The New Experiment

ANNOUNCEMENT: Claire is getting her social media worked out.
Many of you have complained about the pop-up asking for a password when you try to view my blog. That happened when I figured out that whenever you google my name, my Twitter account is the first hit. Since I use words like "shit" in my tweets, I found it necessary to block my tweets from prying eyes (potential clients). I have dropped the Twitter feed from my sidebar (tear) so that the password popup is gone. If anyone knows how to get my real name OFF my speedracer twitter account, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!

In the meantime I have recently created more professional Facebook and Twitter accounts that I will be updating more regularly sans the cursing and with more information than just "first satisfying bowel movement in weeks" as my tweet content. My newer "professional" twitter name is @ClaireLunardoni, and my Facebook is finally linked up to my real name (and if I went to high school with you, no I STILL don't want to be your friend!). Hit me up!

Winter is my season of experimentation. In the winter of 2008-09 I experimented with giving up sugar, caffeine, processed grains, and dairy. It was great but completely unsustainable. In 2009 I tried a training program to do 1000 push-ups in an hour that I KNEW was bunk. I proved it was bunk when I gave up on Christmas Eve after achieving 500 push-ups in an hour and 15 minutes. My shoulders are STILL rounded forward from it.

This year's experiment is a doozie... for me anyway because it requires me doing something that I absolutely LOATHE: counting calories.

Many of my clients ask me about Biggest Loser. Even though I personally love Biggest Loser for many of the same reasons I loved both the Anna Nicole Show and Lifetime Television, as a trainer I'm also obligated to poo-poo it because of the negative impression that it gives of our profession. (Although I don't know if ANY trainer should be complaining about a show that is basically a 2-hour commercial for their services). Nevertheless, despite practically living in a gym (my desk chair is a plyo box), I don't know any better what goes on behind the scenes at Biggest Loser than my clients do. How much are they eating? How much are they exercising? What exactly is the composition of their diet and exercise program? Are Bob and Jillian really like that behind the scenes? Uhhhh... hold on, I'll just pull out my How the Fuck Am I Supposed to Know app.

Some internet research told me that they're doing some 4-6 hours of exercise a day (including at least 90 minutes of intervals) and eating somewhere between 1000 and 1500 calories a day. With a deficit of several thousand calories per day, bodies that are screaming to be given a chance to heal, and cutting all the processed crap out of their diet, it's no wonder they get results. There's also some severe dehydration going on to cut weight, but that's beside the point.

In a quest for more detailed knowledge of their fitness and nutrition plan to report back to my clients (and because I'd recently had a dream that Jillian got drunk and insisted we have sex on her motorcycle), I picked up a couple of Jillian Michaels' books. Around this time, one of my heavier clients said to me, "Yeah, but it's easier for someone like you to lose weight than someone like me." Well that was it. Not only was it completely untrue, but the best way to get a Claire to do something extreme and possibly stupid is to make it into a competition, even if it's just an imaginary cage match with scrunchy-faced "fitness guru."

One of the Jillian books I had picked up was "Making the Cut," which promised me that I could "drop the last stubborn 10 to 20 pounds once and for all" in 30 days. Sure, okay, whatever. Who doesn't want that? Rather than being aimed at the morbidly obese, this "plan" is closer to what participants on her spin-off show "Losing It" probably do: a 30-day diet for drastic results for one specific occasion (wedding, high school reunion, that day that you finally "accidentally" run into the ex).

Here's a summary of the diet: you only get to eat your BMR's worth of calories, and you're supposed to do these high-intensity "advanced" weight-training circuits 4 times a week, plus cardio for like an hour every day. There's this 50-question questionnaire that tells you what kind of metabolism you have, and I'm a "slow oxidizer," which means that I get 65% carbs, 25% protein, and 15% fat (more carbs than the other two oxidizing groups).

Problem No. 1 with The Plan: I'm a vegetarian. Most of my meals are high in carbohydrates from vegetables and whole grains. My protein sources tend to be toward the high-fat (cheese, eggs), high-carb (legumes, whole grains), or no-no foods anyway (soy, tisk tisk). Of course I feel full after eating a lot of carbs, because I always eat lots of carbs. Of course I find high-fat meals satisfying if it's pretty much the only time I get both fat and protein in my diet. So how am I supposed to answer a question like, "You concentrate best when you eat: A. fruits and grains, B. nothing in particular affects my concentration, C. meat and fatty food"? Well, A is the only one I've tried so...

Problem No. 2 with The Plan: Michaels gives me a formula to figure out my BMR, but doesn't take into account body composition. I have way more muscle than the "typical" person my size. I weigh 130 pounds, but I have 110 pounds of lean mass. I'm also WAY more active than most people. I'm a trainer. I'm lifting, spotting, demonstrating, and riding my bike around the city for 12 hours a day 5-7 days a week. According to Jillian, I'm not allowed to eat more than 1385 calories every day. According to the Katch-McArdle formula for BMR, my BMR is more like 1450, and my. My daily caloric expenditure is somewhere between 2500 and 3000 calories per day. Michaels' answer to any excuse I may have, "It's only 30 days -- suck it up!" (that's a direct quote).

The real reason that I tried the "The Fuck You Jillian Starvation Diet" (other than, I'll admit it, wanting "my sexiest body ever!"), was because I thought it was a terrible idea. I have several clients who are subsisting off of fewer than 1500 calories per day, and they're the ones who aren't losing any weight. But how do you tell a frustrated dieter that the best way to lose weight is to eat more? And how do you sympathize with someone trying to cut calories when your 5'2" frame has processed 2500-3000 calories pretty much every day for the past 10 years? Finally, I knew what was supposed to happen when you go on low-calorie diets, but I wanted to see for myself.

Diet Strategy Number 1: Don't Keep Your Diet a Secret
I told every single one of my friends, clients, and coworkers that I was doing this diet so that I wouldn't chicken out. Let me tell you, I would have given this stupid shit up on the first day if it hadn't been for that!

My typical day's eating looks like this:
4:30 am -- apple
8:30 am -- oatmeal with 1/2 a scoop of protein powder and a tablespoon of chia seeds
10:30 am -- lift weights for an hour. Feel like shit. Am able to lift way less than I usually would. Take extra long breaks because my recovery is shit. Am successful in not fainting.
11:30 am -- plain nonfat Greek yogurt and a banana
12:30 pm -- run, ride, do yoga, swim for 30 - 90 min, high intensity. Cardio actually felt okay through the whole experiment
2:00 pm -- eat some sort of grain salad with veggies
4:00 pm -- eat a fruit salad and worry about going over on my carbs
8:00 pm -- 4 egg whites, sauteed spinach, be glad for the chance to go to bed and not be hungry anymore

Diet Danger Number 1: If You Severely Restrict Your Calories, You Will Lose Muscle, Not Fat.
After 10 days on the diet, I had lost 2.4 pounds. I had lost 1.9 pounds of muscle, despite lifting weights for over an hour four times per week. Yes, this was a very short time for a weight training program, but I wasn't really looking forward to having lost 8 pounds of muscle by the end of the program.

Diet Danger Number 2: If You Are Hungry All the Time, You Are Unlikely to Stick to Your Diet and You Will Gain the Weight Back Sooner Rather than Later.
I was so hungry! I don't mean like tummy grumbling hungry. I mean like feeling like I was in a constant state of bonking hungry. I managed to stick to my calorie limit for 10 days, keeping all my macronutrients in the right proportions. Every time I stood up, I would be dizzy for a good 30 seconds. I would lose count while counting to 10. I couldn't remember what people had said to me that morning. I was nearly getting in accidents because I was driving around in a fog. I was loathe to demonstrate an exercise because I was afraid I would collapse and my muscles would burn for the next 10 seconds. I could think about nothing but how hungry I was. Walking past restaurants was torture. I began fantasizing about food.

I was a total wreck, not just energy-wise. I was going crazy. I turned into a control freak (more than ever, like I was when I was a teenager and I used to pitch a fit if somebody wanted to watch something else when it was my turn to watch Ally McBeal all alone and do my crunches). If something unexpected came up, I was more likely to cry until I get my way than to get it done. Clients would ask me to reschedule appointments and I would get extremely put out. "You want to come 15 minutes later? Fine! Let me put an ALERT on that so I don't FORGET." (Fucker!)

I was even more scatterbrained than ever. I would tell my clients to do 12 of an exercise and stop counting at 5. Supersetting squats and shoulder presses? I'll forget the squats. I'd spend eons staring at my phone because by the time I've turned it on, I've forgotten what I was checking, so it times out and puts itself to sleep. Then I'd turn it back on and try to remember.

I couldn't deal with anything mentally trying, which really sucked because in day two of the Fuck You Jillian Starvation Diet (28 days till pizza), someone smashed my window right outside of work and stole my new bike out of my car. I don't know how I would have reacted normally, but as I dealt with insurance (bike's not covered), the autoglass guys (what do you mean you have a Massachusetts insurance company?), called the cops ("yeah, sure, we're on it."), listened to my coworkers tell me how stupid it was to leave my bike in my car in the first place, and filed a police report ("how does a bike even fit into the back seat of a Corolla?"), if I'd had a gun and ran into the crackhead who violated my car and my bike, I would have shot him in the face without thinking twice. Then I would have continued to shoot when he was on the ground. Yeah, sure, it's a violation. They stole something that I worked my ass off for; something that was perfectly fitted to me and only me with the tiny frame, extra long stem, and aggressive fit, and they sold it for $20 worth of meth. But I don't like guns. Still, I was feeling violent. That night I saw Scout and laid into her so bad that she told me that she didn't want to hang out with me anymore tonight.

Starvation not only affects your energy for exercise. I had no sex drive, and didn't even want to be touched... or be around other people. Meals are so precious and so restricted that any person demanding my time or my energy may rob me of precious calories, or worse force me to cheat. I might miss some of my 8 hours of sleep that are my only escape from this shit. They may demand a portion of my already severely-depleted energy stores. I started isolating myself.

Diet Danger Number 3: If You Aren't Eating Enough Calories, Your Workouts Will Suffer
I'm an athlete getting back into training. It's bad enough that my workouts have been shit. I've got an 18-mile run on Saturday where I'll be burning 1.5 times my daily calorie allowance in the race alone. I've got a 120-mile ride on New Years that will require about 2x my daily allowance. My workouts were already crap. I was ending them early and turning down the heat because I was so low on energy. I wasn't recovering properly. Things that normally wouldn't make me sore were tearing me up. I quit one hill repeat workout short because my hips were so stiff I was afraid that I would slip out on the 40 mph descent, not crap out on the 7 mph ascent.

After 10 days I was absolutely dead. I had been hungry and able to think about nothing else for a week and a half. I couldn't imagine another 20 days of this, and the mental fog and hunger were only getting worse. My job performance was suffering. I felt sick, not in my stomach, not in my head, but in my body. I already knew the answer to this experiment: It was a terrible idea. Did I really need 10 more days of this torture to figure this out?

Diet Danger Number 4: Most Dieters Wind Up Gaining Back More Weight Than They Lost/Hunger Leads to Binging
On the 10th day I got home from my ride starving and couldn't stand the thought of having to get through the next 4 hours on nothing but a container of nonfat yogurt (I'd already eaten the banana out of desperation to get through the workout at all). I ate the yogurt, then I ate another banana, then I ate my dinner, then I ate a granola bar that had survived the pantry cleansing I had done 11 days earlier.

Then I went to the mall to go Christmas shopping. But I couldn't concentrate on finding any gifts because all I was really looking for was a Sweet Factory. I found Godiva Chocolates and See's Candies, but I couldn't very well walk around the mall eating bonbons out of a box. I had to find something that would require as little unwrapping as possible and where I could reach into an opaque bag discretely as many times as I needed to until I had eaten so much sugar that I was going to throw up. Having walked 2 laps around the mall and not found the type of binge haven that I sought, I went to the Trader Joe's next door and bought a container of Almond Butter Toffee Chocolate Dipped Whatever Things at 170 calories each. I ate all 8 of them in the package as I bought gifts in Borders. Then I went out to dinner with Scout. I was jolly and happy again and willing to be touched.

The next day I felt alive again. I was able to focus on what my clients were saying and deal with the unexpected. I went to Target to pick up part of a Christmas gift and found myself wandering the grocery aisles wishing all the other shoppers would leave so that I could design the perfect binge in peace. I hadn't eaten this way in years! What was happening to me? In the car I couldn't shove foil-wrapped white chocolate pieces and blue corn and flax seed tortilla chips into my mouth fast enough. I ate so much that I thought I really was going to vomit, and then I had pizza for dinner. This was terrible. Normally I enjoy eating with friends and pride myself on craving healthy foods. What I was doing right now was addictive behavior. What had Jillian done to me?

I know that my eating will normalize shortly, and I look forward to getting back to my own workouts rather than Jillian's mind-numbing light-weight, high-rep circuits that use half the equipment in the gym.

I have also learned valuable lessons about myself in this experiment:

• I do have willpower when I have a very specific program, but when I relinquish any control, then I lose all control.
• I need way more than 1385 calories per day to function. I should probably go no lower than 1800 calories per day to avoid going crazy.
• I still don't eat enough protein.
• Everything that they say about diets is true. The hard part is actually following the only one that works: proper diet and exercise.
  

Le dopage

With my recent month's focus on strength training, I've been spending time in GNC and the GNC aisle of Rite Aid looking at protein powders and other supplements. They have ferocious pictures of men looking like their limbs are being torn off with overblown claims in nonsensical language that calls up images of biting the heads off bunnies and pencil-like nerds. Words like "warrior," "beast," "unchained," and "monstrous" promise to turn you into a behemoth in language that seems better suited to a comic book than a supplement a few feet away from the Mylanta and diurrhetics that promise to fight kankles. They also have derivatives of words that I recognize from stories about doping cases in the news: "anabolic," "androgen," sterol," "testosterone"... I know that many of these products contain substances banned by cycling and triathlon (not by law), and it's tempting to try them out and see what they'd do to my power.

People walking into supplement shops are already vulnerable. They've come in with the intention of dropping $40 on pixie dust that will give them more of an advantage than food alone. And what makes one substance "bad" and another "okay" anyway? It's pretty arbitrary. I heard an interview once with some anti-doping specialist that said that caffeine was the single greatest legal performance-enhancing drug, and that if it weren't already so entrenched in our culture, it would have been banned long ago. And yet athletes have their careers terminated over traces of some chemical that's found is way into their blood through cold medicine. Sure, caffeine's natural and EPO isn't, but testosterone and HGH are natural and they're not allowed. Alcohol is way more dangerous than EPO (even back in the days when guys on EPO had to set their alarms for the middle of the night to do jumping jacks so that their blood didn't congeal in their veins), but alcohol is perfectly legal. If these drugs are banned, it's not necessarily because they're "bad" for you (or worse than any other pharmaceutical anyway).

The drugs aren't banned because they're unsafe, they're banned because they make you bigger/stronger/faster. Athletes spend hours every day busting their asses to get a leg up on the competition. They eat food that tastes like sand to optimize their power-to-weight ratio and muscle recovery. They take artificial supplements to pick up where food left off with electrolytes, protein, and even some vitamins. For a female athlete who takes iron supplements to fight exercise-related anemia, for example... how different is it physiologically to increase her red blood cell count with a few red blood cells from another person's veins? It's different ethically, but physiologically? When Greg LeMond was shot in a hunting accident, it was okay for him to get blood transfusions (he didn't). When Floyd Landis's hip was necrotic, it was okay for him to get cortisone (a steroid) shots. For those whose livelihood depends on it, the pressure to take that extra step to the other kind of enhancing supplements must be astronomical; especially in sports like cycling that have the perception (true or not) that everybody's already doing it.

So back to me standing in the aisle at GNC staring at the tubs of monster dust. I'm here because I want to burn fat, build muscle, improve explosive power, and I'm willing to pay for it. These bottles are saying they'll give me what I want. Running through my mind over and over with each outlandish claim on the side of a bottle is: I'd never even be tested!

I'm not doping. I have doubts as to whether this monster dust even works for meatheads who only care about bulk (not performance), let alone a spritely little cyclist like me who could care less about getting "shreaded." I'm not about to drop $58.99 on Andro Nitro X Triple Anabolic Formula and Penis Enhancement! If they had something proven to improve my performance though, like EPO, blood transfusions, or human growth hormone sitting there between the Incredible Hulk and Jillian Michaels pointing and smirking at me, I can't guarantee I wouldn't shell out the big bucks and take it home.

I like to ride my bike (and swim and run) because I really like putting the hurt into other people. I love the feeling when someone thinks, I can take her, and then I just blow them to pieces. I hate being on the other side of that story too, and it haunts me for months when I am. In short, I hate it when people think I can't do something. I have classic Little Man's syndrome, and I'm willing to go to great lengths to prove I have bigger balls than all y'all. If there were a button I could press, or a mantra I could say... or a magic pill I could take to never be shown up again... come on... yeah, I'd do it.

I've been watching a lot of old Tour DVDs during my trainer workouts lately. I personally believe that many–if not all–of the major players over the past decade are dirty. Do I care? Not really. Does it make me mad that Lancey Pants is probably a huge drug cheat and possibly a huge hypocrite for his professed dedication to anti-doping measures? Yes. Does it make it any less exciting when he schools Ullrich, Pantani, or Mayo (all of whom have their own sketchy pasts)? Not at all. Hey, all the EPO, HGH, anabolic steroids, and blood transfusions in the world would never make me a Lance Armstrong. Those guys are still fantastic athletes and genetic freaks. So what if there's a little Hollywood in there exaggerating their prowess and making a better show? It's not my career. If they want to gamble with their reputations in order to dazzle me a bit with a thrilling 200-km solo breakaway, I'm not going to object. Sure, I wish the sport were clean, but I also wish that all parking were free and plentiful, organic produce were cheap, and it were sunny every day. It ain't gonna happen and there's nothing I can do about it, so I'm better off not worrying about it to begin with and enjoying what I've got: lying, dirty cyclists who combine two of my favorite things–scandal and cycling!

And don't y'all act like you're better than me and that you would never consider doping. A couple of years ago I asked who would eat food that tasted like sand for an opportunity to be the best athlete in your sport. For those who placed athletic performance high on their list of priorities, many of them said that they would. The rest lied. Rumor has it that many triathletes with the means to do so choose to use performance-enhancing drugs in their quest for elite goals like Kona. With any reward that's tempting enough, a sport that requires so much single-minded dedication, and no consequences for cheating, can you really be surprised that it's happening? I'm not saying that everyone's doing it, but the fact that it's rare gives the athlete who chooses to cheat even more of an edge over his competition and makes doping even more attractive.

So yeah, if I were in the best shape of my life and in a position where I were just on the cusp of true greatness, and then my manager came up to me and said, "Here's a new drug that will enhance your performance 8%; enough to go from also-ran to sporting great. They won't be able to detect for another decade," I don't think I'd hesitate for long before dropping trou for the needle.

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.

Followup

Some of you may remember my post from last week about The Sprinkler, who was leaving messes on the toilet seat. After a particularly messy bathroom afternoon, my co-conspirators and I had had enough. I wrote to the office manager (a man) again and begged him to put up a note addressing our specific problem. I even included a sarcastic suggestion of what I thought the note should say, including terms like "for the love of God" and "you throw like a girl." Much to my surprise, the office manager came over and said that the note was fine how it was. It conveyed anger and humor at the same time, and showed that this behavior was unacceptable. "I can't go in there, though," he said. "You hang it up."

Me?! Accept responsibility for this?! Nuh uh! If any of this blew up in our faces, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't the only vigilante taking matters into her own hands. So I recruited my co-conspirators. Fellow runner, and member of the hardest working production team in the publishing world, Liz aka Za-beth took my words and brought them to life with her design and production knowledge. She took out some of the more offensive wording, and designed the sign to maintain but soften the sarcastic tone. Within 24 hours, the following sign was posted in both bathrooms:

Please excuse the comment sticker. The image was made from a PDF at the final stage of editing. Yes, when you work in publishing, even the signs for the bathroom go through a couple of editing passes.

For obvious reasons, we have to be clandestine about it. But at least one sweet, soft-spoken long-time employee has given positive feedback. We win!

Another thing I have to follow up on is the detox. We're going on 11 days now, and dare I say that I'm adapting? I mentioned the trouble giving up caffeine, that has now passed. I'm still dependent on sleep aids (I'm beginning to think that nothing natural will cure my insomnia), but I've been able to sleep every night that I've taken something (which doesn't always happen, even when I do overdose on nighttime over-the-counter stuff).

For the first week I was absolutely wiped physically. I'd dug deeper than I thought in the Hyannis not-even-close Marathon, and my body just felt so crappy that I was convinced that I was going to have to take a week off of training altogether to feel human again. And then, on the seventh day, after only 2 hours' sleep (that was the night I tried going without the Advil PM), I got up to go for a long swim... and I felt awesome! Without putting in any special effort, I took about 8-10 seconds off my usual 300 time, and after swimming 4,000 hard yards, I still felt like I could have kept swimming all morning. I stayed home from work that day to take a nap (I still had a sick day coming to me, and I'm useless when I'm tired anyway), and around lunchtime I got on my trainer. I ground out a hard 2 hours with 5-minute stints as hard as I could go every 15 minutes. The sluggishness in my legs from earlier in the week was suddenly gone, and I was averaging roughly 2 mph faster that I usually would on a similar workout. Even my runs have been fantastic. That night I ran a short interval workout, and despite being dehydrated and depleted from my ride, the run went great, as did the tempo run with hills that I did on Thursday. Where I thought I was going to have to take a week of bedrest next week, now I feel like I'm already coming off a rest week. I feel like Artie: The Strongest Man... in the World!

And the willpower thing hasn't been as difficult as I thought. In the first week I thought I'd kill for some yogurt covered raisins. I couldn't imagine how I was going to get through 40-some days without sugar. I still crave sugar when I'm hungry, and that's been the hardest, but I'm not about to start murdering babies and selling my soul to get it. I found myself standing in the aisle of Whole Foods for 10 minutes last night, debating the identity of raw sugar, evaporated cane juice, and other "natural" sweeteners like "raisin juice concentrate" and "fruit sweetener." In the end I decided that in the body, sugar is sugar no matter where it comes from. In a huge feat of willpower I put the hippie cereal back on the shelf. (I have had to put some maple syrup in my iced tea for hard runs, but got through an 80-mile trainer ride on fruit alone.)

I miss the comfort of decaf coffee once or twice a week, but I'm trying all kinds of different herbal teas, and it's almost as comforting. Almost. I don't miss cheese nearly as much as I thought I would and I'm drinking soy milk for the first time in years. And giving up the processed grains has been more of a challenge to my social life than my appetite. No changes in body composition, except maybe tipping the scales about 1% heavier (.1% more body fat), but I'm not too worried about it. My weight has fluctuated within 3 lb in either direction for over a year, but it's not long before it comes back home.

So for those of you who are wondering how I'm doing living off tree bark, nuts, rocks, and berries, I'm doing just fine, thank you very much. And it's WAY easier than I thought it would be.

Rants: Yoga and Your Useless Fat Ass Is Your Own Damned Fault!

I think that perhaps I may be in a bad mood. Either that or I'm just having a bad day. Either way, I'm annoyed at the world. I'll start with the second one first.

On Saturday I did a weights session followed by a long-ish, fast-ish run, and as a result my hamstrings (thank you straight-leg deadlifts), lats and rhomboids (thanks pullups), and pecs (thanks pushups) have been fucked up all week. Not injured, just tight and sore. I am not flexible to begin with, especially not in my neck and shoulders. I have that rounded-forward shoulder, winged scapulae thing. Kyphosis? Typhoid? Whatever it's called. I try to care, but I really, really, really don't. Nothing you can say can change my mind about that, so quit interrupting. I'm trying to tell a story.

So I go to yoga this morning to try to address the aforementioned problems in my back, chest, and legs. I do not enjoy yoga, I go because it is good for me. I also do not like the teacher. She is one of those people who fancies herself a serious triathlete, but skips 90% of her workouts. And yet she still makes excuses, like we care, or that we haven't noticed when she never shows up to swimming. When she comes to swimming, she will sit out 50 yards out of every 100 to catch her breath, but she refuses to move down to the slow lane. She loves to talk about the marathon she ran (I think it was Chicago in something like 1855), but I have heard her speak of ONE actual run that she's gone on in the year I've been going to her class. After that ONE run, she complained of being sore for a week.

But she thinks she knows everything there is to know about anything. After I ran the Boston Marathon she asked me what my time was. I told her it was just under 4:15. "What was your time?" asked one of the swimmers in the class, Susan. We like Susan, she just hadn't heard me. The World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga teacher answered for me, "4:50, anything under 5 hours is good." I didn't run a 4:50!!!!! But for some reason I didn't correct her. It seemed like it would be rude, since she does know everything after all. But it annoyed me.

I must have told her in February or March that I was training for an ironman. "You mean a half ironman?" she asked. Noooo, why would I say 'ironman' when I meant half ironman. Either you think I'm stupid or you think I'm a liar. I don't appreciate either one. Then, some time in the spring she asked me again if I was training for anything. "My big race is my ironman in August," I said. "Is it a half ironman?" she asked. Noooooo, it's STILL a full ironman. Before I left for California at the end of July she asked me what I was going for. "My ironman," I said. "Oh, is it a half ironman?" Noooooo, still a full fucking ironman! Once I can understand, maybe she just didn't hear me. But three times?!

And she says the names of stuff wrong. Granted, she's French, and I of all people shouldn't be criticizing anyone of knot knowing obscure plurals and rare eccentricities of one's second language, but she makes these mistakes in every class, and in every class they annoy me, second language or not. She calls vertebrae (plural of vertebra) "vertebras." She calls scapulae (plural of scapula) "scapulas." She calls your pelvis (noun) your "pelvic." She uses "foot" for both singular and plural, same with "shoulder" and "buttocks." And she calls your plantar fascia your "plantar fasciitis," as in "We are going to stretch your plantar fasciitis." If you don't know, plantar fasciitis is inflamation of the plantar fasciia. You cannot stretch inflamation.

So today, as I mentioned, I was stiff and sore. I'm not usually a very flexible person, but today I was in especially rough shape. That's why I go to yoga! We're warming up, doing our breathing thing (I have to cheat, I don't know how other people can breathe in for 15 straight seconds without suffocating), when she comes up behind me and tries to roll my shoulders back. I have the forward-rolling shoulder problem, I know. I don't care. I usually let her roll them back and I hold them as best I can. But today the woman was trying to break some bones. I was trying to be zen about it and ignore her, letting her reshape me without affecting my chi. You know, flowing with the river... But then she whispers, "You want to roll them back a little farther." At this point it feels like the points of my scapulae are about to puncture my lungs, and I physically CANNOT move my shoulders back any farther. "That's as far back as they'll go!" I whisper, and she goes back to the front of the room.

Then she comes back to correct me on pretty much every pose for the rest of the day. She corrects me more than the new people I have to either side of me: the woman who is twisting in complete WRONG direction, and the man who is doing the ocean breath so loud that I swear they can hear him all the way up on the Death Star. I know I'm not the best yogi out there, but I'm sure my form is better than some of the 50-year-old runner guys in the class. "Claire, keep that leg straight. Claire, flex your foot. Claire, you want to rotate your hip out more..." But when she asked about my jacket, I knew she was picking on me. See, it was 6º when I pulled in to the Y parking lot this morning. So I was wearing this warm, old, ratty fleece. I'm one of those people who's always cold, and I was still wearing my warm, ratty fleece halfway through class, because it's not like we were running or anything. I was cold. She came over and said, "Aren't you too warm in that fleece?"

"Not yet," I said. What the fuck?! Like I wouldn't be able to tell if I were too warm. Just because she's menopausal and suffering from hot flashes doesn't mean that we all are. This is yoga class, not tea in her living room. Let me zone out and feel my body dammit! Quit distracting me.

But I wasn't pissed off yet. This is just the typical yoga annoyances that I put up with every week. I'm zen, I can deal with it. This is why I do yoga, to stretch and calm down. Then, after class I sprayed down my mat, put my stuff away, and was putting my shoes back on outside the yoga studio. "Claire," said the World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga Instructor, leaning out the door. "Have you been stretching after your biking and running?"

"No," I said, because it was the answer she was waiting for. In fact I do stretch... a bit. Probably every other run I'll be feeling tight and stretch for less than 5 minutes. You know, touch my toes, stretch out my calves on a stair, stand with my foot on my butt... I'm not one of the people who starts wiping down their bike in spin classes before the stretching is over. But I'm usually too cold/tired/sweaty/hungry to stay touching my toes for 20 minutes after every workout. That's why I go to yoga! And anyway, aren't modern exercise trends moving away from static stretching?

"Well you really should be stretching after you work out," the World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga Instructor told me, like I'd asked her opinion. "That's why you're so tight. Just for a few minutes before, and then more afterwards."

She CAME OUT OF THE CLASSROOM to tell me this. This is why I go to yoga!!!!! And yes, I was tight today, but it was from fucking myself up lifting too much weight. That's. why. I. come. to. her. class. at 5:30. in. the. morning. EVERY. WEEK! I come to yoga to STRETCH, you blockhead!

Beyond the marathon

Alternate names for this post:

I Have a Cowbell and You Don't

Things That Suck Giant Donkey Balls and Things That Don't
There's More Than One Way to Skin a P... never mind

I've always wanted to do ultramarathons, and the gateway drug into ultramarathon addictions is the 50K. It's technically an ultra, but it's a "soft" ultra, an ultra "light" if you will. Still, 50 kilometers is 31 miles, and since they're usually on trails, the terrain doesn't tend to make it easy for you. Sometime in my Boston marathon taper, (when I thought I was invincible and could do anything), I decided that I could do a 50K NOW. I wrote to a few friends, and they cautioned me that 50K was a long way, that if I wasn't comfortable with marathons, and I don't usually run on trails, then maybe I should put it off until I was better prepared. They think I can't do it! I raged (remember, I was tapering and I was grouchy). That same night I got a flier for the Pineland Farms 50K in the mail, and it seemed like fate. Even still, I didn't tell anyone about my plans. Sure, Gretchen, Mindy, and Cranky knew, but no one else. If too many people told me I shouldn't do it, I might start to believe them. Then I'd be out $40.

And the other reason why I didn't say much about it was just in case I failed, I wouldn't have to tell anyone. I could just pretend like it didn't happen. I realize that I'm a fairly weak runner and I was prepared to walk the last 10 miles if I had to. I was prepared to come in dead stinkin' last. I just wanted to see what was on the other side of that 26.2 mile line. However, since a 50K is about as painless as you can go in the ultramarathon world, at times it was easy to forget that this race was actually longer than a marathon. I was about as keyed up about it as I would be for a fifteen mile run.

I was all ready to wake up at 5:00 to make the 10:00 am start, and that's what I would have done if I hadn't checked the race web site just one more time before bed and seen that my race started at 8:00! Shit! Disaster averted, I set my alarm for 3:45 and went to bed, where I stayed awake for a few hours before finally falling asleep. In the morning I was on target to leave at about 5:00... well, maybe 5:05, until I went to plug the address into the GPS in the car and discovered I'd copied the address down wrong. I had to go back inside, print up new directions, blah, blah, blah. I finally hit the road around 5:15.

I drove right over to my local Starbucks where I could see the Hungarian early morning ladies getting ready for the day, but they were still closed for another 10 minutes. So I got back in the car and headed north, waiting until after 5:30 and pulling off for another Starbucks that I knew was near the highway. I pulled up and... it was also closed. Fuck. Driving north towards the New Hampshire border I kept telling the GPS to find the nearest Starbucks until it found one that was near the highway and wouldn't require any doubling back. It was about 6:00 now, and I knew that all the Starbucks in North America must be open at this point. I pulled off the highway, pissed off the bitchy lady that lives in the GPS who seems so peeved when you don't follow HER rout, and finally managed to find the local Starbucks at about 6:20. To my relief, the lemon-shaped lamps inside were on. To my greater relief I could see two employees behind the counter inside. And to my great surprise, the door was locked. Some cyclists were across the street, and I asked them if they knew what the fuck was up. Starbucks doesn't open until 6:30, neither did this other coffee shop across the street. They would be open in 10 minutes, but I didn't have 10 minutes anymore. "Fuck!" I said. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" I ran back to my car and noticed that the restaurant that I'd parked at had a giant "Open" flag hanging over the door. I tried the door. Not open. Fuck. And now I had to pee.

Finally I found an open Starbucks at a rest stop in Kittery, went to the bathroom, and dashed out to my car. At the very, very best, now I could only arrive 25 minutes before the start. What if they closed registration? Really, I had nothing to worry about. I wasn't even the last person in the parking lot and made it to the starting line with plenty of time to pee and drop my stuff in the car.

The course was two 25 km loops (15.5 miles) that were impossibly wound-up on themselves, which meant that you were never far from an aid station. The 50 mile runners (who'd left at 6:00 AM) would do a 3.5 mile add-on before doing 3 loops, and the 25K race started at 10:00 to do one loop of the course.

I ran with a camera all day, but this was the only picture I bothered to take. Oops. The rest of the pictures from the course are taken from the photos at last year's race on the web site.

The race director yelled something about the course that I didn't hear, and then a cow bell was rung to send us off (I think), and we went... sort of. That's what I love about trail running, people start running-ish, jogging-ish, but no one's really in a hurry. I'd hardly used my legs all week, so I was feeling really great, but I ran-ish, jogged-ish with everyone else, and when we hit the first hill, I stopped and walked with everyone else. If the person in front of me was going slow, I slowed down rather than going around them. We ran in a big pack for the first several miles until the course finally sifted us out.

I found myself running with a guy with a hydration pack. I ran when he ran, walked when he walked, and when everyone else was gone and we were still together, I introduced myself. I would get to know a lot about Jay over the next several hours, as we ran the whole, entire course together. He'd run several 50's of both the metric and English standard variety, although he wasn't a total trail nerd by nature. "These people are crazy," Jay whispered to me after we'd been running together for a few miles. The few other people that I talked to were a bit loopy, and I was glad I'd fallen into step with Jay and not the crazy lady who couldn't stop talking about the black flies in her front yard, or the guy tooting his own horn about his 20 years of ultrarunning experience who still hadn't finished Western States (that's all he talked about).

Jay was in the army and had some unspecified job with the Department of Homeland Security. He'd served in both the Clinton and Bush administration. I was really interested to hear about Jay's experiences with combat, his political opinions, his thoughts about Bush, and his thoughts on war, but there are so many questions that you just can't ask a soldier. "Tell me," I said, "do you miss it?"
"What?" he asked.
"War."
"You must know some people in the military..." he said. I'll admit it, I'm totally intrigued by the military. I have my GI Jane fantasies (no, not that kind of fantasy), and might have wound up in the military if I didn't have to kill anyone, shoot anything, follow orders, or eat meat, and I could walk away whenever I wanted to. I was hoping that Jay would have some great and inspirational stories about intense physical missions, but later in the race when I asked him if he had any, he said, "Nah, nothing like this."
"Well, what about boot camp?" I asked.
"Boot camp isn't as bad as people think it is. If you sat on the couch for 4 years in high school you might have a hard time of it, but if you were an athlete in high school, it's nothing you wouldn't be used to." I was disappointed. If I was going to run with an army guy, I was hoping that he could at least yell insults at me and make me dig deep inside myself to "be all that I could be" or something. He said that the one thing that one of his basic trainees had filed a formal complaint against his unit about was that his drill instructor made the trainee eat cookies until he puked. Hell, I knew people who did that kind of thing for fun! Instead, as time went on, we fell silent, and by the second loop we barely spoke anymore. We just had a tacit agreement that we were going to be in this together, and when one walked, the other walked, when one ran, the other ran, we waited for each other at aid stations, and we paced each other through the whole, entire race.

The race web site describes the course like this: "The trails are wide and non-technical, but very hilly. Although there are no major climbs the rolling terrain is unrelenting." I was afraid that the trails would be like my trails at home that are so rocky, rooty, and steep that I find it hard to average faster than an 11:00 mile, even when I don't walk. However, the "trails" were more like paths: grass-covered paths through the woods, or paths trampled through the tall grass in rolling fields. In fact, the only part that was hard on the joints were the paths through the fields that were slightly banked, and real hard on your uphill ankle. The rolling hills were endless, but the uphills weren't so bad, since we were walking them, and there were only a few knee-busting downhills. Grades tended to stay below the 20% mark, but there were several spots where it reached up to 30% both up and down. We had a cumulative elevation gain and loss of 7,900', which was much less severe than it could have been. I thought ultramarathons had to climb tens of thousands of feet for anyone to sign up. Luckily, I was wrong.

My body felt great, until sometime between miles 7 and 10, all of a sudden, it didn't. My butt started doing that thing that my butt does where it gets tight and sore. I started getting that awful heartburn that I got in the Adirondacks. Jay stopped to use the bathroom and I shuffled on ahead for a few minutes without him. Without Jay to pace me, I felt like I weighed a million pounds. I was running along on a flat with a woman whose shuffle could barely be called "running" in its loosest definition of the word. When Jay caught back up I was able to pick up his pace and trot away. Still, I knew I had to do something, or today was going to "suck giant donkey balls" (Mindy's phrase, not mine). I started hitting my bottle hard, emptying it before every aid station. It was getting hot, and I started drinking a dixie cup or two of Gatorade while they were refilling my bottle. I alternated between Gatorade, plain water, and Nuun at each aid station. I ate potatoes, candy orange slices, Twizzlers, bananas, anything that appealed to me. The aid stations were great, with more food than I've ever seen at any road race or triathlon, even the ones that cost three times as much as this event. "Man, I never thought I'd see the day when I didn't want to eat another Twizzler," I told Jay as I continued chewing on the waxy mess well after the aid station. I'd started chewing on Twizzlers to quit smoking, and kicked the butts, but wound up with a nasty Twizzler habit. Twizzler addiction or not, stuffing my face seemed to work though and whether it was the fluid, the food, the Gatorade, or the Nuun that did it, I started to feel stronger again a couple of miles in to the second loop.

"Stronger" is a relative term. Every time we stopped running I was so relieved at the chance to walk, but after awhile a deep, dull ache would set into all the muscles in my legs and I would NEED to run again to clear it out. And so it went: walk, run, walk, run, walk, run, repeat until you hit an aid station, stuff your face and start over. It was getting pretty damned hot too. The temperatures were in the mid-70's, which is hotter than anything I've gotten to train in this year, and the sun was strong. It wasn't such a problem in the woods where there was shade, but running across those fields it was really beating down.

About half way through the second loop Jay and I came up behind a man who was hunched over, and was tipping over so far to the right that his right ear was on his shoulder, and only the left side of his body seemed to be moving. It was a wonder he wasn't just pivoting around in circles. "Great job," I said as we passed him, and that was when I got a good look at his face. It was my old nemesis, GRANDPA! At the time we thought that he was only doing the 25K, but as it turned out, he was in the 50K. The way the course was set up, you had to pass the finishing area each loop, in order to do a smaller 5-mile loop on the other side. As Jay and I came through the finishing area I tried to spot Mindy, who was supposed to be volunteering. It was crowded, so instead I shouted out to the first person I saw on the other side of the tape, "Hey, if you see a girl on crutches, will you tell her Grandpa's here?! She'll know what I mean." Mindy's Grandpa's biggest fan. The stranger at the finish line looked confused, but I figured it was a simple enough instruction: "crutches", "grandpa". He'd find her, and she'd know what I meant.

I finished my second marathon in just over a month in 5:04, hit the lap button, and kept running. Amazingly, that isn't even my slowest marathon of my life. In an exchange of no more than two sentences, Jay and I decided to run more for the last 5 miles. "Let's get this over with," I said.
"Hell yeah," he breathed, and we kept running. I was surprised at one point to look down and see that we were doing about 9:20 miles. It may have only lasted a few seconds, but I was surprised that my body could still go that fast. To be honest, I was tired and sore and ready to get off my feet, but I wasn't feeling as bad as I thought I would be. A few miles back we'd run into a guy (walking backwards up a hill, I know how that feels!) who had said that the loop was half a mile short, meaning we would have to run one fewer mile. When it turned out that he was wrong, I was suprised that I didn't really mind. Maybe it was because Jay was still there. "I don't need to stop at the last aid station," I said. It was less than a mile from the finish.
"I'm going to stop and have one last drink," Jay said. "You can go on without me if you want."
"Hell no! I've been with you for this long, I'm not going to run ahead now to save a measly minute." So we stopped and had one more cup of Gatorade, ate one more handful of candy, and trotted on towards the finish line.

"Are you particular about your finishing photo?" I asked. "Because I'll be more than happy to hang back 10 seconds so you can get a good shot."
"I didn't even look at it last year," he said. "Did YOU really want to be alone in that photo?"
I hadn't run this race alone, why would I want to be alone in the photo? "Jay, I would be honored to cross the finish line with you, and I would be just as honored to cross right behind you." We joked about how preposterous it would be if we had a final sprint in the finishing chute, and how badass it would be if I pushed him, the army guy, out of the way for the win. As the finish line came into view I said, "Jay, it has been a pleasure and an honor. Thank you so much for taking me through this." We didn't join hands, we didn't stick our arms in the air, we didn't yell, or scream, or whoop, we just crossed the finish line together in 6:03:30. There wasn't even a photographer there.
As they tore the tabs off the bottom of our numbers, the volunteers asked, "Do you guys care who comes in first?" We both agreed that it made no difference in the world.

I'm so proud that we managed to actually pick it up at the end!

We began to walk away, when Jay remembered the finisher's prize for the race: a silver cowbell! "Guess what, I got a fever..." Jay said to the volunteer who stared at him blankly. "And the only prescription is..." his face fell. "Do you know what I'm talking about?" She didn't. "More cowbell!" Jay said, a little defeted that she didn't get the reference.

All I wanted to do was sit down and never get up again, but there was a free barbecue, and I decided it would be nice to have a veggie burger when I went to my final resting place, so I got in line behind Jay for the food. I saw Steven there, who had just finished the 50 mile race, and looked like he hadn't totally recovered his faculties. He was sunburned, shoeless, shoving macaroni salad in his face as fast as he could, and full sentences were a challenge. It was Jay who spotted Mindy first. "I see a girl over there on crutches, but she's not blond." Why do I always think Mindy's blond? While I was catching up with Mindy at the condiment table, Jay stole away and I never saw him again. I wished I could have thanked him one more time.

Mindy had to see about her volunteering responsibilities, and I had to see about my veggie burger, so I wandered over to a bale of hay and sat down to watch the crowd. These people didn't look like they'd just run 30-50 miles. After a marathon people look like a bunch of grouchy zombies, but these people were smiling and hugging and laughing. Why, right over there was a chick in an Ironman jersey who looked as fresh as a daisy. It seemed like an odd fashion choice for a trail run, but hell, if you can do an ironman and run something like this looking as fresh as that, you can wear whatever the hell you want. I started to feel like I would never hack it in the ultraendurance world. I'd seen so many Mdot tattoos on the calves of people passing me today. The chick in the ironman jersey was on the move, coming towards me. Then she waved... at me! Oh my god, it was Nitsirk and Dr. Nick, I felt like such an idiot! We talked a bit about running and ironman and how I'm NEVER doing Lake Placid. I mentioned that I might do Coer d'Alene next year, because it looked pretty flat.
"Flat?! That one's as hilly as Placid, if not more!" said Dr. Nick. But... but... I'd looked at the course comparisons online. Coer d'Alene looks flat-ish. Go here, and tell me what you see.

"Well, we should get going, and you should take a shower," Nitsirk said. "You're kind of... salty..."
I set off on the long walk back towards my car and they went to get their bikes. When they came up behind me, Dr. Nick said, "You're walking kinda' bow-legged..."
"Yeah, I've got some personal chafing issues," I admitted. Think of the worst place to possibly chafe, and I was cut up pretty bad there.
Is it your nipples? Noooo. Not even close.
Is it your... inner thighs? Noooo. But you're getting warmer.
Is it... between your butt cheeks? Nooooo. But you're getting even warmer.
Gasp! Is it your... you know, your.... Yes. I had worn a hole in my "no-no place" and I was going to walk like I'd just gotten off a horse, no matter who could see me. It had been bugging me the whole second loop.
"Oh my god, be careful in the shower!" was Nitsirk's parting advice.
Peeling off my clothes was interesting. My feet looked like hell. I had dark rings of dirt around my ankles, my chest was all chafed up, I had salt all over me, and once again, for the second week in a row, I had bled into my shorts (this time from the chafing). When you're chafed, a shower can be torture as the water washes all the sweat from your skin into the wound. When I went to wash my no-no place, I almost screamed out loud. When I was dressed (and wearing clean underwear) I waddled out to meet Mindy.

Mindy was crutching around the finishing area handing out gold cowbells, pint glasses, and gators to the 50 mile finishers, and I stuck around for a couple of hours to help her out. Really, after seeing her hobbling around trying to unload glasses and cowbells out of boxes while on crutches, you couldn't help but help her. The only shirt I had with me was a dark, long-sleeved t-shirt that definitely wasn't going to cut it in this heat, so I swallowed my pride and helped hand out cowbells in nothing but jeans and a sports bra. I felt naked as the day I was born, but it beat the hell out of walking all the way back to my car to get a short sleeved t-shirt. God, I wish I had a 6-pack!

People crossed the finish line looking alright or looking like hell, but everyone said please and thank you. No one yelled at the volunteers. I wasn't the only one who'd come back from my shower to help out, either. "Everyone's just so nice!" Mindy gushed over and over. I really love the trail crowd. Everyone helps everyone else, even if it means losing a couple of seconds. They're cheap races in beautiful places, and everyone is just so supportive and kind. It makes me wonder why people would do triathlons at all, where the athletes think it's their prerogative to yell at the aid station volunteers whenever they want, and it's standard procedure to push the cheating envelope for a 2-second advantage. God forbid it take you an extra second to get a bottle.

It was getting late, but Grandpa was still on the course. I wanted to see him finish, but there was talk of a cut-off time. The course cut-off was at 7:00 pm, 11 hours after the 50K start. Grandpa finished his first loop when I was already finished (I think). I wanted him to finish so badly. I couldn't say that I beat him if he never finished. There were two 50K guys out still there, both in their 70's. Both were experienced runners that had hundreds of marathons between them, but both were s l o w. At this point, there were about 8 1/2 hours on the clock. As I tried to imagine what it would be like to run 31 miles in 11 hours, I couldn't. Can you imagine the mental toughness it would take to drag your old ass 30 miles at a 20-minute mile? Especially with the horrible posture that Grandpa had. Can you imagine how heartbreaking it would be if someone came up on a 4x4 after 25 miles and told you you had to quit? My heart went out to Grandpa. I couldn't stick around to see him finish but, God I hope he did. I came home with a new respect for Grandpa. Grandpa is the baddest assest mofo of them all. I still beat him though.

By the time I had a couple of veggie burgers in me, I felt a lot better. I was having no problems moving around, and I was able to stand up and sit down with ease. Stairs weren't a problem. When I'd finished I'd felt like I could have gone one more mile... and then one more... and then one more... After Boston last month I felt like I'd been beat up for 2 days afterwards. Today I don't feel half as bad as I did after the marathon, despite the extra 5 miles and endless hills. I guess what they say about the pounding on the road and the virtues of the walk/run really is true. Watching all those people finish the 50 miler really made me feel like there was so much farther to go, so much more left to do. Maine Runner (who's training for Western States) had me practically drooling with jealousy as he talked about his training and fitness. Could I have run one more loop? One of the purposes of this race was to figure out if I wanted to attempt my first 50-mile race in November. Before I even left Maine, I had my answer.

No Claires were harmed in this experiment

So when we left off I'd just read The Thrive Diet (Brendan Brazier) and decided to try it out. Rocketpants has pointed that, as a vegetarian, I should be against animal testing. Well duh, I'm going to be the guinea pig.

The Eating Side of Things

As someone who hasn't always had the healthiest relationship with food, I have to be really careful when I make drastic changes in my eating. I can't restrict foods, or else I go way overboard and everything suffers. So I decided that instead of "not eating processed foods" I would try to "eat more whole grains, raw fruits and vegetables, etc." I went down to my local neighborhood Whole Foods and spent $100 on $6 loaves of "sprouted 7-grain bread" to take the place of my Pepridge Farm "multigrain" (white flour dyed brown) bread. I bought a tub of foul-smelling green powder containing chlorella, spirulina, wheat grass and açaí extract (among other things) to put in my smoothies. I bought about a million grains from the bulk bins that I promptly forgot the names of when I got home. I bought ground flax seed for protein and omega 3's, nutritional yeast for B vitamins, maca for whatever that does, nori and umeboshi plums to make brown rice balls, miso paste to use instead of salt, dates to make my own energy bars, coconut oil for god knows what, and some other things I can't remember.

I'm not even going to pretend that I followed the diet to the letter during my 2 week experiment. If it was too much effort to eat "the Thrive way", then I ate bread or cheese or sugar or whatever I had around. Another thing I'm not allowed to do is spend all day obsessing about what I'm going to eat at my next meal. My diet on a normal day looked something like this (new additions in bold):
4:45 AM: a banana and a handful of almonds
7:00 AM: omelet (one whole egg, one white) on sprouted multigrain bread, a berry smoothee (with whey powder, ground flax seed, maca, and green foods), green tea
10:30 AM: trail mix of raisins (it used to be craisins, but I got rid of them to cut the sugar), and soaked almonds. More green tea.
1:00 PM: soup with some kind of whole grain and lentils cooked at a low temperature with miso paste
5:00 PM: whatever I can find in the kitchen that I won't puke up during my workout
8:00 PM: whatever dinner Dad makes. No one's allowed in the kitchen while he's cooking, so what Daddy makes, I eat. Spoiled, I know, but I'm not going to go imposing my weird experimental recipes on him.

To tell the truth, my diet really wasn’t all that bad to begin with, and so my little experiment really just meant tweaking a couple of details... if I felt like it. For example, I didn’t nix the sports drink, but I did try to mix papaya chunks in with my shot blocks (which was good because they didn’t stick to my teeth, but bad because they also had some undesirable side effects), I had white pasta when that’s what Dad had prepared, but if it was a rice dish, I made some brown rice on the side (as long as Dad didn’t have to take responsibility if it “came out wrong”)...

... And I tried to cook...

I’m not a bad cook when I know someone else is going to try to choke down whatever I prepare, but I’m not nearly as attentive for my own palette. I don't mind if it tastes like sand just as long as it's good for me, and when my food tastes like poo I don't tend to overeat. Being a shitty cook is my way of avoiding obsessing about food. When I cook I’ll just put in whatever ingredients I can find lying around and hope it turns out okay. Most of the time, it doesn't.

My first cooking experiment: The rice ball incident
They would have turned out unappetizing at worst if I hadn’t tried putting the umeboshi pickled plums in the middle. These barf-magnets are pink and squishy and come in a vacuum-sealed container that makes them look like fetus balls and costs $11.99. They have the texture of something organic (in the chemistry sense) that’s been rotting at the bottom of the trash can for about 6 months, and taste like nothing but brine. I’m not a big fan of nori either. It took me several tries to get the “ball” part right, and most of what I came up with looked more like dark green “rice burgers”. Let me tell you, I’ve never been as relieved as the day that I finished my rice balls and knew I wouldn’t have to pretend they weren’t that bad anymore.

My second cooking experiment: Not cooking
Another morning I came home late from the gym and didn’t have time to prepare my grain of the day (barley) and lentils. Well, that’s okay. If you leave rice in warm water for long enough, it’ll cook anyway, right? At least that’s what one of my hippie housemates told me (trying to get me to discourage war, one stirfry at a time). So I put the barley and lentils in a tupperware with some warm water, then I threw in some nori for extra credit and trotted off to work. Let me tell you one thing about nori: if you put it back in water, it turns back into kelp and smells like a bad day at the beach. Let me tell you something else, most office kitchens, like mine, do not have strainers. So here I am with something that resembles a tide pool sitting on my desk all morning, periodically going off to the kitchen to change the water, and leaving an ungodly mess in the sink. My boss told me that I had definitely "out-grossed" Diane, who can eat unseasoned brown rice and steamed broccoli and call it a delicious meal. When it came time to eat it, I could barely stand to look at it. I scraped most of the seaweed into the trash, mashed in as much avocado as I could to mask the taste, and gulped down the crunchy lentils and grains. Diane stood at the door to my cube laughing at me as I choked down the first bites. Entirely disgusting.

My third cooking experiment: The mystery of the gloppy grain
As I mentioned, when I bought my buckets of grains from the bulk bins, I didn't really take much notice of what they were or what they were supposed to come out like. So when I cooked an interesting, gravely-looking grain for the better part of an hour I was pretty disappointed that it turned into a gloppy, gooey, slimy porridge-like mush with flecks of pond scum in it (spinach, actually). But it was too late to find another lunch now, so I blasted it with water hoping to wash the slimy excess starch away. It didn't go away. The colander just held the water there. There was nothing to do but dump the disgusting mess into a tupperware with some hot pepper (to try to mask the taste) and dash off to work. When I took it out to eat it at lunchtime, it had taken on a kind of grey tinge that looked like the gruel from Oliver! with some healthy green mold for good measure. I ate it, again with Diane laughing at my misery.

The Training End of the Deal

Week 1: Totals from Sunday, March 16 - Saturday, March 22
4 Runs: Total distance 51.6 miles (15.76, 8 [speed work], 18.34, and 9.52 [brick] miles)
3 Bike Sessions: Total time 5:46:28 (actually less than usual)
4 Swim Sessions: Total distance 13,000 yards
15 Workouts overall: 21:21:30 (one near-half-ironman simulation)

Week 2: Totals for Monday, March 24 - Sunday, March 30 (Easter off)
3 Runs: Total distance 38.2 miles (10.25 [hill repeats], 7.84 [brick], 20.14 miles)
3 Bike Sessions: Total time 7:34:57
3 Swims: Total distance 7,800 yards
13 Workouts overall: 20:09:55
(for more information you can check out my training log)

So I basically did at least 2-a-day workouts 4 days a week, with long workouts on weekends and one rest day with only 1 workout, for 2 weeks. Plus Easter off. Most of the emphasis was on running, since weather insists on breaking my heart as far as cycling goes.

The Results

The positives: Most importantly, I didn't die. Although I was tired and beginning to fade at the end, especially in the swimming, I was able to pull a 20 miler out of my ass the last day averaging about 15 seconds per mile faster than my 2 long runs the week before. It should also be noted that although I was tight, I didn't feel the hint of an injury.
~My first indicator of overtraining is always insomnia, but I was able to sleep soundly almost every night and wake up feeling alive (if not "energized") every morning.
~Almost immediately I started to feel leaner and it took just a little bit less imagination to see definition in my abs (if I stood just so in just the right light). My data on this is sketchy since I bought a scale half way through the experiment, but I did lose about half a percentage point of body fat in about a week (about half a pound). It's nothing major, but I have mentioned before that I feel sexier when I eat more vegetables. I definitely felt sexier.
~Thursday (of the rest week after the fact) on the run of a brick workout I EASILY held under 9 minute miles on an EASY 3 mile run. Four weeks ago on a run under similar conditions I held a similar average pace, but including fartlek bursts of speed. Running faster was definitely easier.

The negatives: I did have to take an extra evening of rest after Easter (which I took totally off). However, after sleeping 9 hours, the next day I woke up feeling like a million bucks and ran 10 miles of hill repeats. In my training log that day I wrote, "I'm SO glad I put this workout off yesterday so that I did it while well rested! It was GREAT!"
~I was feeling blah by the end and was definitely burnt out on racing. Though now, at the end of my rest week, I feel ready to take on the world again and am climbing up the walls a bit.
~I'm a horrible cook. Luckily, I'm not a picky eater if I know it's good for me.
~I refuse to go in public restrooms. I have a very regular schedule: without fail I go over breakfast or wait till tomorrow. Uncharacteristically, there were a couple of days at work where I had to break Claire's #1 Rule of Public Pooping: Don't. And there was the papaya incident in the last 3 miles of the 20 miler.

Things to take into account
~I had never done volume like that (the previous training cycle I averaged only about 15 hours a week), so who's to say I couldn't have done that anyway, without changing my diet?
~My feelings were totally subjective. I have no way to quantify the results other than DEAD/ALIVE, INJURED/HEALTHY. I am alive and healthy.
~I did take a full day off for Easter smack in the middle of the 2 weeks, something that I almost never do. Maybe a full day's rest is just what I needed to get recharged, and not $100 worth of powders and potions.

Conclusion

I can't say for sure if the diet helped, or it was just the placebo effect carrying me through something I didn't know my body was already capable of. In any case, I figure that it can't hurt. And if 2 weeks of these changes were enough to carry me through 89.8 miles of running, 11:20:42 of biking, 20,800 yards of swimming, and 41.5 hours of training in 15 days (on top of a full time job), then who knows what the longer term effects will be.

In the poll, two thirds of you (6 out of 9) agreed with Trihardist who said, A month ago, I would have said that I would totally do it if it meant I could compete at the highest levels of sport for ten years. But that would have been before I tried to eat an all-raw diet, in hopes that it would give me more energy (and quicker recovery). I made it about a week and a half before I said "Fuck this! I'm gonna go eat a loaf of bread!" So bring on the pizza and beer, baby! And post-race nachos! I understand her point of view, but I just don't feel like pizza and nachos could ever be as dear to me as, say, a gold medal.
I am more on board with Gretchen, who said, Claire, ...your blog never ceases to entertain, inspire and make me think [why, thank you, Gretchen; the check's in the mail]... [Y]ou are totally right on about why I compete. And on that note, I can't believe the number of folks who said they wouldn't give up tastey food to kick ass on a world level.(That's some suffering, but not that much!) Either they are totally full of shit, or they just don't know what they are missing. I don't mean to be a total bitch, because I too run more for the adventure than to win, but that's mostly because winning is just not really an option. I ran competatively in college though and had my share of wins. I can honestly say that for me there isn't a longer lasting high out there than kicking some ass, toeing the line knowing that you are faster than everyone else, feeling confident, and as you put it, like a badass mofo. I don't get that so much these days, and I would happily give up 10 years of tastiness for that high. Don't get me wrong, I know that there is so much more than winning (otherwise why would I bother??) and trail running and ultras are strong on the adventuring/suffering factor which, as you note, are apparently big reasons why we are out there. But from someone who truly loves the community feel and non-competative aspects of ultra running, there is still nothing like kicking some ass.

In other words, I'm totally at peace with whatever my result as long as I'm doing my best. That said, there is not a day that goes by that I don't wish my best were among the best of the best. And even if I will never be the best of the best, I would still like to do everything I can to do MY best in anything that is important to me, be it athletic competition, my job, my writing, etc. So the final verdict is that, without going overboard, I'm going to continue to slowly cut processed foods out of my diet and work in more "superfoods" or "power foods" or whatever you want to call them. Within reason anyway... And who can resist the anti-aging properties! There's no reason to do the vegan thing (I did that for a year and a half, it sucked), or insist that I NEVER eat the "bad" stuff. But still, I think the evidence was compelling enough. I'm not going to discount my diet as another way to get the best out of my body.

PS One person answered that they would give up tasty food for a decade, but not for the reasons I'm talking about. I would be interested to find out exactly WHAT those reasons were for this mystery person.