2008: The Cliff Notes

Life has been pretty crazy in my kingdom as of late, so I've been sitting on this post for over a week. First of all, Happy New Year to everyone. I hope it was happy and safe and you got to spend it with cool people.

Since I can't seem to think of anything new to say, of late, I've decided to ring in the new year on my blog by reviewing the one that has gone by. My total mileage was as follows:

148 runs, 1,158.7 miles, 7 days, 16 hours, 07 min, 11 sec
92 bikes and 49 spins, 13 days, 13 hours, 12 min, 28 sec, for a grand total of 4,430.6 mi (not counting miles done in spin class or on the trainer)
133 swims, 344,812 yd (195.9 mi), in 4 days, 23 hours, 25 minutes, and 18 seconds
423 workouts, 28 days, 14 hours, 4 minutes, and 56 seconds, 5,789.2 Mi


I made the podium in my age group or division a total of 11 times, although in some cases this distinction is pretty dubious due to the lack of competition.

1. Run and Dunk – Jan 1 – 5.87 mi, 51:25
a 10K-ish run followed by a jump in the ocean. Not as cold as you would think.

2. Frostbite 15K – Jan 20 – 9.29 mi, 1:20:53
lived up to its name. I had a pretty good day despite the cold.

3. Mid-Winter Classic – Feb 3 – 10 mi, 1:39:59
a 10-mile run in Maine that I ran with the flu so that I wouldn't miss the chance to meet Mindy, Nitsirk, and Iron Matron.

4. Half at the Hamptons – Feb 10 – 13.25 mi, 2:02:50
This race sucked. I still had the flu, it rained and snowed, and some guy died right in front of me. Not a terribly positive experience.

5. Martha's Vineyard 20 miler – Feb 16 – 20 miles, 3:31:00
Still sick, and not the easiest race I've ever run, but at least I got to talk to a pretty girl!

6. High Anus Half – Feb 24 – 13.3, 1:58:29
I saw Mindy again and PRed, breaking 2 hours in a half marathon for the first time.

7. Stu's 30K – March 2 – 18.75 miles, 3:02:34
This was possibly the hardest running race I have ever run. Harder, maybe, than some marathons I've run. This was my first rematch with Grandpa. I made him cry, I'm sure.

8. Trout Creek 15K – March 11 – 1:20:54
Angry and I took some vacation time and fled to Florida for a weekend where I ran a 15K "trail" race. I won my age group!!! Okay, there was only one other chick IN my age group, but I beat her!

9. Eastern States – March 30 – 20 miles, 3:13:27
I met up with Mindy and Maine Runner for a nice run through 3 states. I was so over running these races at this point, but I finished the 20 miles in one piece (far behind Rick and Dick Hoyt, I'd like to add). I had a nasty sunburn after that one, though.

10. Michael Dunleavy 5K – April 16 – 5K, 28:13
This one was just a fun 5K with my friends. We beat the Bitchy Bathroom Lady, though, so that's all that's important.

11. Boston Marathon – April 21 – 26.5 miles, 4:13:49
I ran the Boston Marathon as a bandit, thus beginning my quest to actually qualify for the race. See this post and my post about the Eastern States to follow the argument of who should be allowed to run Boston.

12. Sheriff's Sprint Triathlon – May 4 – 300 yds, 4:48/9 mi, 27:24 (inc. T1)/3.2 mi, 26:25
I won my age group and made a new nemesis. Remember this one, guys? I thought that my blog had been pulled down by a certain someone after I wrote this post.

13. Hairy Man Triathlon – May 17 – 1.2 mi (long), 40:10/56 mi, 3:27:04/13 mi, 2:04:45
The most challenging triathlon I've ever done, swimming in freezing cold water, riding a bike course with 6,000' elevation gain/loss, and running a half marathon up and down a mountain. I won my age group and got 4th (female) overall, but only 11 women even finished. Read this post to see my views on Ironman Tri-Geeks.

14. Pineland Farms 50K – May 25 – 31 miles, 6:03:30
My first ultramarathon. All in all it was an extremely positive experience. Can you believe 31 miles hurts less than 26? This is where I met Damon, my now running guru, although I wasn't very fair to him in the race report.

15. AIDS LifeCycle (posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, I never did write up the last day) – June 1-7 – 545 miles, 7 days
This was far and away the most fun I have ever had at an event. I would do it again in a heartbeat, and I think that all the riding I did played a huge part in the success I had on the bike later in the season.

16. Charles River Swim – June 15 – 1 mile, 28:50
I did this race just to say that I'd done it. It was pouring rain and everyone fled as soon as they got out of the river. Imagine my surprise when I got an envelope in the mail a few weeks later with a gold medal for WINNING the wetsuit division!

17. Cranmore Hill Climb – June 30 – 6.5 miles, 1:34:29, 2889' elevation gain/loss
This race was interesting, if nothing else. We started running up the mountain in a thunderstorm, and the whole hillside had turned to mud. I ran the whole second half of the race holding my pants up because they were so waterlogged they were falling off.

18. Patriot Half Ironman -- July 5 -- 1.2 mi, 32:43/58 mi, 2:45:57/13.1 mi, 1:59:41
I feel like this was my high point of the season. I had a really good race (although I didn't think so at the time, I've eventually accepted my run time for that race). Best of all, I beat Cunt on a Pink Bike by like 5 minutes! Oh yeah, and I won my age group.

19. Loon Mountain Run -- July 6 -- 5.15 mi, 1:25:38 >3,000' climbing
I did this race the day after Patriot and I was WRECKED! Parts of these hills were so steep, my GPS registered me as standing still. My most vivid memory of that day was that I couldn't move fast enough to get away from the flies.

20. Saratoga 12/24 -- July 12 -- 199.6 mi, 12 hours
If Patriot can't be my high point, I feel like this day was my high point. I had never gone farther than 115 miles on the bike, and I went nearly 200 that day, breaking the course record by over 10 miles, despite really bad conditions: 100* heat and incredibly high ozone. I thought I was going to puke all day long and my feet were KILLING me. But I was so proud of that garish trophy!

21. Vineman Full Ironman -- August 2 -- 2.4 mi, 1:03:27/112 mi, 5:57:55/26.2 mi, 5:17:08
I know that this should have been the high point of my season, but it wasn't. It made me sick for weeks to even look at anything that had to do with the race. I had a fine day physically, pulling out 4th in my AG and 9th overall, but I was just so angry that I had had a bad race mentally. Everything seemed to be stacked against me, and even though it all turned out okay in the end, it really ruined my first ironman experience for me.

22. Savoy 20 miler -- August 18 -- DNF, 10+ mi loop finished.
After Vineman, I just couldn't seem to get it together. This race was hell in the mud: badly marked and extremely technical. I gave up after the first 10 mile loop and was furious with myself. I gave up for all the right reasons: I simply wasn't having fun, but I still felt like poop.

23. Green Lakes 50K -- August 25 -- 31 miles, 6:01:03
I signed up for this race because I was furious about the last one. I drove all night to Syracuse, and ran the race expecting nothing but to finish. Imagine my surprise when I got second in my age group! Thank god for small age groups. The race bolstered my confidence again, and kicked me out of my horrible slump.

24. Malden Irish-American Club 10K -- September 1 -- 10K, 50:37
And imagine my surprise AGAIN when I placed third in my age group at this little 10K, despite taking it out WAY too fast and blowing to bits by mile 3.

25. Lobsterman Triathlon -- 1.5K, 19:32 (current?)/40K, 1:09:23/10K, 54:54
I'd been building up to this race all summer. It was a wicked competitive field, but the only competition that mattered was Big Red. I had a good swim, a great bike (except for the last 5 miles or so when this dipshit wouldn't let me by), and a HORRIBLE run. I don't know if I have EVER hurt that bad running. Ever.

26. Hartford Marathon -- October 11 -- 26.5 mi, 3:58:56
I had no idea what to expect from this marathon. I hadn't even run in like 2 or 3 weeks. I started out really strong and was doing great until suddenly I just wasn't. My quads locked up (they'd been stiff since I stopped running) and it was all downhill from there. (Actually, it was all rolling hills from there, but what does that matter).

27. Busa Bushwhack -- November 2 -- 8.7-ish miles, 1:19:46
I finally got a rematch with Grandpa on the turf where our rivalry began. I kicked his ass. In fact, I think I made 3rd in my age group. This was a really great race for me. My running was starting to come together.

28. Salem Wild Turkey 5 Miler -- November 25 -- 5.05 mi, 38:02
My running finally came together. I took one and a half minutes per mile off my pace from last year. Too bad my sprint finish with that tomato-faced bitch didn't turn out the way I wanted, or the race would have been perfect.

29. Fells Trail Race -- November 29 -- 26.54 mi, 6:01:34
This race, astoundingly, was great. It was lonely and cold, but it was an incredibly challenging course and boredom was the only reason I didn't finish the full 32 miles. Much to my surprise, I was the first woman in of the people who did 24 miles. And I did an extra 2.5 miles, just to round out a full marathon: my sixth one of 2008.

30. Santa Speedo Run -- December 13 -- 1.5 mi in my underwear.
And finally, my friends and readers came through so that I could run a mile and a quarter around downtown Boston in my underwear to help raise money for poor kids. This might have been the most fun I had all year. At least it was the only race where I was screaming my head off and smiling every second of it.

Thanks for following me through such an eventful year. Let's hope that next year is just as fun, although I may be going down different paths. I'm going to sneak my big New Year's Resolutions down here where few have bothered to follow me. However, stating them out loud will give me some accountability:
1) Qualify for Boston, Kona, and RAAM in one year. (Boston and Kona are reaches, I believe that RAAM is not).
2) Break the World 24-hour outdoor cycling record by riding 440 or more miles in 24 hours. This will be a real challenge. Please don't make fun of me if I don't make it.

Happy New Year, everyone!

The Alcoholic Post

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

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

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

Right: Already so drunk we can barely

stand up, my friend Blair climbs on my shoulders

before we hit the bars in January, 2004.

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

Right: I pretend to make out with my friend

David to make his boyfriend jealous while my

girlfriend takes the picture. You think these

things are funny when you're wasted.

(September 2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--- --- ---

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

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