A really good weekend

You can't stay down forever. You just can't. No matter how much of a sad sack of shit you are, at some point something's going to happen and you're going to smile in spite of yourself. That was what happened to me on Saturday. I woke up, and in spite of everything, I had a good day.

I'd been fighting all Friday with Grease Monkey. In the morning it was about her dishes in the sink. In the evening it was about her ex girlfriend coming over to get some stuff that had been in storage all this time. And before bed I had finally sat her down and made her listen while I said my piece (calmly), which led to her telling me to never speak to her again. So despite a lullaby of screaming and slamming doors on Friday night, I slept like a rock (as you do when you've done as much crying in one day as I'd done), and I woke up on Saturday in a good mood.

It was sunny and warm like it usually is in late May, not late March as I saddled up to go on my first group ride in about six months with real, live people. I had planned to ride easy with Slick, Pepe, and Jorge in order to save my legs for Sunday's first race of the season. Usually everyone rolls out together and then we regroup at a stop sign five miles out, so I didn't think anything of rolling out with the big guns... until we hit the stop sign and they kept right on rolling. I turned around to look for Slick and them, but there was no one behind me. When I turned back, everyone had taken off full steam... up a hill. I had to think fast, so I took off after them... and immediately dropped my chain (haven't done that in... years!). By the time I'd caught on to the pack, I was committed to keeping up with the big boys for the day and in significant oxygen debt.

In the past it has taken all I have to keep up with the fast group when they're cruising along. When they're hammering, forget it! These are guys who average 22+ mph for a century, although no one's in that kind of shape this time of year. But today I had no problem keeping up with anyone, even when everyone gunned it into the town line sprints. It looked like Eric's coaching was working after all. I am so strong! I kept telling myself over and over, because affirmations are supposed to come true if you say them right.

The only time I had to push in the whole ride was going up the damned hills. We'd be riding along just fine and I'd barely be pedaling. Then, when I knew a hill was coming up I'd try to jockey toward the front and then rip it up the hill as hard as I could. And fashoom! Vroom! Whirrrrr! I'd be 10 yards off the back by the top of the rise. Luckily, real cyclists go on a cigarette break the second they crest a hill (figuratively of course), and I was able to catch back on as they picked their noses going down the back side.

I started to get really mad at myself. There is simply no reason why I should be such a shitty climber. I'm small. I'm powerful. I can't sprint for shit, so if you're not a sprinter, you're a climber, right? But nope. Not me. I'm a complete anomaly in that I'm fast, but never when it matters.

And I might have stayed angry about getting dropped on all the hills if I weren't so damned proud of myself for keeping up on the rest of the ride. At one point near the end of the ride I confessed to another rider that I hadn't ridden with people in forever, so I hoped I wasn't too squirrely. "Nah, you're not squirrely at all!" he said. My heart nearly burst out of my chest with pride. I'm always ashamed of my triathlon roots because cyclists see triathletes as a liability in the pack. I practically blended in!

Then, after the ride one of the Big Boys introduced himself. "You rode really strong today," he said. I played it cool and graciously thanked him, but inside I was jumping up and down, clapping and screaming: They like me! They really do! Those five desperate minutes of going balls out after the last hill to try to catch up were instantly forgotten. I decided that it had been a good ride.

With a song in my heart and a smile on my face, I checked my cell phone as I shoved a Clif bar into my face before riding home. Text from Grease Monkey (who was supposed to never be speaking to me again): "I don't want to fight anymore."

In this whole ordeal, I've known that all I had to do was shift my attitude, and things would begin to fall back into place. Once I stopped going crazy and being a needy, clingy, desperate headcase, then she would chill out too. But I just couldn't seem to get my mind around relaxing or being happy again. Now it seemed like all my meditating and visualizing and praying to God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster were finally beginning to kick in. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

For the rest of the day I was just chill. I wasn't anxiously checking my phone for messages from HER every 2 minutes, and I wasn't depressed. I enjoyed the sunset. That night I hung out with Grease Monkey and it was just like when we first met with us giggling and flirting like kids. For once I was fine with us not being "us" for now. It was just... well... a perfect day!

Sunday

Sunday's race was a crit (riding endless laps in a tiny circle in a tight group for an hour, just so everyone can sprint for 20 seconds at the end). Have I mentioned that I hate crits? I've only done one, and it was such a horrible experience that I didn't do another bike race for 4 months. Stupid crits. But so much of bike racing is crits around here, that I have to get used to them, even if I never get good at them.

Knowing full well that I might cause grievous bodily harm to another rider with my erratic riding in a tight pack, I decided to do my first crit of the year far, far from the women that I would have to see for the rest of the season. Three hours away in southwestern Connecticut seemed like a good place to start.

Instead of a traditional play-by-play race report, I'll just give you a list of seven reasons why I hate crits:

1. Crits suck because you can't warm up right. Because the course is a mile or less and they're always running another category's race right up till the last minute, you don't get to warm up on the course. You have to go get lost somewhere in town, and you don't get to ride around and figure out where the bad pavement or tight corners are before the rest of the party shows up.
2. Crits suck because it's all about jockeying for position, not riding your bike. It's like riding in a washing machine. One minute you've got a nice spot in the front, and the next everything's been turned upside-down. You get boxed in, you get passed on all sides, and you get cut off. You move your legs more to get out of the way of other girls than you do to pedal. There were times when I just wanted to stick my fist out and clothesline the train of girls passing me without letting me in, or elbowing girls in the face who got too close.
   
3. Crits suck because they're bike races that discourage pedaling. I swear I spent 3/4 of that stupid race not pedaling. Last time I learned my lesson about not letting anyone use me as a workhorse, so I only pedaled to get myself back up to the front of the pack, and then I pedaled like hell up the little hill up to the finish line on each lap. If I pedaled anywhere but on the hill, I found myself shooting out the front in no time. Then, when we hit the little hill all the girls who had been sitting on my wheel not pedaling would use their fresh legs and zoom right by me, and by the next lap I'd be spit out the back.
4. Crits suck because it's not the best cyclist who wins, it's the biggest weasel. So the art of successful crit racing is to be the one who sucks the most wheels, pedals the least, and cuts the most people off to be in the best position to sprint away for the last few seconds of the race. To me, that's not cycling, that's... cheating!
5. Crits suck because the courses are boring. If you're just riding round and round around the block 22 times, the course is boring and predictable. There's no place to break away, so everyone just winds up riding together the whole time in a giant clump and stressing each other out. Everyone sprints in all the same places, and it's about as fun as watching traffic at a stop light.
   
6. Crits suck because they always come down to a sprint up a hill. So the only time that anyone is ever putting in any effort at all whatsoever is on a hill into the finish that happens every lap (in my limited experience, this is always the way the course is set up). Wiesel your way around 90% of the course, sprint up a hill, repeat. Since I can't sprint OR climb, this makes crits especially stupid. I feel like I'm just getting warmed up, and then everyone goes on a cigarette break just as I catch up.
7. Crits are stupid because I'm not good at them. I lead into the hill on the second-to-last lap, hoping to get a better spot at the front when the pack accelerated through the bell lap. But by the top of the hill I was boxed in and couldn't get around to where the girls were accelerating. By half way through the last lap I was all the way in the back again. I moved around to the outside and accelerated back to the front by the bottom of the hill and sprinted for all I was worth. Apparently all I'm worth is 17th out of 20, because even though I hit the hill in 4th or 5th place, all the wheel-sucking weasels came around at the end.
   

All that being said, I count the race as a success. I knew it would take a miracle for me to do well at a crit, so my goals were on other things:

1. Handle myself well in a pack. I resolved to dive head-first into the pack and hold on to people's wheels at all costs. I concentrated very hard on what was going on around me at all times, and aimed for the tight spots if they were the best place to go. I got touched by several girls and cut off once and never faltered, so I think that was a success.
2. Not be anyone's bitch. I promised myself I would stay in the pack and not ride off the front. I only pulled the pack once, and only for about a minute. And when I was up there, I didn't ride hard. So there. I didn't give nothing to nobody!
   
3. Not go down or take anyone else out. Success!
4. Ride the hill like a bat out of hell. Okay, so I didn't shoot out the front on the hills, but I didn't shoot out the back either. In the past I would have been dropped every single time. Instead, I was just as wiesely as everyone else and didn't pedal in order to save my energy for the hill. Judging by how sore my ass was last night, I guess I rode pretty hard even though I was never accelerating for long enough to break a good sweat.
   
5. Have fun. Well... that one still needs work.
   

Mental Workouts

This post has been broken into 3 parts to make the skimming easier. The first part is bitching, the second part is kind of heavy, and the third part is more lighthearted and (I hope) humorous.

I’m still sad, sad, sad, but underneath it all there’s something bubbling up inside that’s mad, mad, mad. In the back of my mind there’s a little voice growing that’s saying, “How dare she! After everything that I did for her!” My inner monologue is slowly moving from a constant whine of I can’t! to something between a diatribe and a plea (as if bitching someone out ever made them see the light and come back to you).

How could you do this to someone that you supposedly care about?! I hiss at the Grease Monkey in my head that is seated on a straight-back chair under a bare bulb. First you treat me like shit for a month, not because of anything I did, but because you can’t deal with the stresses in your own life. You move to a different house (which you couldn’t do without me), you get all your nice things out of storage, and then you uncategorically cut me out of your life when you no longer have use for me. Do you think that you have no responsibilities to think about my feelings? You think that this is the best for both of us?? Did you honestly think that no one would get hurt? Why don't you take some fucking responsibility for once? You say you need time and space; I can give you time and space. But why do you have to dump me to do it? Why, after all this time of me being the stable one emotionally and constantly picking up the pieces of your wreck of a life, compensating for your disastrous time management skills, why do I now have to bear the burden again of your poor emotional management?

And on it goes like that. While I’m at it, I bring up all my other grievances: how everything had to be on her schedule, how I was always the one who was saving money and paying for things when she ran out while she squirreled money away bolstering her savings and reducing her debt (and then she calls me financially irresponsible!), how I feed and walk her dog and she is still disdainful of my cat, how I never made fun of her for not knowing what words mean or that China and Japan are different countries but she treats me like an idiot for not knowing how to properly clean a cast iron pan… This last one opens the door for me to list all of her little flaws. And I could go on forever like that, but I try not to dwell on it.

In the five stages of grief, I first hit denial, then I piled bargaining on top of that. Depression set in really quick, and now I’m moving in to anger. I’ve only got one step left and that’s acceptance. I really, really, really don’t want to hit acceptance. I don’t want to let go. I’ve lost a lot in the last year: my independence, a lot of athletic drive, contact with friends, a feeling of being connected with my emotions, and a lot (a lot) of money. I want that life back, but I want that life with her in it. Is that too much to ask?

Spiritual Revelation... Almost

This whole situation has lead to a kind of spiritual crisis. As everything in my life feels like it’s spinning out of my control, I’ve needed some kind of Higher Power to believe in. A friend of Shane’s picked Jessica Biel to be her AA Higher Power because she didn’t believe in God and Jessica Biel is hot and wholesome. Jessica Biel, as hot and wholesome as she may be, wasn’t going to do it for me. I would say that I’m spiritual, but I don’t believe in God in any Judeo-Christian way. I was trying the whole “ask the Universe” visualization thing, but my whole world was too black for me to be able to envision a better world. So then I turned to astrology. At least checking daily horoscopes I had some sort of indication of what to expect and how I should act on any given day. Who cared if it actually worked, I just needed some sort of daily guidance. So I googled “horoscope,” found one that most seemed to understand my situation at the moment, and bookmarked it. I've been checking both Taurus (me) and Gemini (her) every day.

But then something else happened, I was back in crisis, and the horoscopes didn’t offer me anyOne to appeal to. If I wrote a letter to Jessica Biel, I didn't think she'd be able to fix it. I actually sat there and prayed. I don’t know how to pray, so I just sat there and said what was on my mind, adding “, God” in there every now and then for good measure. I asked one of the gym regulars who was off to daily mass to pray for me as well because I figured he’d be better at it. God knows what's up, and I didn't promise Him anything, but knowing that I had my bases covered made me feel a bit better.

But I doubt that going to church or checking my horoscope is going to provide the rock that I (Claire, not people in general, just me) am going to need to get me through. Normally that thing has been working out and riding my bike, but since that just isn’t working I need to add something to my repertoire. (Mindy has pointed out that a sign of depression—the fourth stage of grief—is not enjoying things that you usually enjoy, so maybe it’ll come back.) I need something that will help me grow mentally, but also make me feel like I’m doing something, because Claires don’t just think about things, they need action.

Some Serious Yoga

So with all that in mind, last night I coughed up $15 that I really didn’t have to go to a real yoga studio for a hot yoga class. I’ve done YMCA yoga on and off for a couple of years now, but I needed the kind of hippie-dippie teacher with a whole wardrobe of yoga clothes, who does things like week-long yoga retreats and shavasana to live music, in real estate dedicated solely to yoga to give me the spiritual and flexibility guidance that I was looking for. I chose hot yoga not to sweat more (there is no shortage of sweat in my life), but because it seemed like the kind of class that the real yogis would go to.

My first surprise came when before the class the teacher was lamenting the flooding in her basement (everything flooded in Massachusetts this week). For some reason, I thought that a yoga teacher should be serene and positive in the face of acts of God, and not say the word “shit,” even if her basement was flooded. Once I realized that this woman was the teacher, I got slightly disappointed again. I have this image of serious yogis eating an all-natural diet and having limber, supple, sinewy bodies. This woman was.. well... doughy.

Another thing I expected in my $15 professional yoga class was some serious chanting and sitar jams. Instead, the teacher had a playlist on her iPod that included Sheryl Crow, Jack Johnson, and REM. Actually, I really liked the music. It was all stuff that I’d had in my CD collection, but it wasn’t putting me in touch with the Universe and making me send warm love vibes to my colon. In fact, there was no meditation component to the class at all, except maybe a story from this month’s Yoga Journal about a woman who went to her first yoga class in cowboy boots and skinny jeans after eating a calzone, and how we should appreciate the ah-hah moments we should get through yoga. We didn’t work on breathing at all, which is fine, because that’s the part where I hyperventilate. Still, I felt like I should do all the things I suck at in this expensive class.

There are a bunch of yoga studios in the area, so I'm going to keep shopping around for a teacher/class that I like. I haven't given up on yoga yet.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the class. I sweat like a rain cloud, remembered some songs that I’d like to add to my iTunes, and chuckled a few times at the teacher’s curse-laiden calzone stories. I got in lots of stretching and some core work. We didn’t do boat pose, so I felt like a semi-competent yogi doing the chataranga and warrior III without falling on my face.

Best of all, though, I had dressed how I thought that serious Bikram yogis would dress. I wore a pair of tight running shorts and a sports bra. When I walked in, everyone was fully clothed but me. Oh well, I’ve lived in Europe, I’m used to being naked in public, so the floor-to-ceiling windows out to the parking lot didn’t bother me. Standing there in my underwear under the dim yoga light I looked at my reflection as I reached for the sky and exhaled deeply. And there… clear enough for me to see them fifteen feet away were my six-pack muscles!

As everybody knows, a washboard stomach is the key to happiness. Anyone with defined abdominal muscles has a happy and fulfilling life (I think that’s in the Bible somewhere). So perhaps everything’s going to work out after all.

A sad, sad, sad post

First of all, I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of well-wishes and support. Am I okay? No, I don't really think so. But someday I will be, and the idea that I'm going to get over this someday (and the work that it's going to take to get there) makes me feel worse. But I'm not drinking and I'm not dead or in jail, and that's what everyone wants to know.

From one moment to the next, I feel like my whole life was taken from me. I really thought that Grease Monkey was The One. We were moving in together, we were excited about it, and I was still so in love after a year. She appeared to be that way too. I had stopped thinking about my future, and started thinking of it as our future. Her things had become our things. My routine had become our routine. Even when things were shitty, I went through life in a good mood because I was in love.

And then in an instant that was all gone; Not only the girl I loved and whose face was the bright point in my day, but also our future, our routine, and seemingly the whole year that we'd had together that we were happy. Because if she could just turn on a dime like that and throw me out with yesterday's paper, what did that mean for this past year when we'd been so happy? Was she using me? Had she been lying every time she'd said she loved me recently? She even tried to throw me out of my house and threatened legal action to do it (forget that she didn't have a legal leg to stand on). How could someone who had bought me gifts a few days before now be telling me she wanted every trace of me gone from her life?

How does someone come back from that? How do I plan for the future when even my past has been taken from me? To make new plans without her means consciously discarding all the plans I had with her. And I'm just not ready to do that. So I'm stuck here in this place that I want so badly NOT to be. Crying sometimes, staring at the wall others, feeling numb mostly, and depressed all the time. I get out of bed, I go to work, I ride my bike, I study for my ACSM exam, but that's all because it's just something that I have to do, so I show up and I do it and when it's done I go back to just wanting to sit and stare at a blank wall.

On a good note, I don't really want to drink anymore. I'm no longer frantically, desperately distraught looking for anything to get me out of how I'm feeling. Right now I just want to sit exactly where I am (emotionally) because no matter which direction I try to go--up or down--it's going to be more painful than it is right here. Alcohol amplifies emotions, and I don't want to feel anything. Last night I asked her about how this came to be, and the ensuing conversation was so painful that I actually had to leave in the middle to hang my head over the toilet because I was going to vomit. No thank you, I'd rather not feel for the time being.

I've actually been thinking about suicide for the first time in my adult life. I would never, ever, ever, ever, EVER do it. Suicide is the most selfish thing a person could do to the world and the people that love them. But thinking about it and acting on it are two different things. When I lie there in my bed staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out how to get through my day, it's just like, Why even bother? I have nothing to live for anymore anyway. I don't want to move on, or move forward and I can't go back. I wish I could stop going altogether.

It's crazy the things you think when someone you love hurts you this badly. You go to a dark place in your head and thoughts that look so psycho when you see them on the news actually occur to you, like, If I can't have her, no one will. Or, If she's taken away everything that I love, then let's see how she likes it without everything she loves. Or the PJ Harvey line that keeps playing over and over in my head, "I might as well be dead, but I could kill you instead." Again, I would never, ever, ever, ever, EVER act on these thoughts. It's not me, it's the pain talking. But along with everything else, I also seem to have lost my mind. How can you think about moving forward when you've lost your past, your future, your life, your love, and your mind?

Who cares about riding a bike?
Who cares about building a career?
Who cares about looking for someone new?
Who cares about improving my body, mind, or spirit?
Who cares if I eat Cadbury Eggs and pizza all day long?

I really need to run away. Just start all over in a completely new place. If I had any money to my name, I'd pick up the few things that I own and get in the car and head for Southern California right now. But right now I don't have the gas money to get to Connecticut let alone California. So here I am, sober, sad, stuck, and psychotic. I'll let you all know when I'm back to being the old Claire. It should be soon, I can't live like this forever. But for right now, this is where I am.

Taking Responsibility

Sometimes life just sucks. I strongly believe that you bring most of the misfortune in your life on yourself. I’m not saying that starving people in Ethiopia, maimed civilians in Iraq, and mothers of dead babies had it coming to them, but the little individual things are usually of your own doing. If I let one thing get to me, say that I drop my toast in the morning or that my train is running late, then it all begins to snowball. I’m mad about the toast, so I start slamming things cabinet doors, and then I might break a glass. Now I have to clean up the glass, and I’m running late so I have to run out the door and maybe I slip on a patch of ice and spill my tea all over myself. It’s a hypothetical situation, but you get the picture. I have quite a temper on me, so I’ve tried to teach myself to stay calm and work my anger and aggression out in other ways (hence the fanatical dedication to endurance sports). I’m pretty sure that most people who have met me would be surprised how often I’m reduced to a screaming, crying thunder cloud of a temper tantrum (at least once a month, but most of the time I’m by myself so I only scare the cat).

So I believe that your successes and failures are completely of your own creation. There’s no such thing as luck. This idea goes by a whole bunch of names: quantum mechanics, “the Secret,” the Universe, energy, waves, the law of attraction, whatever. The idea is that there are infinite possibilities, and that something only becomes Reality once you observe it. If you always see the sunny side of things, then more positive people and circumstances are attracted to you. If you always see the negative, then you will create a negative world around you. If you believe you are poor, fat, unlucky, then you will be, so I try to turn my back on the negative and always see the positive.

When I was in Cozumel, it was one of those times when everything seemed to mean something, and every conversation I had seemed to be teaching me a lesson. At the finish, a young guy with perfect English helped me to a chair and told me how to get to the massage tables. The next day while I was walking down the main shopping street, someone called out my name. I didn’t recognize him, but he recognized me, and in the course of our conversation he mentioned that he noticed that I had been wearing a GPS and asked if he could talk to me about magnets.

You’re probably thinking, Oh brother! Healing magnets? She’s really gone off the deep end. But I had some friends when I was working at the gym in Santa Cruz who had sworn by magnets. They insisted that they sped healing and recovery. Open to anything, I let him give me his spiel about magnets, and wouldn’t you know, his demonstration really did convince me that magnets optimized your strength and flexibility and that wireless devices like cell phones and GPSs really did have an impact. I’m sure many of you will think I’m crazy, but I swear I am wary of these things and always looking for the trick. If there was a trick to it, then he tricked me because I was sold. Now I wear a magnet around my neck every day.

In addition to the magnetism stuff he told me about the movie “The Secret” which is all about the new-agey “vibes/Universe/create your own reality” stuff that I was talking about earlier. I was also open to that idea after a long summer with a good friend in Barcelona introduced me to the concept of asking the Universe for something. (Another one of those times that I went through a huge life shift in a short period of time). It was from her that I learned to be positive to prevent bad things from happening to me. Based on the Mexican magnet man’s recommendation, I rented “The Secret,” and learned about how if you visualize your ideal future with enough energy, it will come to you. I decided that I was going to try it. I began spending a few minutes every day visualizing prosperity and success in both my personal and professional life.

But I have a little problem with visualization, every time I try to picture how I’m going to feel in a race or in a certain situation, my mind shuts down. I read Michael Phelps’ book “No Limits: The Will to Succeed” and he talks about how visualization is a huge part of his success, but how many variables can there be in a 50m pool? With a triathlon or bike race, I don’t know what the course will look like, what the weather conditions will be on the day, how much sleep I will have gotten, what the pack will look like… How can I imagine what my body will feel like if until I’m actually there? I’ve even tried to step back and remember previous experiences where it all came together. I think back and I’ve got mental snapshots of the course or things I said to myself, but I can’t for the life of me remember the feelings in my muscles or how my bike felt under me. Part of the reason I think exercising is so satisfying is that, just like when I’m drunk, it slows my mind down and I only feel/think one thing at a time. One day, for hours the only thought I had was the first line from “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”

Visualization is a branch of the whole mental end of sport (and life) that I just haven’t mastered. It’s like I can squat 500 pounds, but mentally, I’m still lifting soup cans. When the going gets tough in a race, my inner beast goes out and has a cigarette. My main project lately is to work on my mind, and develop the focus of a business/sport/life champion. I’ve been reading “The Winner's Bible: Rewire Your Brain for Permanent Change” and it’s been really great at giving more practical strategies than the hocus pocus in “The Secret.” I also read Johan Bruyneel’s “We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success with the Mastermind Behind Eight Tour de FranceVictories,” which is all about winning with strategy.

But as soon as I began focusing on setting myself up for success, all I seemed to find was failure. Through a long, drawn-out hiccup in unemployment, I was $1000 down for the month of February and drained my savings to pay bills. My girlfriend (who has no outlet for her stress) began going through a rough patch and turned into a horrible ogre. She kicked me out of the house (for a spell) so she could get space and my world went topsy-turvy. I tore through every single pair of my bike shorts in the same spot in a week, and I stopped pooping. It felt like every time I tried to pull myself together something else awful happened that was completely out of my control.

Yesterday I was distraught. I’d fought with Grease Monkey, she said she wanted me out of her life. I spent the greater part of eight hours hiding in the laundry room at work, staring at the wall and trying to figure out who the hell I was anymore. I’d been spending so much time on her problems that I hadn’t paid any attention to my own. Obviously, it hadn’t helped. If everything happens for a reason, then the reason that all this financial and personal shit has been happening to me is because I need to step back and take stock. I need to make time for the things that are important to me, like my blog and myself. And if things don’t happen for a reason and life just isn’t fair, then it’s time to take stock and begin rebuilding my foundation by taking a close look at myself through tools like my blog.

So no promises, but it looks like I’m back…

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.

In the mountains no one can hear you scream

Do any of you remember how during my taper for Boston I got a little bit overly ambitious on mapmyride.com? On all the Google maps there was this big, green chunk in upstate New York calling out to me, Claaaaaaire, come ride in me! Not one to ignore spooky voices in my head, when I saw that it was going to rain Sunday all over New England I looked at the weather report for upstate New York: Cloudy, but dry. Well that settled it.

I mapped out a loop through the Adirondacks starting in Lake George and winding up along Lake Champlain to Lake Placid. It worked out to be about 160 miles, but whatever, I was sure I could handle it. I would have no choice if I had to get back to my car, right? I mean, there were 3 lakes on my rout, and everyone knows that water settles to the lowest point in any given place. Therefore it would be flat, of course. I ignored the elevation profile, figuring that it would be fiiiiiiiiiiine. And if I got tired before I hit the required distance, too bad. I would still have to get back to my car no matter what. The idea was to go really, really long to make a quick jump to the next level in my cycling fitness anyway, so the more I wore myself down, the better.


Still, I thought it would be wise to keep the total distance of my rout to myself when I told people what my plans were. Diane, at work, reminded me that I would be in the middle of the woods with no one around. "And you know who hangs out in the woods...?" she said. Hikers? Tree huggers? Lumberjacks? Cute, fuzzy animals? I don't know... "Creeps!" she announced. "I don't think you should go."
When I told my parents where I was planning on going my mom asked if I would stay with her aunt who lives somewhere in upstate New York (and must be about a thousand years old). "It's just a 4-hour drive," I said. Driving back from CT at night doesn't bother her, but for some reason driving home from nature seemed like a really long way. My mom has really twisted logic sometimes.
"What if you get lost?" Dad said.
"I'm not going to get lost. There are only like 5 turns on the rout and they're like the ONLY roads there are out there. I can't get lost!" Still, I studied the map for days to make sure I knew where everything was.
"I just think it's a dumb idea," said Dad in his condescending, know-it-all voice that is tailor-made to make you feel stupid. Well that was it. Now I HAD to do it, just to prove that this was NOT a stupid idea, although doubts were creeping in... Not about whether I should do the driving all in one day. Not about creeps hiding in the woods dressed up as tree huggers or cute, fuzzy animals. I was beginning to wonder if 160 miles was really a good idea. And what if I had some mechanical problem? What if I got lost? What if I really got too tired to get back to my car? How's the cell phone reception out there?

The Prologue

So did I take it easy the day before? Don't be silly. I did a ride with the crew from the bike shop. I was the only girl, like I always am, but I held my own alright. We started out easy, and I was getting a little annoyed. What the fuck, I wasn't even pedaling. This wasn't even a workout. Then, as roadies will, they started surging. I still suck at drafting as much as I ever have, especially with a group of guys I don't know. I kept zoning out for a minute, finding myself a few lengths behind, and having to push to catch up. By mile 30 I was out of water, very hungry, and falling behind on the climbs.

The course was by no means hilly, but there were a lot of short rollers that my legs are still not used to after a whole winter on the trainer. They would pull ahead, I would drop back a bit, and then the King of the Bike Geeks (the one who sold me my bike) would put his hand on my back and start pushing. I hate it when people touch me. I really hate it when men touch me, but we're not going to get into that... Then he starts going on and on about how he hasn't trained all winter and he's really into the "death march" now. "Well, maybe you would have more energy if you didn't have to push my fat ass around," I said.
"You're not fat," he said. That wasn't the point. Quit touching me! THAT was the point.
Then we got to a longer, slower climb. I don't know how he did it, but somehow he hooked his fingertips on my spine and dragged me closer to him. There was nothing inappropriate about it, except that our handlebars were touching which made me nervous, but I couldn't get away because I couldn't surge forward (I didn't have the power), I couldn't go left (he was there), I couldn't go right (he had his fingers half way around my spine), and I couldn't drop back (his hand was there). He hung on and stayed there for what felt like an eternity. After the 55-ish mile ride and a stop in the shop to stock up on supplies for tomorrow I got home thoroughly drained and vowing to ride more hills so that no one would ever touch me again!

Like I said, faster in the middle.

The Adirondacks

The drive to Lake George is over 4 hours long, so I got up at 3:45 in order to hit the road early. To avoid toll roads my directions took me a weird rout through northern New Hampshire and Vermont, then through some backwater highways into the park. Driving on one of these rinky-dink 2-lane 55 mph scenic routs I came to Woodstock, VT. I drove by a police cruiser with its lights on. Then I saw that the speed limit had gone down to 25. Good thing I saw that, I thought as I dropped down to 25. The cop car pulled out. What the fuck? Was I getting pulled over?! I hadn’t even been speeding! I pulled into a parking lot and the cop came up behind me. I wasn’t mad or anything, because I KNEW that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was just a speed trap f’chrissake. They all get us some time, it was just my turn. It wasn’t worth getting mad over, but I was still glad that it was raining and she was the one that had to get out of the car, not me. “Do you know why I pulled you over?” she asked. She had puffy hair like only country people have. If you don’t get out of Woodstock, VT much, you might not know that puffy hair hasn’t been in fashion since the 80’s.
“Well, after I saw you I saw a sign that said 25 mph and slowed down,” I said. “Sorry, I’m not familiar with the area.” Stupid country towns, they have nowhere to pull in municipal dollars than to snag a city slicker every weekend. What other explanation was there for her being out here at 7am on a Sunday?
“Well it was the second sign,” she said. I wasn’t paying too much attention, but it still wouldn’t surprise me if she was waiting there at the first sign. “Do you know how fast you were going?”
“Like 50 or 55,” I said, honestly.
“52.” So I WASN’T SPEEDING! She wrote me a ticket saying I’d only been going 35, which was nice, because awful things happen if you’re going twice the speed limit, and I was on my way. I just shoved the ticket in my glove compartment and forgot about it. I was NOT going to let this ruin my day.

My directions were going fine until I came to a T-stop that was not on my directions. North or south? I chose north. If I was right, then great; if I was wrong, then it would cut distance off my ride. It turns out that I was wrong, and wound up cutting Lake George completely off my rout, but that’s okay. I have bad memories of a vacation there when I was in middle school. That vacation is a family joke to this day. It included fish in the toilet and bugs in the beds. I did not need to see Lake George again.

I parked at a Park and Ride, got my shit together, and got ready to go. The only thing I had left to do was find a bathroom. Across the street was this sign: (my birthday's coming up, anyone want to buy me a new camera?) and a flag that said “OPEN”. I had no idea what the sign might mean, but surely they had a bathroom. I went up the walk and found only two trailers and a truck sitting in the mud. The larger of the two trailers had wooden pallets lying in the mud to serve as a walkway. I went up the “walk” gingerly trying not to get my cleats stuck between the wood slats and opened the door. Inside it was set up just like a bakery, only it was a TRAILER. This guy had a whole bakery capable of making bread and pastries set up in a SOLAR POWERED TRAILER. Cool huh? But I had a feeling that his home wasn’t much more than the bakery itself and felt bad asking for a bathroom. “Umm, is that parking lot across the way for all day parking?” I asked instead. Country folk sure do live differently than I do...

It was cloudy and cool as I set out. Where I parked was in a low marshland just south of Lake Champlain, but the rollers didn’t waste one single second. What had looked like flat land on the elevation profile was actually a bunch of tiny, steep hills one after the other. The thought occurred to me, This is going to suck on the way back. But that didn’t register, not really.

After about an hour and a half I found myself climbing a long, steady hill the likes of which I hadn’t seen since Europe, not even in stupid Connecticut. I climbed and climbed and climbed for miles and miles. Sweat started to drip down my face. I was breathing hard and pedaling to the rhythm of my breathing. I sniffed and got sweat up my nose. It felt like I had sea water up my nose and I couldn't make it go away. It sure was beautiful up here, and I couldn’t remember the last time I climbed a real mountain. Next time, I swore, I was going to bring someone up here with me. This was too beautiful to be doing all by myself. The clouds were just overhead, caught on the tops of the mountains around me. I crested the hill and rode down in a tuck: pedals at 3 and 6, hands in the drops, nose practically resting on my handlebars. The wind howled in my ears and my naked eyes watered. I hit 45mph. I got to the bottom and realized I was grinning. Then, just as I pulled up to the T-stop at the bottom of the hill, the sun came out. I stopped to take a couple of pictures, and when a cop stopped and looked at me I smiled and gave him the thumbs up to show that I was holding my phone up to take pictures, not to get reception. Then I rode off. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this happy.

I stopped and bought batteries for my real camera (I’d checked them last night, but when I took it out this morning they were dead, go figure) and pedaled down the road through tiny little towns with signs that said “Have a safe trip!” as you left, then miles upon miles of nothing. I followed signs for Lake Placid, and was surprised to see that it would only be 50 miles exactly from where I parked.

Then I hit another hill. This one was longer with a few long, steep grades broken up with mellower uphill stretches. The highway followed the river, so the scenery was spectacular with the swollen river roaring away below and the towering mountains to either side of me. I was in such a good mood, that the tone in my head really was as cheezy as the tone in which I’m writing.

Grade vs. Distance for the major uphill chunks on the

way out. I have trouble making sense of these graphs, but
basically anything above the line is uphill. The higher
above the midline it is, the steeper the grade.
Any big colored-in chunk is a long climb.

I turned a corner and sticking out waaay above the trees were the Olympic ski jumping slopes. Hoool-ly SHIT, you guys! Have I mentioned that I’m afraid of heights? Those things were SO tall, and the slopes were so steep and narrow. Ski jumpers must be the most fearless and stupid motherfuckers on this earth!

I knew I was getting close to Lake Placid because kitted-out cyclists were zooming down the road in the other direction huddled low on their aero bars. No one dresses that geeky for a training ride except ironmen. Folks, remind me NEVER TO SIGN UP FOR IRONMAN LAKE PLACID! I know the thought’s going to cross my mind someday, so I’m counting on you all to talk me out of it. That bike course goes up the hill I just described TWICE. FUCK THAT!

I got into the town of Lake Placid around 1 o’clock. What a change from the hick towns I’d been riding through! Everything, but everything had Olympic rings on the side of it and a half dozen flags in front of it, and every store was a bike shop, ski shop, running shop, or clothing shop that would only appeal to athletes (i.e. Life is Good TM). I sat on a bench overlooking the lake sat on a bench to eat a Lära bar. I wasn’t really hungry or tired, so I just bought 2 liters of Gatorade and hit the road again.

Like I said, anyone wanna buy me a new camera?

Coming out of town there was this enormous grade that had me redlining to the top. Once I crested it the most horrible heartburn set in. It felt like I was either having a heart attack or being stabbed in the chest. What happened?! I’d been eating out of the bag of shot blocks, papaya chunks, and candy orange slices in my bento box all day without a problem. I’d had Accelerade in my camelbak all day. But now, every time I put food in my mouth, my chest would ache and burn every time my heartrate went up. I swear, I will never, ever drink Gatorade again for as long as I live. Gatorade makes you have a heart attack.

There was one long-ish grade back to the top of the mountain, and when I rode over it my chest felt AWFUL. I remember thinking, I will never do IMLP because it gives you a miochartial infarction! Some of you who have been with me for awhile might remember that when I’m riding alone, I make noise. I’ll scream and yell and swear and talk to the wind or terrain or cars or whatever, because no one’s around to think I’m nuts. So as my chest ached and burned I screamed and moaned and groaned and yelled and swore out loud, at the top of my lungs when it got bad.

After the shorter, steep climbs out of Lake Placid, I got to ride back down the monster mountain. I practiced my tucking again as I flew down the mountain at a million, billion miles per hour. I experimented with holding my hands on the centers of the handlebars like the pros do instead of the drops. It didn’t feel any faster to me, and it made it harder to steer and took my hands away from the brakes. Still, I looked cool, so now that my confidence was up, I rode like this more and more... when folding up like that didn’t make me feel like I was taking a hot knife to the chest, that is. What the hell, I NEVER get heartburn!

When I got to the bottom of the hill my directions had me turning left, while I had come from the right before. Remember, I was not parked where I’d expected to park when I wrote out the rout, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I decided to follow the rout and set off into the unknown to my right. Oh my god, I was going S L O W. I was on my little chain ring and still couldn’t squeeze the power out of my legs. I knew I had to keep eating, but that gave me more heart attacks, which made me yell and scream more. What’s more, I wasn’t 100% sure of my directions. I was supposed to be following Rte 9, rather than 9N, which I’d taken to get up here, but you know how these country roads are: sometimes they take one name, and you don’t see the other name until they split apart miles later. And I had no idea what direction the road I was on went in. For all I knew it went all the way up to Canada. I’d tried to print up a map, but for some reason Google maps doesn’t like to print. After about 5 miles of doubt, I stopped, ate another bar, and turned back. Oh my God, all this time I’d thought I’d been on a flat, when I was really going up! I coasted easily back up the road from whence I had come into... a gnarley headwind! I swear, this headwind was not here when I came up this way! I don’t know how fast it was blowing, but there are headwinds you can deal with, and then there are what-the-fuck headwinds. This was a what-the-fuck headwind. I was around 80 miles now, getting VERY tired, having heart attacks every few minutes, and this was NOT what I needed right now. Certainly not with the hill I had in front of me. I remembered myself grinning as I’d blown down it this morning, and wished I could have gone back in time and slapped that stupid grin off my own face and screamed, “You DO realize you have to go UP that thing again, you fucking idiot!”
I thought that at least when I turned the corner and went into the mountains the headwind might go away. I was wrong, it was a dead-on what-the-fuck gale and I was riding right into it. Actually, I wound up going so slow that I was kind of thankful that it cooled my face, but still I did despair for a minute or two. Before I started climbing I took a second to regroup. There was no sense in feeling sorry for myself. I just had to suck it up and climb it and that was that. As I started climbing in my easiest gear and heaving for air I just repeated over and over to myself. “Just - get – o – ver – it.” The mantra helped. I switched back and forth between thinking it meant, “Quit complaining and harden the fuck up,” or “Don’t think, just climb.” Every once in awhile I would remind myself, “The-hill-DOES-end. Just-get-o-ver-it.” And I got over it without cracking... for now. As a reward I got another flying descent for several miles.

Just use it for background music for the following section.

But I’d used up everything I had mentally on that hill. I’d told myself I had to “Just get over it,” the “just” meaning “and then that’s it.” But that wasn’t it. I still had some 30 miles to go over rolling terrain. I hadn’t eaten in awhile, so my heart attacks had calmed down, but the what-the-fuck headwinds were just as bad here as they had been in the valley. The trees still didn't have any leaves and there wasn't so much as a plastic bag skittering across the street to give me an indication of how hard the wind was blowing. That really bothered me for some reason. If the wind is really blowing and I can SEE something flapping away, then it seems to validate me. But if there are no weeds, leaves, flags, or papers lying around to be blown in the wind it feels like it's all in my head. If it was all in my head, then that meant that I really was riding only about 10 mph on my little chainring on flat ground. No matter how you sliced it, I felt weak. I kept telling myself that it was good to get the slow rides out in training when you're all by yourself. Telling myself that worked for a few minutes, but I knew I was full of shit.

For some reason I felt like I had something to prove in this workout. It wasn't just all the people who told me I shouldn't do it that I had to prove something to, I was also competing against people who probably have no idea that I've been doing my homework on them. I've admitted that I chase Bob-O's times, but I had other people in my that I wanted to prove something to. Not that I wanted to get in these individuals' faces, I just wanted to post some speedy fast times, and maybe even lie and say "it felt easy." I looked down at my wrist. I'd only gone about 95 miles and 6 hours had come and gone, I think I'd actually passed the 6 1/2 hour mark at that point. What had held me together for miles were thoughts like, If I can just push a little harder I might be able to hit 112 miles in under 6:30. When that one went it was, Push a little harder and you can get a century in in under 6:30. When 6:30 came and went I briefly fixated on getting 112 miles in in under 7 hours. When I saw that that was not going to happen, I cracked.

The other thing spinning around in my mind was that one of the ideas behind this ride was to go over 112 miles, so mentally the distance would seem smaller. I wanted to teach both my mind to push past 112 miles, so that when staring down the barrel of a marathon, I wouldn't feel like I'd already put one max effort into my legs so far today. When I first turned back from Lake Placid I had planned to ride past my car the remaining 10 miles down to Lake George. Then, forever and ever for the rest of my life I could tell myself, "This is nothing, I've ridden 130 miles over mountains before." When the headwinds began, I told myself that I could choose between riding extra and a run-off. When seven hours came and went, like I said, I cracked, lost it, gave up. I spun in whatever gear offered the least resistance, sat up into the headwind, and gave up on the idea of running when I got back to the car.

My legs still actually felt okay. I wasn't sore and the thought never crossed my mind to walk my bike. I wasn't even really hungry. Mentally, though, I was cooked. The last 30 miles had been such a fight, and if I'd felt this bad going 112 miles, then how was I ever going to run after this, let alone run a marathon?! And still fresh in my mind was what a marathon felt like on FRESH legs, and despite doing all the training how it still hurt like hell. It really hit me then: What the fuck have I gotten myself into?! I was scared, but most of all I was disappointed in myself. I've never been fast or talented, but the one thing that I've always prided myself on was endurance, stubbornly barging on where every good reason said that I should quit. If I ever felt again the way that I felt at that very second, I knew I'd quit. It wasn't even that my body was that tired, I just... CRACKED.

I hadn't been quiet all afternoon, but my grunts and moans and screams had just been visceral reactions to how I was feeling. Now I started using words. "Just lighten the fuck up, would you!" I yelled at the wind. I came over a ridge and saw another hill ahead and moaned, "Nooooooooooo." In Spain I could yell "FUCK" when I dropped something, was startled, or hit my head, and even though people would look at me funny and everyone knew what it meant, it didn't really matter because it wasn't their language. I came to the bottom of an incline that was among the steepest of the day (around 15%) and yelled, "FUUUUUCK!" at the top of my lungs. I think some of the townspeople heard me. I think that in an English-speaking country, that might matter. A few minutes later I pushed up another hill and caught myself thinking, Maybe that was the last one. Don't you ever fucking think that, I said out loud. Because it's NEVER the last one. When the next hill rolled around, because there was no one around to see me, I started crying. There were no tears, it was the kind of crying spoiled kids do to get attention when they want out of wherever they are. I just wanted someone to swoop in and get me out of here. This is as close to a religeous experience as I get: Wishing I believed in God so I had someone to beg to get me out of here. And when I finally reached my car, I wasn't relieved, but angry. I felt like when someone's really late picking you up from the airport after a long flight, all you want to do is bitch somebody out.

Final stats:
Distance: 114.71 miles
Time: 7:17:40
Average speed: 15.7 mph
Total elevation gain: 9,335 ft

I packed my stuff into the car, took a short walk to clean out my legs, and started driving. I stopped at the first gas station I saw and bought some pretzels and peanuts even though I was still having chest pains. Maybe it was my heart breaking, maybe that's what it was. I peed for the first time since I left in the morning, and surprisingly it was mostly clear. God knows how that happened. Then I got in the car and made my way back to the highway. I doubled back over the road I had just ridden. I wasn't really thinking about much of anything. I was exhausted and numb. I felt like I'd gone somewhere emotionally that I'd only been once or twice before. Suddenly, out of nowhere I started sobbing. I don't know why, I wasn't sad in the least. I've heard of people who have cried after massages or after doing a max lift. I didn't feel much of anything, it just felt good to release it. It was like watching a good tear-jerker when you're in the right mood. So I drove and cried as I pulled onto the interstate back home.

I'd been driving for about an hour when I passed a sign that said something like, "Pittsburgh 42 miles, Montreal 135 miles." That's funny, I thought, those two cities aren't in the same direction. Then, at the next exit I passed, it didn't just say "EXIT 35", it said "EXIT/SORTIE". Oh shit! That's French! I'm headed towards Canada, and getting close by the looks of it! I snapped out of my self-indulgent funk and pulled off at the next exit. I swear I was paying attention when I got on the highway. It's just, they have the little "North" and "South" signs in such little type, and they both end in TH, have the same number of letters, and have an O in the middle. EaST and weST have similar problems. It's just my opinion, but they should either fix the signs, or fix the English language. Now I had to drive another hour just to get back to where I started, and with gas prices the way they are... Well it doesn't pay to cry and drive.

On the way back they had the big marquis flashing, PREPARE TO STOP AHEAD. I wonder why? I thought. Road work? An accident? When the cars started to slow down I was stupefied to see US border control agents. I had gone through border patrol checkpoints in California, Arizona, and Texas where they asked you questions and peered suspiciously through your car, but in New York? Were there really people sneaking Canadians through the border hidden under tarps in the back seat?

The best part of the day? Stinky Business Septic Pumping and Diner at mile 30. No kidding: diner and pooper services in the same building. The trucks simply said "Stinky" on the front.

I don't really have a conclusion to my tale. I'm not sore in the least. I wasn't ravenously hungry afterwards. I have been very sleepy, but that is probably because I got home way past my bedtime. I'm just a little, well, disappointed. So does anyone want to come with me next time? I promise, I'll do my best not to get too cranky when I get tired.