on anyone's wheel.

For the rest of the ride back we leapfrogged along in silence, me opening big gaps until I thought that he was gone behind me, then 20 minutes later there he'd be. All I kept thinking was, Please don't leave me here alone! I intended to keep going, but I had no idea how I'd negotiate the next 2 pages of turns alone with no handlebar mount for my cue sheet. As we crossed the Santa Cruz town line, SMoFo said, "half way there!" I looked at my watch: 94.67 miles. I wanted to cry. I was already sore and tired like I had 200 miles in me already, and now the wind had turned again. I felt like I could curl up and fall asleep over my handlebars.

"SMoFo, can you do me a favor before you go? Can you stop off with me so that I can get a Red Bull and go to the bathroom without leaving my bike alone?"

"Of course!"

When I stood up at the 7 11, my eyes wouldn't focus. I almost wandered right into the stock room before I realized that I had to ask first. The clerk looked like another lifetime smoker -- unsympathetic. No bathroom. "Fuck it!" I said when I came out, handing my brevet card to SMoFo. "Will you give him mine too when you throw in the towel?"

We said our goodbyes and I went back to the car, frustrated. I couldn't work it out. Was I just out of shape? No, can't be. I've ridden 1 century, 3 200Ks and a trainer century in the past 3 months and all have felt better than this. Nutrition? No, by now I've got my routine down. Overtraining? How could it be? Everything indicates that I'm getting stronger since my training got cut by 50% because of the African Sleeping Sickness. Pacing? No! I'd been watching my heart rate and breathing all morning.

Which leaves only more drastic hypotheses: chronic fatigue? adrenal burnout? anemia? B12 deficiency? parasites? cancer? some rare genetic disorder? There are 199 possible causes for "extreme fatigue" on wrongdiagnosis.com and 99 if you add a second symptom of "low energy."

I wish I could just get a full blood panel, but I can't afford insurance. So I'm turning to the common knowledge of the Internet community, because how could that be wrong?!

Stay tuned, the race report for the next day is even more interesting. Rather than snot, this one is all about vomit-- MINE!