Relapse

Video for background music only.

There are other things to talk about: races, rides, ennui/burnout, but right now all that's taken a backseat. Basically, I relapsed. Hard.

I could go on for hours (and have) about all the gory details, but basically Lindsey (fuck protecting her identity anymore) fucked another girl from work and lied to me about it. Many times. Then the other girl lied about it, when I didn't even ask. Then when Lindsey finally told me, it was over text message ("We're sleeping together. You should know.") and refused to take my call, that's when I went out and bought some beer. She had lied just yesterday and told me I still had a chance with her with that slut's pussy still on her breath! I no longer cared about anything in my life except making the hurt stop. When she told me she wasn't coming home that night, that's when I started drinking the beer.

That is when shit really hit the fan. I called her after she got out from work and begged her to please come home and talk to me about this, that I was already drinking and she was the only person who could stop me (truth and manipulation at once). She came home, but said she was going to do whatever the fuck she wanted, and I couldn't stop her. I lunged for the beer that was sitting on the other side of her.
"If you drink that fucking beer, then I'll never respect you again for as long as I live," she warned. That gave me pause, and gave her enough time to leave the room. But once I was alone again, I decided that I would do anything, even ruin any chance I ever had of a good post-relationship relationship with her to have that beer back.

But as I was reaching this decision, she was stealing my beer to bring to the skank's house. I would have poured every one of those beers down the drain, but she could not take what was mine for herself and drink it with that whore. It was locked in her car, so I sat on the porch drinking the last beer in the house and thinking, Bring it on. This is what's going to finally make me over her. When she finally did come out, I calmly told her to give me my beer back. "It's mine and you don't have my permission to have it," I said. "I bought it legally, as an adult, with my own money and it's not yours to take. Give it back to me."

"What are you going to do, Claire? Are you going to smash my fucking window?"

The idea of smashing her window hadn't even occurred to me. It was mine and she was stealing. "No. You're going to give it back to me because if not that's theft."

"You owe me so much fucking money anyway, get the fuck out of here you fucking loser! You can drink till you kill yourself, I don't care. I'm leaving and I never want to hear about your fucking problems again. Leave me alone!"

"If I owe you money, then I will pay it to you. Make me a list of what I owe you money for, and how much, and I will pay you what I owe you," (I imagine that she planned on charging me labor for everything she'd ever done to my bike, at which point I was going to charge her for every coffee I'd ever bought her plus gas money for the delivery fee). "But you cannot take something that belongs to someone else without their permission."

"I'm calling the fucking cops!" she screamed. She pulled out her phone and I could see that she was dialing 911.

"You can't dial 911 for something like this, Lindsey. It's not an emergency. They're going to yell at you."

"Yes, hi, my housemate" (she pronounced the word with emphasis to prove her point to me) "isn't letting me leave the house."

"Lindsey, that's bullshit," I said. I knew that those 911 calls are recorded and I wanted to state my case. "I'm not restraining you in any way. You're between me and the car, I'm 3 feet from you, and we're on the passenger's side. You've just stolen something from me and I want you to give it back before you leave." I couldn't wait till the cops showed up and made her give it back to me and then told her to be on her merry way. I knew any arbitrator would be on my side. (Later my housemate said, "Hers was the only voice I could hear screaming. It's just so TRASHY to be screaming at someone on your front lawn in the middle of the night and calling the cops like that!")

"She's drunk and she's standing in the front yard in her pajamas," Lindsey went on.

"How drunk do you think I am?! I've had 4 beers in 4 hours, and you took all but the last one away from me 2 hours ago." Then mid-sentence, still on the phone, she just turned on her heels, got in the car and drove off to go fuck her skank. With my beer.

I was understandably furious. I had taken her shit patiently for 2 1/2 months, and now I'd finally snapped. She had taken away my last shred of dignity, and I didn't give a shit about what she thought of me anymore, the lying whore. I went inside and realized she'd left behind her crate of hard liquor. I found a bottle of $50 tequila that I'd bought her in Mexico and started drinking it. But I don't really like hard liquor, and it wasn't making me feel any less mad, so I went up to her room and I took back all the gifts I'd ever given her, love letters I'd ever written her, and sex toys we'd ever used together (and that she'd used on the skank, in my house, on my birthday I discovered). That still didn't make me feel any better, so I went through all her drawers where even her underwear was anally folded and stacked and I unfolded her shit. I threw some underwear on the floor, moved shit around in her closet, unalphabatized her CD's, unmade her bed, and poured the rest of the bottle of tequila on her comforter. Now I was feeling a bit better. I went downstairs and I saw the road bike that I helped her buy, the one that she was trying to sell to the skank for twice what she'd bought it for. Seat post plus saddle? That should be about $300; way less than my cut of the bike, I took the seat post out and pulled off the tape. Then I let the air out of her tires and went to bed.

That was on Tuesday. The next several days I was a wreck, especially since she didn't come home until Friday, but I didn't drink. I was mad at myself for drinking and figured I could forgive the extreme emotional distress as long as I never drank again. Then I found out that she'd fucked the skank in my house when I was away for my birthday, and lied about that even as she came clean about everything else. That's when I lost my will to live. When I found out about the birthday transgression from our other housemate, I waited 12 hours and texted her, "No wonder you were to exhausted to go out for my birthday. It must have been really tiring fucking that whore in my house all night. You'd better stay away for a long time you lying sack of shit. If I never see you again it'll be too soon." That's the day she started coming home and saying she was going to bring the skank to sleep over. The housemate had to step in to quash that one (I was so glad that I made sure there was a witness in the house each time we saw each other, just in case she tried some other bullshit legal bru-ha-ha).

More background music.

After that, I would just sit on the couch all day shaking and trying to sleep so that I could stay up late enough to make sure that she didn't bring the skank by. I couldn't ride my bike because I couldn't leave the house, and I had no energy anyway because I wasn't eating or sleeping. I only got about 2 hours' sleep a night. I lost more than 5 pounds in a week. Every minute I knew she was at work, I knew that the skank was at work with her. Then every minute that she didn't come home after work, I was picturing what she was doing with the skank: going on dates at our places, fucking her at her house, and telling her what a psycho I was. It was pretty clear from Lindsey's behavior and things that Lindsey had said that the skank was talking shit on me, turning Lindsey against me and I yearned for a chance to redeem myself. I am not the weak, loser you think I am! You cannot push a person that far and expect them not to snap! Come home and tell me that you love me and that you're sorry!

I knew that if they came by our house just once and squeezed me out, I would never be safe in my own home again. The skank lived about half an hour away on the other side of Boston, and we live about a mile from where they both work, making our house too convenient to pass up. So I had to stay home at all times to make sure the precedent wasn't set that they could come over and I would leave. I HAD to defend my territory! I made it through my vigil on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday without drinking, but Saturday when she didn't come home it was too much.

I cut a pretty blah date with a girl I was never going to fall in love with short, and I stopped by the liquor store on my way home. What was I even resisting the drinking for anyway, I didn't give a rat's ass about my life. At least if I drank then I could be alone comfortably and maybe even fall asleep. In fact, the only way to keep myself from hovering around her was to drink. I could hide from anything to keep drinking. She never came home that night, and I broke out my journal and just started writing and drinking; my favorite things to do in the world. The alcohol dulled the pain enough for me to face the really tough ideas (me having to finally get over her, the fact that she wasn't the Lindsey I fell in love with after all, the fact that my life was over), and quieted my mind enough for me to put my thoughts on paper without dropping dead from anger and grief.

But the next day on my vigil, I was alone and shaking from the anxiety again. I hadn't slept in days, I hadn't eaten in days, and I still had so much in my mind that I just couldn't face. So I went back to the liquor store and drank and wrote some more. On Monday I had to work, and since I hadn't slept more than a few hours in days I tried to take a nap after work, but my mind just wouldn't stop. So I drank all of her and the other housemate's beer to fall asleep, and when I went to replace it after my nap, I bought more for myself to get through the night. That night I spoke to Teen Idol, her best friend who moved away the same week she dumped me. He put it all in perspective, but he said, "You can't push a mule uphill. The only thing you can do is to leave and hope that someday she'll be willing to take your call."

When I thought that my world couldn't get any worse, here it was. She called me one evening at about my bed time and said, "I'm going to the package store. Do you want that 12-pack?"

I was already drinking, and couldn't figure out if this was an apology or a test, but the right answer seemed to be "no." "I don't want a 12-pack, I want that 12-pack. Never mind, don't even tell me the fate of that 12-pack. Just leave me alone."

"What the hell was that?" I asked her the next day. "Are you trying to fuck with me?"

"Well you'd made such a big deal of it, and I was thinking, if you want to drink yourself to death, then it's none of my business and I'm not going to stop you."

"So you thought you'd buy me beer?!" She was just as bad as the last psycho that made me start drinking again on purpose so she could manipulate me.

By Thursday I was up to almost a 12-pack a day already between my afternoon and evening sessions. Friday (my day off), I started drinking at 10 am, finally fell asleep for a bit, woke up, started drinking again, she came home unexpectedly and froze my bender for a couple of hours, drank more when she left, and went back to sleep. When I woke up that afternoon, I drank another few beers to get through the couple of hours before the spin class I had to teach. In the spin class I felt like I was going to vomit all over the floor and resented every soul who had shown up for even being alive and putting me through this. And then after the spin class I met up with an old drinkin' buddy of mine that I hadn't seen in about 5 years.

My drinkin' buddy and I have a long, sordid history, and as annoying and abrasive as he can be, he knows me well and he knows how to set a fire. The drinkin' buddy and I polished off about 9 beers apiece (and several cigarettes) as we set a fire in the woods and one-by-one burned every gift, every sex toy, and read and burned every letter. It was my way of saying goodbye and closing the book on this chapter of my life. There was no anger, just peace and sadness. "You were really in love with her, weren't you?" he said after I threw a particularly raunchy love letter on the fire.

"Yeah," I said.

"That letter was really hot. Do you remember that time when we got wasted and I convinced you to teach me how to have sex with a woman by pretending I was a woman?"

I groaned. That's another reason why I can't drink. I will fuck literally anybody, including my drinkin' buddy a couple of times. "That was some of the best sex I've ever had," he went on. "But you were always over it after just a minute or two and telling me to just finish up already. I'd always thought you just had issues with sex because of what happened to you... I guess you really are a dyke."

He had a way with words, but he was right. I'd been thinking of getting with a few guys just because they were easy and I needed affection, but I always regret it the next day, even if I'm sober (which has only happened once). Part of the reason that I'd loved Lindsey so much was that sex had never felt that meaningful with anyone else before. I don't think I'd ever truly made love with anyone, although I'd been with a few guys and gals I really, genuinely cared about.

(My feelings about sex with men are important for the next part of the story.)

We finished the beers, put out the fire, and headed out. "Can I drop you at your parents' house?" I asked. A side effect of my buddy's drinkin' problem is that he's lost his driver's license. I shouldn't have been driving either, but alcohol impairs judgment.

"No, my parents kicked me out for my drinking a few months ago. That's why I'm living in Everett."

"Well can I drop you at a bus stop or something?"

"It's too late, no busses running this time of night around here."

"Well I can't drive to Everett! I'm too drunk!" I protested.

"Can't I just stay at your place?" he asked.

(Now I'll remind you that alcohol impairs judgment.) "Fine, but I don't want you staying on the couch where Lindsey could find you in the morning. You'll have to sleep with me. But no touching!"

We went home and continued to talk deep into the night, waking up Lindsey. As we're getting ready to go to bed, I found a t-shirt for my friend, but no shorts that would fit him. He went down for one final leak and met up face-to-face with a very angry, very awake Lindsey. To make matters worse, he was holding her book about Spain that lives in the bathroom, which he had (understandably) thought was mine. "Where are you going with that?" she asked. Need I remind you that she hates it when people touch her stuff?

Then I got a text message. "I told you you didn't have to sneak around! I'm bringing over whoever the fuck I want! A good friend huh?! He's in his underwear!"

I told my buddy that he HAD to go down and sleep on the couch right now, and he had to get out of the house early in the morning. But by the time he woke up, she was already up and I was doing my best to explain the situation and begging her not to do anything to make things worse than they already were. I just wanted to talk to her in peace while she was in the house and actually listening to what I had to say, but I had the problem of an abrasive hung over man with no manners and no driver's license sitting on my couch.

He took a slug of her Kettle One vodka right from the bottle. Then he wanted a ride to the bus stop, but first he wanted a ride to his parents' house. He spend 45 minutes in his parents' house taking electronics and food, then he wanted a ride to Everett. All I wanted was to be go home and talk to Lindsey, then be alone. Getting caught up in his drama was exactly why I hated drinking so much. I would hang out with shady people because I didn't give a flying fuck, just as long as I wasn't the drunkest one in the room, then I'd get stuck being taken advantage of in these sketchy situations that I never would have put myself in if it weren't for the booze. By the time I got home, Lindsey was gone never to be seen again.

I had planned for the catharses in the woods to be my farewell to drinking, then I would stop staying in the haunted house as a birthday gift to Lindsey. However, she hasn't noticed my birthday gift because she hasn't slept at home since that night. She won't open the birthday card that tells her that the house is hers (although not her love nest) until I get back from RAAM. When she's home, she sleeps with her door locked and a baseball bat next to her bed. She won't speak to me or even be in the same room as me for me to tell her that I'm not drinking anymore, and that I'm back on my bike.

I know that at this point I shouldn't care what she thinks, but the reason that I fell in love with her was because she saw everything that I valued in myself – my independence, my drive, and my ability to quit drinking – and she loved me for them. As bad as this has all sounded, she was in love with me and acted as such as recently as Valentines' Day. How could I feel good about myself if the one person who valued those things in me now said she didn't care if I lived or died?

I am now on my third day of being out of the house, and my third day of not drinking. To see how quickly I could fall into a booze hole (less than a week), it makes me realize that it will not be long before I lose what little life I have left. I know that my first priority has to be not drinking, and making all my decisions based on that priority. But when all the things that used to keep me off the sauce – riding my bike, running, hanging out with friends, drinking tea and coffee, cooking, working – remind me of her, then how am I supposed to do that? I tried going to AA meetings, but a bunch of booze bags sitting in a room talking about drinking only made me want to drink, and their stories made me realize that relapse was possible.

So I have decided to move to San Francisco at the beginning of July. I'm not crazy about San Francisco as a city, but it is the traditional home of people running away from something. Shane has agreed to put me up until I'm back on my feet, I have the remains of a support network there from living so close in college, and a well-connected trainer at work has agreed to make a few calls for me. Because of a combination of my promotion and vacation (for RAAM), I'm not on the schedule at work, so I have no job here in Boston. Because I haven't spoken to my Dad since Christmas and because I can't be in my haunted house that was supposed to be the beginning of the rest of our lives with my girlfriend, I have no home. Since my girlfriend is sleeping with some skank every night just to get away from me, I have no relationship. Since most of our friends are in common and I cannot hang out with many of them at events that she might go to, I have a shaky social support. I never really planned on staying in Boston anyway, so I purposely didn't put down many roots. What else is keeping me here? It looks like what I need to do to take care of Claire is to start completely over... just like last time.

The idea that I'm getting out of here and that this is only temporary is the only thing that is keeping me away from the liquor stores. I'll take it.

Another one of THOSE posts

For a more lighthearted post, see my previous post below. Sorry there are no pictures, but my scanner doesn't work, and I don't have a job anymore to scan my pictures there.

My year-and-a-half anniversary of quitting drinking went by almost a month ago without mention. I didn't have the time or flexibility in my schedule to do anything like the (nearly) half ironman I did last year to mark the 6-month mark. A year ago, it was important to keep doing more and more crazy and intense things to mark special occasions. This year, I'm more interested in saving it for where it really counts. I'm beginning to trust myself more to have free time and use it responsibly. For me, in the first year I was so afraid that if I didn't have some slightly out of reach goal around every corner, I would tumble off the wagon, never to return. Probably, if I hadn't pushed myself like I did last year, that's what would have happened.

But now after some 18 months of flexing that muscle every day, I feel like I can lead somewhat of a more normal life. I've been letting myself have friends again. I've stopped signing up for races that I don't want to do. I'm trying the whole dating thing again. And I have even purchased beer with no intention of drinking it without going off the deep end. It feels good. I know that I can never risk letting myself have a drink again. In Florida I had a non-alcoholic beer, and even the .5% alcohol by volume was enough to trip that switch in my head that said, "STAY HERE IN THE BAR. DRINK AS MUCH AS YOU CAN UNTIL THE BAR CLOSES AND YOUR MONEY RUNS OUT. DRINK! DRINK! DRINK! MAKE SURE YOU NEVER RUN OUT OF BOOZE AGAIN!" I can never just have one drink like some people can, but it feels nice to trust myself to lead a normal life in other ways.

But I'm not here to talk about drinking. I wrote that post 6 (well, nearly 7 now) months ago. The drinking is only one part of everything I had to get over to start becoming who I am now (and there's still so much to be improved upon!). Before I really started drinking, my problem was food. I was at my wits end. I remember thinking, Addicts and junkies have it easy, because no matter how hard it is, they know that they always have the hope of quitting. You can't quit eating. In many ways, I still think that I was right.



I was always afraid of getting fat as far back as I can remember. I remember going on my first diet when I was 9. Then, when I was 13 I stopped eating meat. My whole family ate meat, so suddenly I was doing something different. It was control. It was power! I got totally hooked on it. I started eating less and less, just to see how little I could get by on. I started playing games where I would see how long I could stare into the snack drawer singing the refrain from "Lady Willpower" before I closed it without taking anything and walked away. I would always leave some of everything on my plate, take the smallest portions possible, and only have seconds if they were offered to me. I started running. The summer before I started high school I weighed around 85 lb (about 40 lb less than I do now, at nearly the same height – I never did grow much after that).

Then, the first day of freshman year, something changed. I decided that the first day of school was a "special occasion," and that I could have a snack after school. I ate a whole, entire bagel and cream cheese. Then I hit the ice cream. I ate until I felt like I was going to puke, I just couldn't stop. It was like someone had flipped a switch. I kept eating like that for the rest of the year. I just couldn't control myself at all. The will power that I'd had the year before was completely gone. I used to hum "Lady Willpower" as I shoved cookie after cookie into my mouth. I ate a whole box of Frosted Flakes in one sitting once. Another time, I ate a whole box of nonfat coffee cake. Entenmen's cheese danishes. Gallons of ice cream. I had root beer with breakfast every day, french fries and a 6" cookie for lunch, and then I would come home and eat my face off. By the time dinner rolled around, my stomach hurt, but I had to eat something because I didn't want my parents to yell at me for eating too much junk for snack. I wanted to stop, I just couldn't. I made up new games where I'd sit in my room on the third floor with a box of girl scout cookies. I would eat one, and while I was chewing it, I'd throw the rest of the cookies one at a time out the window. It felt like control. It made me feel a little better.

By the end of my freshman year, I'd gained some 45 lb. I went from a size 0 to a size 8 by spring track season. My thighs had never touched before, and now I wore through all my pants in the crotch from the rubbing. When I was in the car, I could feel my fat jiggling and it made me sick. I had stretch marks. All my clothes were stretched out and looked like maternity clothes tenting over my paunch that I didn't always remember to suck in. It made me sick to be inside my skin, but I just couldn't stop eating. I would hardly eat anything for days, and then I'd go nuts, eating everything in sight.

Sophomore year is when things got really out of control. I learned how to stick my fingers down my throat to throw up, but I never felt like I got it all. I started stealing laxatives from the drug store, but (even then) I wouldn't poop in public restrooms. If I was ever stuck away from a private restroom when the laxatives kicked in, I would get so sick that I sometimes threw up. I used to get so angry with myself for being so out of control, that I would cut myself with a retractable exacto knife: deep gashes that would reopen when I picked up something heavy. This is the part that I most regret now, because those stupid scars will never go away.

And so it went through the rest of high school and into college. I was 20 years old, still convinced that the best days of my life had already passed when I was 13. I was so depressed that I defined myself by it. I used to cling on to all my "issues," thinking that that's what would make me special, worth knowing. If I couldn't be skinny and hot, I could be the frumpy girl who will always be there to listen to your problems. I could be that friend that you can't get rid of. I was one walking cry for help. I drank heavily, did every drug that came my way, and fucked anyone that showed an interest. I tried to kill myself one night. I did everything I could to sabotage my chances of getting accepted into my study abroad program so that I could sell everything I owned, drop out of school, and run away to New York City. Fucked-up shit crossed my mind, like wishing I had cancer, because cancer patients are skinny; or purposely becoming a junkie, because junkies are skinny. But much to my dismay, I was accepted to the study abroad program.

In Barcelona I decided that the best way to get sent home was if I got really sick, so I just stopped eating. In one month, I didn't have one bowel movement. I lost about 20 lb.

...And then I met a girl and everything changed. She was unattractive, opinionated, critical, and 10 years older than me, but she absolutely loved life, and I loved her. She was 30 and I was 20. She treated me like shit, and I loved it. She was ashamed that she was only in college, while most people her age had careers, and she was ashamed to be with me because I was so much younger. I idolized her. I would have done anything for her. "Why are you so sad all the time?" she asked me. She was expressing disgust, not concern. "It's really not hot. It makes you so much less fun to hang out with." And then she decided she wanted nothing to do with me (for the first of roughly 7 times over the course of that year). I was devastated. I locked myself in my room and got wasted, I couldn't think of any other way to deal with the emotion.

When I woke up, I felt so horrible, so absolutely disgusted with my own life, so overwhelmed with grief that she didn't want to be with me anymore, that I had no idea how I could live in my own skin even one minute longer. I guess it was despair. And then I made the first responsible decision I think I'd ever made in my life. I thought, Whatever I have been doing up until now hasn't been working. I need to quit dieting. I need a way to burn off all this energy. So I went to the gym and kicked the shit out of myself until my anxiety attack was gone. Then I went back and did it again the next day. I started eating 3 meals a day, and found that when I wasn't trying to skip meals, I didn't actually overeat. When I didn't restrict things from my diet, I didn't actually wind up binging on them as much. And I began writing in my journal compulsively. Every day I would drink and write and drink and write for hours until I could barely hold the pen anymore. I wanted to prove to this girl that I wasn't the loser deadbeat that she thought I was. I sat there every day and put my thoughts down on paper about what it must mean to be happy, almost every day for a year.

Out of that year came my drinking problem. But out of the same phase came endurance sports, and most of all my commitment to enjoying life. I did wind up hooking back up with the girl, and every time she broke up with me I would go back to my journal and figure out how to be that much better of a person. I could no more be bitter at her now for treating me like shit, than I could be at drinking for treating myself like shit. Both brought about the most positive changes in my life.

So yes, drinking ruined my life. But in a way, it saved it. If I hadn't started writing that year, then I never would have been able to break out of my negative cycle. If I hadn't started drinking, then I never would have had the patience to do all that writing. Also, drinking eventually took over my appetite. Food became just something to soak up the booze in my stomach and keep me from puking. When I finally did emerge on the other side, binge eating wasn't something that caught my attention anymore. It just didn't offer the same high as alcohol. It also helped that Spanish food sucks and I'm a horrible cook.

What I was thinking a lot about as my 1.5-year anniversary rolled around was about appreciating having my life back. I was on a pretty crazy "diet," but wasn't finding it difficult to stick to, because I had learned the significance of good eating. I knew that I couldn't drink, but am beginning to enjoy a normal life again because of it. And look at all the great things I had achieved in the process of getting myself through those addictions to food and drink. It was March, and I could still ride my bike 125 miles. I was swimming faster than I ever had before. And I had completed no fewer than 7 races of marathon distance or longer in one 9-month period. For a fuck-up, I think I was doing alright.

As usual with the posts like this that get pretty personal, I'm disabling comments. If you have something you would like to say to me, please feel free to send me an email at speedyspeedracer@gmail.com.

The Alcoholic Post

Left: Shane, Meg (of AIDS LifeCycle fame), and I have fun with the camera as we get wasted in late December 2006.
Today makes one year since I quit drinking. One year, the amount of time seems unbelievable to me. If you asked me a year ago if I thought I would make it a year, I would have been lying if I said yes. Then again, I lied a lot back then. I lied about what I'd done last night, I lied about how much I drank and with whom, I lied about where all my money was going, I lied about why I was shaking, and I lied about stupid shit that I didn't need to lie about because I was so ashamed of myself that I didn't know where to draw the line at what was acceptable and what wasn't. But hell, if you ask me today if I could make it another year, I'm still not sure. It sucks. It sounds so trite, but you really do have to take it one day at a time.

Left: Celebrating getting my TEFL certification, getting positively wasted and having a smoke with one of my students in Barcelona (March 2006).

You would think it would get easier with time, smoking sure did. After a couple of weeks it doesn't even cross your mind to have a cigarette, after a couple of months the thought grosses you out. But not with alcohol. Imagine you had to go completely vegan, give up all meat, fish, dairy, eggs, and anything that had those things in it. No more chocolate (or all but the most disgusting, unsweetened, bitter stuff), no more pizza, no more milk in your coffee, no more steaks, no more cake, or bread (because most bread has eggs in it), or cheese, or hamburgers, or ice cream. All your friends can continue to eat normally, but you can't. All the restaurants' menus will stay the same, but you can't eat anything but the salads. Could you do it for a day? Could you do it for a month? Could you do it for the rest of your life? That's a bit like what quitting drinking was like for me. I hadn't gone a day in months without drinking, I loved beer and wine. I drank more than I ate. When I quit, bars didn't stop serving alcohol, liquor stores didn't disappear, my friends didn't stop drinking, the world went right on as it always had, but I had to somehow cut out this integral part of my life.

Right: Already so drunk we can barely

stand up, my friend Blair climbs on my shoulders

before we hit the bars in January, 2004.

I heard an interview with Todd Crandell, the founder of Racing for Recovery once. He said that he doesn't like to tell stories from back when he was using, because it glorifies it and makes it sound "cool". I can see where he's coming from, people just want to hear about the lowest points in your life just like they enjoy watching the same gruesome unraveling of someone's life on TV. Hey, it's why Lifetime: Television for Women is so popular. The fact is that I don't have many gruesome stories. I was what they call a "functional alcoholic". I liked to write when I drank, and some of the best papers I ever wrote in college I wrote while trashed. I got a 4.0 GPA the second two years of college -- the two years when I was able to actually purchase alcohol (legally). I didn't like drinking with other people because I would get too drunk to handle myself, but never wanted to stop at that point, so I would just drink alone. And I would write, and write, and write because there isn't much else to do when you drink alone. Most of my old No Wetsuit Girl posts were written while I was drunk off my ass or as I was getting there. I don't have any interesting stories of getting arrested (although I should have, who knows how I avoided a DUI with the frequency that I drove drunk), waking up in crazy places, or anything like that. Mostly I just stole shit from my friends (drinks and money for drinks), slept around, and urinated inappropriately (and not the cool kind of inappropriate urination that I'm proud of like I do now).

Right: I pretend to make out with my friend

David to make his boyfriend jealous while my

girlfriend takes the picture. You think these

things are funny when you're wasted.

(September 2006)

I threw up a lot. Not necessarily because I was drunk, but because I had no stomach lining left. By the time I left Spain my muscles and liver ached miserably and I had a stabbing pain in my spleen and a splitting headache every morning. I would get the sweats and hit by waves of nausea at the strangest times and need to go outside for some fresh air. I could barely eat, but I kept drinking. If you ever woke up feeling like I felt every morning, you wouldn't think twice about calling in to work. I wasn't just hung over, I was sick. But since I'd done it to myself, I got up and went to work feeling like that for months on end. And then people wonder how I'm able to endure some of the long workouts that I do. When you have done things that fucked up to your body, things like forcing it to process a 12-pack and a pack of Marlboro Reds a day for 2 months straight, or forcing it to throw up just to make the dizziness pass so you can get on to more drinking, sitting through a 12-hour exercise binge doesn't seem quite so bad. If you've ever had to stumble home 3 miles when you're so drunk that you're seeing double and falling over with every step, shuffling the last 5K of a marathon doesn't seem so bad. Sure, it hurts, but at least you know which way is up.

Left: I ham it up while Jamie tells me how much he loves me.

The aprons were for the "birthday boys". My birthday is in May, this picture was taken in August 2007. It remains a mystery how I wound up with an apron that night.

Addiction is a funny thing. You look around you and say, "God, my life sucks, my body feels toxic, and I hate my life," but you still can't stop. You wake up every morning and say, "I'm never drinking again," but by the time you finish your first cup of coffee you're already planning how you're going to get your next drink, if you haven't started already. You know you have a problem, so you go to great lengths to hide it so no one else will try and stop you. By the time those around you pick up on it, you're too out of control to be able to do anything about it, no matter how much you want to. To this day I still have a coffin-sized storage container sitting under my bed filled with empty beer bottles from three weeks I spent at home last summer. They were all my "night caps", and I still haven't figured out what to do with such a huge number of bottles without drawing someone's attention and having to come up with an explanation for it. It could have been much worse, but I'm thankful that I was able to catch myself when I did, before really bad shit started happening. I was one of the lucky ones.

Right: I now pee in these, most of the time.

When I quit I had to start my whole, entire life over. I broke off a relationship, quit my job, left the country, left the continent, and moved back in with my parents in Boston, a place I hadn't lived in more than 7 years. I didn't call any of my old friends (still don't) and started from scratch. But I needed something to keep my occupied during all that time I would have spent drinking. There is a lot of time to be filled when you quit drinking, time I didn't even know existed. What the hell does one do when one is awake and alert at 9:00 on a Sunday morning? Go to church? I dreaded nighttime, because what in the WORLD is there to do after sunset other than get shitfaced? I had to write myself a note to put next to my bed that said, There's nothing to fear about going to bed sober. And who does one spend their time with when everyone else their age spends all their free time drinking?

So I threw myself headlong into training because, what else was there to do with my time and energy? It was a reason to tell friends that I couldn't go to bars ("Aw come on, you don't have to drink... Just have water!" - as if that were possible), because I had a race in the morning. Also, if I had a big race looming, something just slightly out of my reach, then it would force me to stay on the straight and narrow. And as my fitness grew, so did the challenges and it kind of took on a life of its own.

When you've done such shitty things to your body as an addict has, you develop an ability to disregard your limits. I've had enough alcohol to kill me at times, and still made it home to my own bed. When you've survived that, you take other kinds of limits with a grain of salt as well. An epic training week isn't all that different from a binge anyway. All it takes is too much time, a little bit of money, and a little push to get you started before you get past the point of no return. Then you wake up one morning and think, "Fuck, my body hurts. What the hell have I been doing the last few days?!" You even get that, "I am never, ever doing that again... until next time," feeling.

This week I rode 330 miles, as a celebration of my year back in the land of the living. I rode 4 23-mile commutes to work, then 100 miles on Saturday with Mindy and a 145-mile ride on Sunday (I rode a century ride, plus rode the 20-miles to and from the start/finish). I wanted to get to 365 miles, but it would be silly to ride around in circles for 30 miles just to reach a silly number. This year was about building up a tremendous base, but I think I've proven all I wanted to prove. Next year I don't think I'll be doing as much crazy volume. But I have to say, if I hadn't been such a hopeless alcoholic, I wouldn't have been mad enough at myself to do some of the amazing things I've managed to beat out of my body this year. If you don't mind, I'd like to take this moment to reflect back on some of the highlights:

Over 936 miles run (my training log only starts in mid-November so I'm sure I'm well over 1,000), including 5 races of marathon distance or longer (I will have done 7 in a calendar year come Halloween).

Over 3,000 miles of riding, plus an additional 100 hours on the trainer, including a 7-day ride from San Francisco to LA, setting a course record at a 12-hour ultracycling event, and 10 rides over 100 miles. Probably the best part of this year has been discovering a love of cycling and a talent that I never knew I had.

Swimming about 258,000 yards in 2 oceans, 2 rivers, and 4 lakes and not discovering a single dead body in the process.

I've done over 30 races in 8 states, setting personal records in a 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon, sprint distance, olympic distance, and half ironman distance as well as completing my first 50K and ironman, and winning the first prize I've ever won for more than just showing up, then winning hardware 6 more times.

At the risk of sounding cheezy, this year has been a real gift, and every single day that has gone by I really do stop and take a moment to remember that I almost stayed home and had a beer (or 10) rather than seeing all the cool stuff I've seen. And I've met some pretty cool people all over the country and the world.

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I've decided to dis-allow comments on this post, because I just don't think that "courtesy comments" are appropriate here. If you do have something meaningful to say, feel free to e-mail me. We'll be back to your regularly-scheduled nonsense soon, maybe with more detail on my 250-mile weekend. But before I go, I just wanted to thank everyone for reading my stuff and humoring me with all my race reports. If it hadn't been for this blog, I wouldn't have gotten to share my little (or big) adventures with anyone!

The Before and After pictures: (Left: August 2007, Right: August 2008)