Coming Back

This week was the first week that I committed to doing at least an Ironman a week to raise money for the SF AIDS Foundation (Click here to donate). Just 4000 yards swimming, 112 mi biking, and 26.2 mi running? This should be a cinch, right? Ideally, I'd like to overshoot it and swim some 50 miles, bike 2500, and run 500 before the AIDS LifeCycle in June, but it turns out that an Ironman is still a really long way to go when you try to spread it out in a busy work week.

Monday: Run 5 miles

I decided that a Spin class counted as 20 miles, since I also had to ride to and from the gym (about 4 mi round trip) and indoor rides have no coasting. But the Y was closed on Monday, meaning that I would be short both a swim and a bike for the week. Instead, I ran 5 miles barefoot on the beach. My plan was to run for an hour, but 50 minutes in my big toes were so sore that I was afraid that I had open sores on them and was rubbing sand into my wounds. Can sand get picked up in your bloodstream and kill you? It probably can. When I got home, I saw why: Giant, twin dime-sized blood blisters on each of my big toes. I was hobbling for days.

Tuesday: Run 10 miles

The next day was a running day as well, and I hit the ancient "paved" road through the trails. This used to be the old Highway One before they carved the new one into the sides of the cliff. The road is so narrow and windy, that it's no wonder that there are pre-war car carcasses rusting out all over the hillside. The trail leaves from near my house, climbs over a mountain, and drops you a few miles down the coastline. I had wanted to run all the way down to the ocean, but ran out of time only a mile or so from the end and had to turn around. Every time I run these trails, I'm blown away by them. I spend half the time with my head up looking over to the next hill and wondering how to get to the trails I can see going up the side, or wondering how long the little trail tributaries go and what's on them. I ran 10 miles that day, but I wanted to keep going and going forever. I hadn't even wanted to go on this run when I left the house.

Wednesday: Swim 3000yd, Bike 20 mi

The next day I did a boot camp-style class with my new corporate client. The class went really well, but I'm embarrassed to say that I managed to make myself sore with the jump squats, lunges, Spiderman push-ups, and abs circuit. (Really?! An abs circuit made me sore?!) Then again, what really fucked me up was the Spinning class that night where I almost made myself throw up. I realized half way through that five and a half minutes of "Don't touch that dial, we're building leg muscles here!!!" was a bit intense, but if I touched my own resistance knob, the class would know. The next morning I couldn't walk down stairs.

Oh yeah, and I swam that day.

Friday: Swim 2000 yd

Friday I still had 1000 yd I had to make up on the swim, so I joined the old ladies during lap swim at the local high school pool. It was a fantastic pool, but I hadn't realized how easy the salt water pool at the Y had made swimming. Now that I was in a regular old chlorinated pool (and a deep one, no less), I felt like I was swimming in baggy clothes. Originally I tried to tell myself that it was a 25m pool, not yards, and that's why my times were so slow. But no... I just sucked. After a warm-up I swam 10x100 IM. I love IM because I love swimming butterfly, but can't do it for more than 50 yards on the best day. IM lets me swim lots of butterfly without having to look like a fool hanging onto the deck and gasping. I don't know when I started loving butterfly so much. I used to hate it. But then I just woke up one day and I could swim 25 yd no sweat, and now I do it every chance I get. I think it makes me look cool. (It's probably better that I never see myself swim fly and preserve my self-delusion on this point.)

Saturday: Bike 75 mi

Which brings us to the weekend. It was going to be in the 70's all over central California, and with no clients or races for the weekend, I decided to go down to Santa Cruz to ride through the mountains. You can't look in any direction in Santa Cruz county without seeing some sort of park or nature preserve, so it was no problem planning a route that took me through Henry Cowell Redwoods state park, Big Basin state park, Castle Rock state park... I knew it was going to be hilly. What I didn't expect was a 40-mile climb. Right: The new white bike. As my friend Tommie said, "Only virgins get to ride white bikes." Well, after what happened to my last bike, I don't think I can be called a bike virgin anymore.



I started near sea level a few blocks from the base of campus at my alma mater. In 2005 when I first started riding, I had ridden up Empire Grade (the road that climbs the mountain behind the university) twice: Once I took my ancient Pugeot that was 2 sizes too big for me, whose brakes didn't work, and whose friction gears kept ghost shifting so often that I carried a screw driver with me at all times to tighten the shifter bolt. I had gotten part way up the mountain, given up in despair in someone's driveway, and then ridden down the hill trying to make myself as big a sail as possible because my brakes didn't work and I still hadn't mastered descending. I thought I was going to die that day. The second time, Lorraine led me up there on the carbon fiber bike I would later borrow for my first half ironman (and then carelessly ditch at the side of the road with a spectator when I blew my spare tube). I had gotten off the bike in that same driveway and refused to go on until I caught my breath. Then she had flown away down the other side while I gripped the brakes so hard that I thought my arms would fall off.

This time when I passed the driveway, I was surprised at how high up it was; about 10 miles into the climb (how the hell did I get up this high on that 54cm steel Pugeot?!), and how I was still riding as hard as I could to get up the grade. Either I was stronger back then than I give myself credit for, or I'm weaker now than I thought. After 17 miles of climbing, I turned toward Big Basin and again rode down the steep, winding hill full of blind turns with my hands gripping so hard on the brakes that I was sure that they would fall off. At one point I tried to come to a stop to give my forearms a rest, and was unable to stop at all.

For another 20 or so miles I rode through the redwoods, climbing slow, grinding, relentless hills with reprieves that always came too late and were too short. I was running out of Chewy bars, and pretty soon I would be out of water. I hadn't passed a single store or gas station on the entire ride, and wouldn't find one until mile 60. Luckily, though, I finally reached the top of the ridge at mile 40, and hardly had to climb another foot for the rest of the ride.

Life was perfect out here. All I could think about was how lucky I was to have this weather, this bike, this body, and the time to be doing this. I hardly got any sun on my bare arms and legs because I was under the canopy of redwoods almost the whole time, but every once in awhile there would be a break in the trees and I could see the entire Santa Cruz Mountain range spreading out around me (given, I was afraid I would have to climb another mountain and wondered which one of those humps would be next every time I looked over the views). I kept thinking about how far I had come since I lived in Santa Cruz and started riding and running for the first time. I kept thinking about how this was exactly what I'd been trying to get back to for so many years, and how lucky I was that I was finally here, despite the misfortune that it took to get me here. I wished Lindsey could see me now and eat her heart out. I couldn't believe how good life was.

When I got back to town, I met up with an old friend and Shane's ex girlfriend, Kat. We had both worked at the same gym in 2004-5 when I first got my personal training certification. I had done nothing with my credential back then and eventually let it expire, while she had been working in gyms ever since. Now we had both found our way back to personal training, her as a powerlifter turned martial artist and me as... Claire. She suggested we go to a tea room with a jacuzzi and catch up.

Slowly the conversation turned to training, and eventually body fat measurements. "I was below 15% before I moved out here, but now I've gotten so fat.." I told her. She looked at me in the borrowed bikini. "Yeah, there's no way you're 15% now," she told me matter-of-factly. It was a wake-up call. I was smarting from it for the rest of the night, until things went even worse and I had other things to feel bad about.

We went to dinner and to a small show with a bunch of bands whose songs all sounded the same and pretty much sucked. Suddenly I had a feeling, There's something wrong with my car! Kat had told me to leave the car in a shopping center where she promised that they never ticketed. I thought it was stupid to leave my car sitting there with the brand new bike in the back seat, right near where the junkies were known to hang out, even though downtown Santa Cruz looked like a church picnic compared to the San Francisco Civic Center area. When we got back to the parking lot, though, my car was gone altogether.

"Kat, where's my car?" I asked.

"What are you talking about? It's right there," she said.

"My car's not blue." Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! I had been working so, so, so hard to put together a savings account, to start to pay off my debt, to park carefully in San Francisco so that I wouldn't get towed or booted because I couldn't afford another setback like this. As with any misfortune, I wanted to blame someone else. I wanted to blame Kat for making me park there. I wanted to blame the towing company for being a bunch of fucking assholes who just steal people's money. I wanted to blame everyone I'd ever met in my life who I had willingly or unwillingly gone out to food, coffee, or drinks with. What I needed was to be alone and punch things, but instead I was in Kat's car having a panic attack about where I would get the $380 it would take me to get my car back.

Well-meaning, she tried to talk me down. "How can you be working so much and not have any money?" she asked. Because my life is out of control. I have so many business expenses that my real income is half of what it appears, and because I keep having to absorb financial setbacks. Because I constantly eat out because I have no time to cook. Because no one around me cooks either, so every time I want to hang out with someone, we have to spend money at a restaurant. Because I spend $50/week on gas. Because $380 isn't chump change! Then she started trying to solve my problems, which only made me feel more helpless. I can't cook! I don't have the time or energy or organizational skills or resources to be cooking for my schedule. Yes, I'm sure there is a way, but I sure as hell don't have the energy or the appetite for it. Because I have been emotional eating to get through my day and please, oh please, oh please don't make me face that demon too... I'm so exhausted from all of the things I've had to face over the past year. I just want things to be easy! Why oh why am I such a fuck-up. I recognized what she was trying to do; that I was stuck in my thinking and things are always better than you think, but I was just digging myself into a hole of frustration and self-loathing. I couldn't snap myself out of it.

I got my car back, and as I drove back to her house I figured out my real expenses in my head. I couldn't believe how much less money I really had than I thought. No wonder I still felt short so often! Why do you fail so badly at being a grown-up, Claire? Why can't you figure out this simple subtraction and addition? Kat continued to try to solve my mental block, but eventually she had to admit that I just needed to sleep it off. I didn't sleep it off, and was in a rotten mood all the next day (and deep into this week).

Sunday: Run 12.5 mi

The next morning I met up with Lorraine for the first time since the AIDS LifeCycle in 2008. We had a lot of catching up to do over our 12.5 mile trail run. "This has been my year of surgeries," she had told me over the phone. When I saw her in shorts and a tank top, I scanned her body for scars. I thought for sure that after all these years of ultrarunning, that her knees had finally given out, but her knees were unblemished. Her old shoulder issues maybe? But nope, those were good too.

"So what did you have operated on?!" I asked.

"My brain."

"WHAT?!" She had had a noncancerous tumor pressing on her facial and auditory nerve. They had had to sever the auditory nerve, which affected her balance making her run "like an old lady," as she put it. Well this 60-year-old woman who was running "like an old lady" after brain surgery still schooled me on the trails, but at least I was stronger than her dog, who was also getting old.

It was good to talk to Lorraine. My life would be very, very different if I'd never met her. I don't know if I ever would have gotten into trail running or even ultradistance stuff... or even cycling if it weren't for her. She taught me to change my first flat. She made fun of me for not having the right bike etiquette. Today I was telling her about my cracked frame and all the memories I had on it. Lorraine, who is not a very reflective person said, "You know, it's important to take a second to look back at how far you've come. When I met you, you were still riding that bike with a kickstand," (the Pugeot).

She was right, of course. "Lorraine, you've finished every 100 miler you've ever done and won your age group at Western States. You've gotta be so proud of what you've done, but no one can even conceive of what an achievement that is. How do you handle the problem of when people don't even know how to measure your successes. I mean, you've got to have bad 50 milers, right? For you, 50 miles doesn't even register as an accomplishment to finish. So how do you deal with the people who can only think to say, 'but that's amazing that you even finished at all! I couldn't even drive 50 miles! (harharhar)'"

"I had that conversation with my doctor just a few weeks ago," she told me. "I was telling him that I felt like I still didn't have my energy back" (the surgery was almost a year ago). "He asked me what I was doing and I told him trail running, road biking, lifting weights, but I still wasn't mountain biking. He said, 'I have trouble feeling sorry for you because you're doing so much better than 99% of the other patients that I see."

"But he doesn't get that your life was bigger than 99.99% of the people that he sees," I pointed out. "You had so much more to lose! This is your life." It was impossible to stay angry around Lorraine, although I was still a bit sullen about my predicament. It really would have been the perfect weekend...

Sobriety: Epilogue

Last night I found myself with a consecutive evening and morning off. Ever since I realized that my 6-month sobriety Birthday had gone by without my ever even noticing, I've been looking around at my life and realizing how little it resembles the disaster that I was living through the first few months that I was here. It's been making me realize how happy my life is these days, and spawning daily Mary Tyler Moore "You're gonna make it after all!" moments. And while Boston (and the rest of the country) is buried under about 6 feet of snow, we've been having clear, sunny days here in San Francisco. I've actually had some free time in the middle of the day to go out and enjoy the views (views are something you don't always get in Fog City, so I enjoy them when I can).

The other morning I went to the beach to do a barefooted sand run in the waves (in January! Life is so good!). I was in the extreme southwest corner of the city when I got in my car and realized that I'd done the math wrong. I needed to be in Chinatown in the extreme northeastern corner of the city (about 13 miles away), parked, changed, and ready to teach a Spin class in 34 minutes. Oh. Fuck.

Once I realized how fucked I was, things started going wrong. I started hitting every light wrong. I kept winding up in the wrong lane. I blew out my flip flop. People (old, slow people) always wanted to cross the crosswalk when I wanted to make a right turn. I was working myself up into a frenzy when suddenly I remembered, Oh yeah. God. It's not that I started to believe in God when I was in AA, but I saw the value of turning over things that were beyond my control to some force greater than myself. It didn't really matter if it was true, at least I'd stop making stupid mistakes because I was frustrated. I did make it to my Spin class with a couple of minutes to spare, by the way.

I hadn't given any thought to God since I spent all that time in churches when I first got here. I'd forgotten all about Him, or that I had ever even considered a spiritual corner of my life. I had also completely forgotten about all the other AA skills that I'd learned, and hadn't even thought of most of the people I'd met through AA since I stormed out of my last Meeting. I wondered if they thought I'd relapsed. I wondered if anyone even gave it a second thought. And didn't I have a chip coming to me?

So last night I went back to the Meeting that used to be my "Home Group" (not because I'd chosen it to be so, but because it seemed to be the one I could make it to most consistently). This was the Meeting where all the same girls said all the same things every week and I could never get called on. Before I even went to the church, I went into a market to find myself some dinner. I remembered with some satisfaction that the last time I had gone to this Meeting, I had mostly gone for the free cookies because I couldn't afford food. Thank god that I wasn't trying to go to Meetings anymore, because all the Meetings are at times when now I'm with clients and earning money.

While I was skulking around the organic foods, I saw one of the Super Sponsors that always gets to talk waist deep in the refrigerator case. I ran around the corner into the cracker aisle before she got a chance to see me. As soon as I saw her, I had that yucky feeling under my skin that I get when I revisit a really unpleasant time in my life. I wanted nothing to do with this Fellowship! However, hiding was ridiculous and finally I let her see me, waited for her at the door to finish paying, and then walked to the church with her.

She asked how I was doing. I felt positively buoyant compared to how I'd felt the last time I made that walk. Once I let go of all that AA rigidity, life had taken on a momentum of its own. I asked her how she was doing. "Wonderful. It'll be four years next week, God willing," she said. God willing?! I thought. After 4 years can't you take just a little bit of credit and trust just a little bit in momentum? Maybe if she hadn't been so preoccupied with thinking about how close she was to her next drink all the time, then she could have actually enjoyed her accomplishment, but whatever. It made me pity her.

In the church I found the Girl Who Used to Stare at Me and caught up with her. "Are you still going to a Meeting every day?" I asked.

"Yep, pretty much. I find it keeps me much more sane," she said. For real?! I thought. My skin was crawling more than ever breathing the same air that I used to when I was going so crazy. Looking back, I feel like the sun came out and everything started working out for me when I dropped AA. When you're on the right path, doors open automatically...

There were some new faces, but most of the same chicks who always talked in the Meeting were still there. I wondered how many of the missing faces had relapsed and how many were just going to other Meetings. We read a short chapter from the Big Book, and in my head I thought, "Just my luck, I came for a boring one." There was just nothing in this whole story that I could relate to at all. I thought that everyone else must feel the same. The guy didn't even talk that much about drinking, it was mostly just about the logistics of getting AA off the ground in the early days in Canada. Who cares about Canada 80 years ago? I figured it would be a quiet day, since you had to at least make it seem like you were relating your Share to the Big Book reading.

The first girl spoke. "I am just so, so, so, so blown away by this story. I actually started getting teared up at the part about..." Huh? Even more so than ever before I felt like I'd wandered into a cult meeting.

All the same girls made all the same Shares about all the same vague shit, dropping in their AA jargon and saying, "Welcome to the newcomers..." and "thanking everyone for their shares." Some things never change (God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...).

By the end of the Meeting, I couldn't have been more certain that I'd made the right decision about walking away from AA four months ago, and wondered why it had even taken me that long. I needed an alcohol-free life to get sane again and move on. These girls weren't living an alcohol-free life. They were coming back to alcohol at every single Meeting. Even after four years, the girl in the market's entire life still revolved around booze. I wondered if you compared all the time she spent going to Meetings and talking to her sponsor and sponsees, if she had actually spent that much time drinking four years ago. I doubted it.

Still, when they passed around the collection plate for the Seventh Tradition, I put money in. And in the final Serenity Prayer, I held everyone's hand and chanted, "Keep coming back, it works!" with everyone else. Because it does work for some people. I was just so, so grateful that I wasn't one of them.

After the Meeting was over, I tracked down the girl that I had spoken to before my last Meeting; the one who had warily given me her blessing to leave AA. "I'm glad to see you," she said. "I was worried about you."

"I am so, so, so good!" I told her. "It was the right decision, for me. Life is falling back into place like I hoped it would. I just thought I'd swing by now that I finally feel like I've got my head on straight to see if it changed anything. I don't think it would be wise to close the door on AA altogether," I said, although I was pretty sure AA would never be a part of my daily life again.

"Well I worry about all alcoholics who are out there on their own, but I'm glad you're doing well. Come back and visit again sometime."

"Sure," I said. "I'll have another milestone in six months."

A call for money, creativity, and suggestions: Run me into the ground, please!

Six months have gone by since I moved to California, sobered up, and pulled my life together. I finally feel like the ground is solid under my feet again, but my head is swimming. Now that I'm here, what do I do now? I have set myself a few goals for the first half of 2011:

1. No big performance goals. I'm out of shape, and any performance goals are sure to end in frustration. I'm only allowed to do what looks like fun, and I'm not allowed to care about how I do in these events. I'm just here to collect stories, t-shirts, and fitness.
   
2. In direct contrast to goal number 1, I have some long-distance cycling goals to complete before July 1, 2011. I want to get the best female cumulative time in the California Triple Crown stage race -- three double centuries spread over spring and early summer. I also wanted to break the female course record at the Davis 12 hour Challenge, but as I wrote this I found out that it won't be held this year. Damn.
3. I will also be riding the AIDS LifeCycle again this year. This is my most ambitious goal, not because of the 545-mile week, but because I have set the goal of raising $7000 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. In 2008 it was all about the bike. In 2011, it's all about the cause. There are more than 44,000 people in the Bay Area alone living with HIV (based on 2007 statistics), many of whom use the SF AIDS Foundation's help to get the medication, counseling, and social services that they need to continue to live healthy lives.
   

While goals 2 and 3 may seem challenging, let's be honest. I can ride faster over longer distances than most if not all girls I've ever met at such events. (Not that there aren't faster girls out there, but they're not into ultracycling). Given a decent state of fitness (which I plan to achieve by "having fun" over the next few months) I will probably have enough fitness and cockiness to keep me in the running at the Triple Crown. And it isn't the 545 miles over 7 days of the AIDS LifeCycle that will be the challenge, it will be reaching my $7K fundraising goal.

I don't know about you, but I need more than that to keep me fired up. I need something to do every day that will peel me out of bed and keep me motivated to be consistent. With my eternally morphing goals, consistency is my downfall. Last week I wanted to be a triathlete, but the week before that I was a cyclist, and the week before that I was pretty sure that I wanted to be an ultrarunner. A month ago I was thinking about lofty road running goals. Or finally digging out that Tour de France ass and six pack and making a body like a fitness model. Or maybe it was finally time to get off my ass and try Crossfit...

You see what I mean.

Goal no. 1 is about not taking the joy out of training, but I do need some kind of goals to keep training. Otherwise I'll have another week like this past week where the only training I did was my Spinning classes, and I took comatose naps for 2-3 hours every morning because I couldn't think of a good reason to move a muscle.

I think a streaking goal would be fun, but it needs to involve more lunacy and creativity than a "no zeros" campaign on my training log. I'd also like to somehow tie it in to my fund raising for a good cause to get other people involved in the cause as well as my progress (à la Eddie Izzard's marathons around the UK). Ideally, it will tie into a glut of entertaining blogs again, as with the race-a-week year in 2008 and the chronicle of my crawl back to sobriety a few months ago. I would like to do something truly extraordinary, but with my work schedule, it will have to be the everyman kind of extraordinary.

Another thing that has been gnawing away at me is that the sparkling gay men with their perfect hair cuts and perfect bodies under their spotless and impeckable clothes are not the only group that benefits from the SFAF's assistance. As unpleasant as it is to see, smell, hear, interact with, think about, and be a victim of the junkies that troll the urban piss bogs of San Francisco, they remind me every day of where addiction can take you if you're not lucky. In the neighborhood where I work, I see them every day. Some of them are addicts, some have gone beyond addiction and have just fried their brains past the point of recognition, and many of them aren't even addicts but a drug tripped a switch they didn't even know they had. You do really, really stupid shit when you need your fix: selling your ass on the street, sharing needles, who knows what other unsavory activities. You don't give a shit, even if it means getting sick. Then, if one day you start to give a shit again, you could still be sick. For the people who are crawling back up from nothing, free health services could give you your life back. I was lucky that when I cleaned up, I still had my health. Somehow I stumbled on the mindframe and hobbies that allowed me to come out the better for my addiction, and with my body still intact. I feel like I owe it to the world to use my body to do something extra for the unlucky. Just one week of riding almost seems like a cop-out.

Here are some ideas for how I can roll my fund raising goals, my sanity, and my hankering to get back into the blogosphere into one. I want to do something inspiring, but right now my mind just isn't coming up with anything creative. I welcome ideas, suggestions, and heckling. I also welcome suggestions for how I can get more people involved in the challenge.

1. Since my goal is to raise $7000, then I could shoot to swim 70 miles, bike 7000 miles, and run 700 miles before the beginning of the ride on June 5 (that's an average of 6800 yd, 411 biking miles--yikes! that may have to be ammended--, and 41 running miles per week).
   
2. Or perhaps more realistically, complete the distance of 7 Ironmans over the next 17 weeks. Folks could pledge a small sum for every ironman I finish, or place bets on whether I finish at all. Or I could just accumulate an Ironman a week for the next 17 weeks...
   
3. A reader-submitted workout challenge where each week people have to submit their most greuling swim, bike, run, and weightlifting workouts and I blog about completing them. The submitter also suggests "value" of the workout, and people can vote on how great they think the workout is by pledging a certain sum for the completion of each. (Get creative here: treadmill marathons, Crossfit torture, the worst hill repeat workout you can think of...) This could also serve as a bank to spice up your own routines with other people's favorite workouts.
4. Run the distance of the AIDS Lifecycle (545 miles) before the event begins (32 miles/wk... on top of bike training). Ask for pledges for every marathon completed. Demand a good story from each one (if I get toward the end of a 26.2 mile stretch without any good stories, then I'll have to run around downtown SF in a giant penis hat... no, wait, that wouldn't get me much attention around here...)
   
5. Burn at least 545 calories every day by some means or another. Hey, it's not creative, it's not challenging, but at least it's consistent.
6. Swim the English Channel, bike across America, run the length of California.
7. Lift 1 million pounds per week. This one could be fun. It would get me into the weight room and doing some Olympic style lifting. I have no idea how the breakdown would go, but it would be a complete change of pace and I'm sure it would change my body composition and give my updates a whole new flavor. People could pledge for every million pounds lifted.
   
8. People could just pledge a certain amount of money per mile run, biked, or swum (think a penny per mile run, a penny per 10 miles biked, and a nickel per mile swum), and cap it off themselves at whatever they are willing to pay as a maximum pledge. Then I have to swim, bike, and run as far as I can in the next 5 months.

I don't know guys, help me out here. I want to make it fun for people to support the foundation, and I want to make sure that the event is enough of a challenge. HELP!

A Warm, Sunny Day in January

After a harrowing ride the day before, resulting in a split top tube and a split... lip... I was not as fired up about my Sunday run as I wanted to be. A little after the fact, I figured out that I had hit six months sober without even realizing it, and since I had a big weekend on the calendar, I half thought about maybe doing it up big. Saturday was the 200K, and Sunday was a trail run where I was signed up for the 21K, but I had the option of upgrading to the 50. And as long as I was thinking about doing a 200K and a 50K, why not just do a long swim on Friday and round it out with greater than the distance of an ironman in all three sports all in one weekend. I did the swim (4400 yards) and the bike, but I'll spoil the surprise right now; I didn't do the full run.

The run was right in my own back yard, so I woke up late and took my time eating a big breakfast. Then I drove down to the Safeway (which has a Starbucks in it (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog) to pick up some last-minute essentials: coconut water, anti-chafe lube, and my coffee. I was cutting it a bit close on time, but I was only a few blocks from the start, right? What I hadn't thought about, however, was parking... and how I would have to park like everyone else. I suppose I could have parked at my house and walked down, but it was too late for that now and I didn't want to spill my coffee power walking down the hill. I found the registration table (as far from the start as you could get), and asked the guy what it would take to change distances. "I'm signed up for the 21K, but I'm still not sure which one I should do..." I told him.

"Aw, go for the 50K," he told me.

"Alright, let's do it!" I said. Then I thought better of it. "You know, I'm still not sure... what do I have to do to switch?"

"I have no idea, actually," he told me, even though he was working the table marked 'distance changes.' "Why don't you just run the 21K, and when you're done, you can decide if you want to keep going. If you do the 50, just tell them when you finish." Perfect!

I got my number on, the lube between my legs, and jogged to the start just in time to hear the starting siren and keep jogging. The trail went down to singletrack about 100 yards in and started climbing even before that. Because I was in the back, I (and everyone else) got stuck going the same pace as the slowest guy in the race. We hiked up the hill for about a mile, dashing around one person at a time whenever there was enough space on the trail. I knew that Sponsor was here, and I was hoping to catch up with her in order to have someone to keep me company and share the pretty views with. I was proud of how pretty Pacifica was, after all, and I never got a chance to share it with anybody.



Even at this slow pace, my legs were bursting with lactic acid, and I knew that I was fucked for the day. Right away I dropped the idea of doing the 50K, and just decided to enjoy the day and get through it however possible. It was the clearest sunny day I'd ever seen on these trails, and even though it was early in the morning, I was sweating in just a pair of spanky shorts and a tank top.

Up ahead, I had made my way up through the group to see that there was one guy who had let a giant gap open up in the trail in front of him. I was annoyed. Why didn't he get the fuck out of the way? Didn't he realize that there were people stuck behind him breathing down his neck? I got ruder and made my way up to him and finally around him. He looked like Gary Sinise on chemo. With Lieutenant Dan behind me, I now had to actually run up the hill. Ow, this hurt.


I came up on another barrel-chested guy who was running shirtless with compression socks and gaters on his legs. This guy's accessory distribution was all wrong. He didn't have so much as a visor or a watch anywhere above the waste, but he was wearing everything that he could cram on below the waist. He had the opposite distribution of body mass, with a giant, boxy torso and spindly chicken legs. It reminded me of something that one of the trainers at work had told me, "You can tell the gay guys who are sick (HIV+) because the steroids that they put them on to fight muscle wasting makes their abs stick out." He didn't look like a Castro muscle queen, but something about this guy's build gave me the heebie jeebies. Actually, I just kind of had the heebie jeebies. My mind was in that place: when you're running all out in the gym and then suddenly someone makes a loud sound with some weights and it explodes in your head so loud you think you're going to fall over.



Finally the singletrack trail opened up onto a wider (steeper) fire road. I was walk/running around people and they were walk/running around me. I came around a guy who had the gaunt body and moribund stride of an ultrarunner that didn't know when to take a rest day. It took me forever to get around him, and he was deep mouth breathing on my shoulder for what felt like an eternity. His mouth was agape and his big cheeks and sunken teeth reminded me of the pictures you see of mummies or mummified hikers that they find in the desert on CSI. I couldn't wait to get around him.

I finally shook off the Cadaver, and a guy came down the hill in the other direction, finished with the "out" portion of the out-and-back and now onto the "back." This was a particularly steep part of the trail, making it hard for even the elite guys (which he must have been to be so far forward in the pack) to look coordinated as they scrambled down the 15-20% grade, but this guy looked even wilder than that. He was wearing a shirt that said "run happy," but something about his gait made him lurch like a toddler just learning to walk. Was I seeing things? A runner behind me encouraged him, "run happy, my brotha'," and Run Happy Guy's response came in and out of my hearing like a wave. "MMMmmmmhuMMMmhuhhhmmmmmMmM." At the time I thought that I was really falling to bits and the fatigue was starting to affect my senses, but it turned out that Run Happy Guy really did have some sort of neurological disorder, and he was still out there running happy and way, way faster than most people. Well how could I possibly feel sorry for myself now?



I got all the way to the top of the mountain without running into Sponsor, and figured that she hadn't come to the race after all, so I turned around and decided I'd take the rest of the course at whatever pace occurred to me. A few minutes down the hill I finally spotted her. "I was in the bathroom line at the beginning!" she yelled to me. "I got a late start."

"Well I'm running at a snail's pace, so you'll probably catch me in a few," I said. I relaxed my pace as much as I could, and even stopped to pee behind a bush, but she never did catch me. Now that I was going back downhill, life was good. I was glad I had legs again (rather than them just being a source of pain and misery), and I bombed down the trail with my arms outstretched like an airplane. Actually, it felt really good to stretch out like that, my chest and triceps were deeply sore I'm guessing from riding on a busted bike for 3 hours.

Unfortunately, the hill ended and it was time to climb up the second hill. This is the shortest hill on the course, made up of grades that I usually find run-able. Not today. I continued my walk-run which looked a bit like "run 5 steps, walk 3" until I reached the top. This downhill wasn't quite so full of life. I could feel the bruised area in my shorts complaining from all the movement going on, and I was also badly chafed between my thighs where the shorts didn't cover. I knew that I was wiped because I could feel my core muscles working on the descent.

By the time I hit the only flat-ish section of the course--a half-mile slight uphill jog on a gravel path to the last hill--even running on this road was tough. It was like I was stuck between miles 16 and 20 of a marathon for 21 kilometers. I wasn't seeing any more ghosts, and I was still passing people on the uphills, but I was falling apart quickly.

The final hill is an endless series of almost 30 switchbacks that climbs about 1000 feet over 1.5 miles. Even though I've run this trail several times, I still never know when I'm getting close to the top. There's tall brush to either side of the trail, and the trail makes its way up the spine of a ridge in such a way that it always looks like the mountain must end after this next bend. Above me, below me, behind me, and in front of me I could hear runners talking about how hilly this course was. Yep, and I run it all the time, suckas! I thought. When you finally reach the top, there's an anticlimactic sweeping turn and down you go.

Normally this is a fun and non-technical downhill that you can take at the speed of gravity, but my legs had had it. I plodded down the hill as fast as my wooden legs could take me. I was uncomfortable deep inside, almost like cramping or when you take a deep breath at the wrong moment and you get a sharp, stabbing cramp in your side. It reminded me of the scene in Running on the Sun when they say that one of the Badwater runners' internal organs have started to chafe from rubbing against each other. I wasn't marathon tired where you feel like you've been beat up from the ground up, I was tired on a far deeper level from the bones out. Maybe I would be back to the endurance level I used to be at someday, but I wasn't there yet.

Finally I hobbled down out of the trail and to the finish line. It was my slowest half marathon ever: about 2:30, with 3764' climbed over that distance. I figured Sponsor was right behind me, so I grabbed fistfuls of corn chips and sugar cookie pieces and settled in to wait. And wait. And wait. What I didn't know was that she was signed up for the 30K, and wouldn't finish for another hour and a half (I finally gave up and left after an hour and 15 minutes).

While I was waiting, I got to watch other people finish. The female winner of the 30K race came flying through the finish line a few minutes after me sporting a t-shirt from a 100-mile race. She was short and muscular, built like a shit brick house just like me with slightly less fat. She had a forward-thrusting energy down to her facial features, even when she was standing still. A couple of heavyset women walked through the finish line wearing cotton t-shirts, Target sneakers, and fashionable sunglasses chanting "slow and steady wins the (9K) race!" Then there was a young couple that I'd seen out on the trail who could have been American Eagle models. She was wearing lime green compression socks, and he was wearing no shirt and a Camelbak which they'd both stopped to take turns sucking on the trail. When they came around the bend to the finish line, they both burst into grins and started sprinting to the finish, elbowing each other and giggling. They were having so much fun, it made me want to be them. For a moment I was a little sad that my girlfriend's knees are too fucked up to ride and her feet are too fucked up to hike these days, but that's a story for another time.

While I was sitting, one of the guys that I'd recognized as one of the front runners struck up a conversation with me. He was one of those hairless skinny straight white guys over 40 that looks like he's made of wax, but he sure was fast. "I saw you out on the course," I said. "I like your Hawaiian shorts!"

"Yeah, I try not to take myself too seriously..." he told me.

After we'd shot the shit for awhile and I was feeling more comfortable, I got up the nerve to ask him something that I'd always wondered. "So when guys like you run a course like this, do you run the whole thing? Like even the steep parts?" I asked.

"Yep, it's not a fast run, but it's a run."

Woooooow. There were quarter-mile sections of this courses that were over 15%. He looked at me, "You look like you could be built for something like this. You've got those short legs, so you can get a fast turnover." Yeah... well... no. "How do you like those compression socks?" he asked. I'd had to roll the compression socks down a couple of inches because they covered my short little legs up past the knees.

"I don't know, to tell the truth," I told him. "I'm wearing them today more to hold me together than out of faith that they actually work."

"Well do your calves knot up really bad after a long run? Do they prevent that?" he asked.

"What? Um, no, I guess I don't get that. I mean I get tired and stuff. Tight. But knots? No."

I went home and took an ice bath, then I took a hot epsom salt bath. With the chafe between my legs and my split... lip... it took a good several minutes to be able to submerge myself in the water and I yelped and whimpered like a hurt animal, but finally I was successful in submerging myself. That night I got a massage from our massage therapist at work. I asked her why my experience with foam rollers and massages hadn't been as painful as other people had described. But when she hit my IT band and I screamed, I felt what all those people were talking about. "I think it's because you never sit still. Your muscles never get a chance to knot up like other people's," she told me. Yeah, well I was a hurt unit. I crawled into bed after my massage and spent every free second I could find the next day asleep.

I think I deserve a recovery week.

Boo-boos

With my confidence flying high after last weekend's 200K, I was looking forward to another flat and fast 125 miles from SF to Point Reyes, which is... north somewhere. A 7:00 start, between 6 and 7 quick hours in the saddle, and I'd be back in SF in time for a late lunch. I found parking near the Golden Gate Bridge at 6:30 and started getting ready. This race hadn't even provided parking suggestions, so I knew better than to hope for a bathroom after last week's fiasco. I took advantage of the fact that the sun wasn't up yet to duck behind a leafy tree and eliminate. Since the urge struck me right at that exact second, I did something I have never done before in my life and... went number 2 without a toilet. I'm sure those of you who have been reading since the days of Claire's No. 1 Rule of Public Pooping: Don't will be amused to know: Does a Claire shit in the woods? Answer: If she needs to.

There was no missing the clot of about 150 riders sitting at the base of the bridge. Registration had been closed when I tried to register on Thursday, but I didn't really care. I went to the guy handing out the brevet cards and said, "I wasn't able to register and I don't really care about the card, but I fully plan to take advantage of any food at rest stops, so why don't I pay the fee anyway?"

He looked confused for a second and said, "Keep your money, you're going to need it."

The reason for his confusion became clear as I made out some of the words that the guy was announcing at the center of the crowd. "...water at check points... only enough for everyone to have one bottle... enough to get you out of the state park... receipt is your signature, so buy something... not gonna be repaved anytime soon... know from personal experience, it hurts!"

I hopped right in with the front group before we had even cleared the bridge, and concentrated on keeping up with the big boys through the endless stop signs of Sausalito and surrounding towns. I knew the first 20 miles or so of road, but soon we were out on the open road and I was in new territory. Contrary to what MapMyRide's all yellow (less than 4% grade) elevation profile had led me to believe, the route was not flat. Instead, there were endless rollers that would climb at a 5-15% grade for about a mile or so, and then come back down, which I suppose would average out to look like a 2% grade over 125 miles. From the ground though, it was draining me dry. My muscles were sore and aching, and despite my best efforts to catch up on my hydration last night and this morning, I felt like I was playing catch-up on my water and food right from the very beginning. I had trained a lot this week, and was feeling it.

Point Reyes National Park was marshland meets cow pasture, with ever-steeper rollers and never-ending cow-catchers at the bottom of each hill. I was really beginning to feel shitty, and when we hit the final climb up to the first checkpoint (a hill that I estimate started at about a 15% grade), I was FRIED. I realized too late that I was already over the red line, and had no lower gear to shift into. I thought for long minutes that at any second I was going to have to get off my bike. At the checkpoint they weren't kidding about the one-bottle policy, and I was starting to get a bit worried about my hydration.

I decided that there was no way I was staying with those guys, and I would rather just pedal along at my own pace until I found someone else to lead me through the route (I had no cue sheet again) rather than try to keep up with the lead group. Eventually a tall Latvian who sounded a bit like Boris and Natasha fell back and we began riding together in our mutual half-bonk to the next checkpoint at mile 85. I was feeling terrible and I was sure that if I didn't get my hands on some salt soon, things were going to get pretty nasty.

The rest stop was an oyster-bar-in-the-rough/convenience store, and there was more of a selection of beers than there was nonalcoholic fluids. There was no Gatorade. I bought an Odwalla, 2 Pepsis (probably the first colas I've had in several years), and a giant jug of water. I planned to slam the juice and sodas, and then fill my bottles with water, but no sooner had I finished the juice and cracked the first Pepsi, when Boris and another guy that we'd picked up in the line for the cash register said, "If we leave in the next minute we can still make it in under 8 hours!" I filled up my bottles and ditched the water jug for the next group of riders and went outside. I started fiddling with the zippers to pull my sleeves off my jacket, and I heard, "Go! Go! Go!" I looked up and Boris and Natasha were already 10 seconds up the road. That's when I did something stupid.

(Word of advice: Never do a Google image search of 'bike crash.') Normally I would have moved my bike up into the street and out of the gutter more, but I threw my leg over my bike where it stood, clipped in with one leg, and pushed off with my free leg. As I began to roll I realized: 1. That I was riding right on the edge of a drainage ditch that dropped off 8" to the side of the road; 2. That I was in too hard a gear to get the pedal all the way around and build up enough speed to be able to maneuver my bike so close to the danger of the ditch; 3. There was one of those sandwich board-style signs right in my path. It said "CRAB" but I thought it said "CARB." That was the last thing I thought before I made that noise that my mother makes when she trips on something and came down on my elbow.

This was my karma for all those times I was unsympathetic to people who couldn't get clipped out in time.

I have no idea what hit what, because a millisecond before I hit the pavement, the nose of my saddle rammed so hard into my hoo-ha that I didn't even feel my elbow hit. Without getting into too much detail, it hit "downtown," right over the pubic bone where your weight sits when you ride. For a second, I sat there on the pavement looking at all my M&M's and gum drops on the pavement around the upturned sign. A group of Team in Training riders rode by and asked if I was okay. I continued to sit. It needed to stop hurting so much before I could move. "I'm... composing myself," I told them so they would leave me alone to my blinding crotch pain.

When I got back on my bike, it was really painful. It was like I had a really bad bruise... if you can bruise on your cho-cho. Later, when I finally did get to take my shorts off, there was blood everywhere, and not for the same reason as last week. Without getting into too much detail, it seems that the pressure caused the skin to just... rupture.

I didn't notice my top tube for another 5 miles. At first it didn't register. I thought, Huh, that's funny. When did I chip more paint off my frame? Other than my painful no-no place, I had already completely forgotten about falling. It didn't even occur to me at first that it could have happened in the crash. Slowly it dawned on my foggy brain, What if it's a crack? Cool, then I'll get a new frame. Wait... but to get a new frame it has to be manufacturer's defect. What if I broke it in the crash? But I was only going half a mile per hour, and I didn't even fall hard enough to get dirt on my elbow. I checked the face of my Garmin, which I knew had hit the ground because it was stopped when I got up. The Garmin wasn't cracked or even scratched. It was too far back on the frame to be from my handlebars. Was it the sign? No, but I hit the sign on the other side, right? I couldn't remember.

Boris and Natasha stopped to exchange electrolyte pills and I checked out my bike. The scratch went all the way down the side of the top tube, and underneath I could see carbon fibers sticking out. "Fuck you guys, I think I cracked my frame."

We inspected it, and after ascertaining that there was no crack in the down tube, Boris produced a roll of duct tape. "Are you serious? Who rides with duct tape?" I asked.

"Duct tape is great for everything, even if you get injured," said Natasha. "I have some too." We reinforced my $3000 frame with some $3 duct tape and I prayed that it would get me the remaining 40 miles home. As we rode, I started to come back from my bonk, but I was despondent. I felt like I was in that turning point in Million Dollar Baby where it goes from being a happy movie to a very, very sad movie. All those rides I'd taken on this bike, and now best case scenario I'd have to give the whole frame back to Specialized to get a new one. Worst case: I was going to have to come up with money for a whole new bike. What would I do without a bike until I could afford one? And all this because these guys couldn't wait 5 extra seconds for me to mount my bike. I was getting grouchy. Really, really, really grouchy.

And I was nervous. We still had the biggest hills and the biggest descents coming up. It hurt to sit, but I didn't want to stand and tax my frame either. I tried to sit up and spin up hills with a light hold on my handlebars to keep from torquing the frame, but on the descents there wasn't much I could do. You put a lot of torque on the frame when cornering, and I kept imagining my bike snapping in half if I hit a pothole on a long, poorly paved downhill.

Coming up the final steep hill out of Sausalito and up to the Golden Gate Bridge again, we came across another rider in a Landry's jersey. Landry's. I know Landry's. Is that in Boston or San Francisco? I couldn't remember for the life of me. "Are you from Boston?" I asked.

"No, but I ride there a lot. I do the Pan Mass Challenge every year. Have you ever done the Pan Mass?" I didn't want to talk to him, I just wanted to know if my brain was working right. "This year my brother's trying to put me up to doing the whole thing, all the way from the New York border. Over 200 miles over 3 days."

I'd been here before. My whole rivalry with Big Red had started over how much more badass the AIDS LifeCycle was than the Pan Mass, and here I was signed up for the LifeCycle again and having the same damned conversation. I had been thinking about how my broken bike must be some cosmic way of telling me not to be so arrogant, but right now I wanted to punch this guy in the forehead. Instead I said, "Alright, have a good day," and dropped him. Or so I thought. It turns out he drafted me the whole way up the hill. Fucker.

I was so irritable at this point that I was sure that I would throw somebody off the bridge if they got in my way, but I made it across with relatively little effort. I eyed the potato chips and pretzels at the end, but I just wanted this day to be over. I went back to my car, parked illegally at a burrito place on the way home so I wouldn't have to walk more than was absolutely necessary, shoved the burrito in my face as I drove (getting cheese and sour cream on the steering whee)l, got home, took a shower, put my legs up the wall, and went to sleep. I still had to run a long way tomorrow.

Messy

While Boston is buried under like 4 feet of snow, California has had a warm, sunny spell this week. Maybe as payment for deriving such satisfaction from Boston's misfortune (or because I pushed myself so hard to enjoy every second of the January nice weather), this is also the week that my body decided to catch that cold that everyone's had around me. My decline went something like this:
Tuesday: Woke up feeling sick-ish. Thought that maybe it was just me being dehydrated. By 6:30 am I knew I really was feeling sick-y. Taught a spin class. Did some heavy squats.
Wednesday: Woke up definitely sick. Also woke up feeling like I'd just gotten beat up. Was it because I was achy or because of the squats? Not sure. Ran 8.5 miles over lots and lots and lots of tall hills in the 40* and wind (it wasn't warm yet). Tried to make up for it with a nap. Woke up from said nap feeling shittier. Tried to kill The Sick by taking lots of zinc. Swam for 45 minutes. Taught a spin class. Almost threw up in the spin class from the zinc.
Thursday: Really, really feeling shitty now. Not like super sick, just not feeling 100% and having a full day where I needed to feel 100%. Had a free hour in the middle of my morning. Lifted more weights. Went for a swim. Taught another spin class. Cold moved into my chest and I started coughing shit up.
Friday: It was sunny and warm and finally decided to take a day off of training and sleep.

But on Saturday I'd signed up for the Santa Rosa 200K through wine country, and with sun and highs in the high 60's forecasted, I wasn't going to miss it for the world. I'd ridden much sicker in way worse conditions! So off I went to Healdsberg, somewhere in Sonoma county.

The start was only about an hour and 45 minutes away. For some reason my brain just wasn't getting around the idea that if it started at 8, then I should plan to be there before 8, so I left at 6:06 in the morning and stopped to get gas. Then I stopped for coffee. I walked into the Starbucks (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog) and there was no line, so I figured I'd go to the bathroom before I got my coffee. In the bathroom, I pulled down my shorts and there was a slasher movie going on in my pants. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! Not only did I not have any tampons, my body doesn't really deal well with sitting in the saddle for more than about an hour with a tampon in. Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck! I was going to have to spend the day bleeding into my chamois. I did my best to deal with the immediate mess, and came out of the bathroom about a minute after I'd entered it to find a line about 8 people deep. Ugh!

When I left the Starbucks, I still hadn't put together exactly how late I was, so I just kept driving. It wasn't until I saw a sign that said that Santa Rosa (which was before Healdsberg) was 27 miles away and it was about 7:22 that I realized that I was in a bit of trouble. I looked at the GPS, and it said that I would arrive at 7:56 am. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! It was my own damned fault. I started driving 80.

I arrived at the start with about 10 minutes to spare, put together my bike, pumped up my tires, and packed my pockets in record time. Then I grabbed my brevet card and started asking for the bathrooms. "There's a bathroom in the Safeway down the street," a guy told me. He looked like a triathlete more than a randonneur with race wheels and well-groomed, tight-fitting clothing. I tried to work out how I would get over there and back to the start in 3 minutes, and where I would leave my bike while I was inside. "Do you have to pee or poop?" he asked. I loved him not only for asking, but because he used the word "poop" with a perfect stranger.

It's not that I had to poop, it's that I needed the toilet paper to help deal with the issues going on in my shorts. I had that "not-so-fresh feeling," and just from the ride across the parking lot I'd already had to wipe a big smudge off my white saddle. Why oh why wasn't there a porta-potty?!

I peed behind a fence and comforted myself that there would almost certainly be a bathroom at the first checkpoint where I could clean up a bit. When I came back out, everyone was gone (and I mean everyone, even the people who hadn't been on bikes.) I got onto my bike as fast as possible and took off down the road. They had told us to print up our own cue sheets, and I didn't have a printer, so I was going to be reliant on the rest of the group to shepherd me through the route. Right before the first turn, I started catching people. I kept hauling as fast as I could, catching one clot of people and slingshotting through to catch the next group. I was riding so hard that I could hardly breathe, but I wanted the guy who asked me if I was going to "poop" to be my friend. I liked him and he looked fast. But after a few miles of riding like the wind, I reached the next front group just as they turned. It was a wrong turn, so we all had to turn around. I got caught behind a car on the U-turn, and by the time I caught the group a few minutes later, I figured that if there was another group up the road, I wasn't going to catch them. Maybe I could catch up with them at the first checkpoint.

Every brevet that I've ever done has had us stopping at gas stations every 20-30 miles to get our cards stamped and the time written on them. It wasn't until several miles later that someone mentioned that there was only one checkpoint at the turn-around. Lame. As I tore through the streets, I recognized where we were. We were on the same roads as the Vineman bike course. The last time I was here my feet were so swollen and achy that I could hardly pedal. Now my tootsies were slightly cold and a wee bit numb. I tried to pick out the spot where the truck had hit me, but I don't think we passed it.

This was the most crowded brevet that I had ever done. We were riding in a group of about 30 riders, none of whom had the rigid pack etiquette of racers. Bike racers move like Germans: quickly and efficiently. These guys move like Spaniards: everyone at their own pace and oblivious to those around them. (Triathletes move like Americans: fast, loud, only thinking of themselves, and taking up as much space as they can.) At one point a guy came up on my right, "I'm coming through on your right," he warned. You couldn't really blame him, it was crowded in here, and I suppose there was enough space. I looked over my shoulder to see if I could move left to give him some room, and suddenly there was an arm. A woman was coming up within millimeters of me on the left side, pinching me in. Normally I wouldn't have minded, but this woman validated everything bad I have ever said about Bianchi riders (poseurs: the type of girl who buys one because she dates a bike messenger or because she likes the color and that it was made in Italy). I have never seen one bicycle take up so much space. It's not that she was swerving, it's that her straight lines were three feet across. She was all over the fucking road! I couldn't get around her. And every time I would make a move to try to get away from her, she was back with me within the next mile! I almost said something, but I'm non-confrontational and I would much prefer to say terrible things to someone in my own head than actually confront them out loud and have them get mad at me.

I noticed a Straight Man Over 40 riding a fixie and asked him about his gearing. He told me stories about how he'd started riding when he quit drinking 8 years ago, and now he commutes 40-60 miles to work every day. He told me about how he'd had to ride the Furnace Creek 508 all by himself when his 4-person team had flaked on him one by one. He told me that his birthday was yesterday. He told me lots of other stuff too before he finally noticed that this conversation was more of a soliloquy and turned his attention to me. "So, are you married?"

Whaaat? Of all the questions to ask, that's the first one you ask? "Uh, no," I said in surprise.

"Well you would need to find a guy that would keep up with you first," he said.

That bothered me for some reason, although it doesn't usually bother me when people assume that I have a boyfriend, or that I don't because I'm too intimidating. "I know lots of guys that can keep up with me," I said. "But that doesn't do me much good. I'm not allowed to get married in the state of California anyway."

"Laws change real quick," he told me. And that was that. I told him that I'd give him my card, just in case he ever needed a last-minute teammate again, but I never did get to give him my card because then we started descending and the fixies couldn't keep up.

I was starting to get hungry and thirsty, but with such a huge group averaging about 20 mph, I couldn't take my numb hands off my handlebars for long enough to reach under my jacket, into my back pocket, pull out a granola bar, unwrap it, and shove it into my mouth without taking out another rider. Not to mention, once it was in my mouth I would have to breathe around it as I chewed. By the time we finally pulled into the turn-around point at mile 70 (somebody explain to me what an "uneven out-and-back" is), I had only drunk one bottle of water and eaten about 3 handfuls of gumdrops (the rest I had lost on a bumpy road in Sonoma). I was ready to clean up in the bathroom, drink some Gatorade, and eat. But.... the checkpoint wasn't a gas station at all. It was a picnic area in the middle of nowhere. There was no bathroom that I could see.

I put my bike in a far corner where no one would get too close to it to see the brownish stains in the textured pattern on my saddle and went over to get my card signed. I ate 3 Chewy bars, 2 chocolate chip cookies, several tortilla chips, and some celery and dip in about 5 minutes, filled my water bottles, and waited for the first group to leave. "You coming with us?" one of the nondescript Straight Men Over 40 asked me. "Good choice," he nodded when he saw me mount. Strange answer, I thought.

Now there were only about 8 of us, and everyone seemed to know each other but me. We were riding more in an organized paceline now, with everyone rotating pulls and taking their time at the front. As the guy coming off the front would drift past the group to the back, everyone would thank him. Now I've heard of people saying "nice pull" before (only if you really turned it up up there, or took an extra long pull), but I'd never seen people thanking each other and calling each other by name. As I got close to the front, one of the littler guys got in front of me and took an extra pull. Was he trying to protect me?! Did he not want to get pulled by a girl?! That made me angry. We hit a traffic light or a turn and I found myself in the back again with the little guy next to me. "You see that guy up there, he's the club's rider of the year. And you see the guy in the yellow? He got something like 10th place in the California Triple Crown series. A lot of these guys are real accomplished guys. Not like racers, but real elite in the brevet and double century stuff."

"Sounds like fun," I said. "I didn't even realize that centuries and rando stuff could be competitive."

"Fun for them, not for me," the little guy said. "These guys are just getting their spring legs on." I don't know why the little guy was telling me all this stuff, but he seemed to have some sort of role of authority in the group. He was one of the most vocal praisers, and he was the only one getting out of rotation to talk to the different guys in the group. When one of the "stars" fell behind, he was the one that went back to help break the wind for him. Finally I got my turn at the front. I didn't think I was riding that fast, but then I heard the little guy's voice behind me. "You're gapping them! You're gapping them."

I slowed down and let someone else take the pull. "Best you not lead," one of the guys joked. "I don't think we can handle it."

The little guy drifted back. "These guys can't handle more than about 20 mph. They're not in real great shape for this time of year." I wondered what he thought my story was. I wasn't in great shape either. I hadn't even ridden 100 miles since Memorial Day, and hadn't ridden more than 40 or 50 miles in the last 6 months. I had no idea how fast I was riding, because my Garmin was in running mode, so it was giving me my speeds in minutes per mile rather than miles per hour. I wondered what these guys made of me turning up in their midst at all, since none of them asked me anything other than my name. At least they didn't ask me if I was married.

Except for a few spots with 5-minute traffic lights (so that 2 directions of traffic could share one lane), we rode the 50 miles home without stopping. I was tired and hungry and thirsty and I just wanted to get off my bike, but I didn't really feel all that bad. I was surprised, these guys were fading faster than I was. I was actually the second one up the biggest hill on the route. And yet they weren't curious about me. I was a bit perplexed, I mean, how could you not want to know about me?! What was wrong with the Straight Men Over 40 around here?

When we got to the finish, after 6 hours and 19 minutes of riding (20 mph average), and 6 hours and 38 minutes total, I had drained my two water bottles and wanted more. I also wanted some food that hadn't come in a foil packet and a BATHROOM! The finish was at a lunch/brewery place, and when we pulled in, the guy who had asked me if I had to poop was sitting at a table on the patio. He offered us a beer. There was a frosty pitcher of ice water on the table too, and I tried to get my hands on a glass of that. But by the time I got a cup, one of the Straight Men Over 40 had poured water into everyone else's cup, and there was only about a Dixie cup's worth for me. "Oh, sorry," he said, pouring the last few drops into my cup. I wanted to cry and kick him in the shins. I drained it and went inside to go to the bathroom. The line to the bar was about 30 people deep and stretched all the way to the door. I wasn't going to be getting any more water here. I found the bathroom. There was a line about 6 women deep, including an old lady and two children. I left the restaurant. Finally I found a public bathroom that smelled like poop but had toilet paper in it. I surveyed the damage. At this point, there wasn't much I could do to clean it up, but at least I could pee in a real toilet. Then I grabbed my filthy bike, packed up the car, and drove to a gas station where I had Chex Mix and a big bottle of water.

The whole drive home I could smell myself. In addition to the situation in my pants, the rest of me was soaked through from sweat. Also, I started coughing up great gobs of grey phlegm that I had nothing to do but wipe on my pants. I wanted a shower so badly and I wanted out of this Spandex. I got home, showered, and then sat in a cold bath. When the cold bath was over, I ran a hot bath and poured more epsom salts in the bath. I don't know if the epsom salt thing works, but I had been so sore all week that I was willing to try anything to speed my recovery along. I didn't even wait for the water to reach the salts before sitting down in the tub, right on top of the grains. As the water reached and dissolved the salt under my crotch, I realized that something was... not right. My chamois had been so wet and sticky all day, that I had chafed my entire undercarriage. Sure, it wasn't chafed right through the skin, but it was bad enough that when sitting in extremely salty water, my whole crotch burned like an STD. Ouch.

I drove into the City that night, and Scout and I got chair massages at the Chinese massage place down the street. Scout thinks the guy named Charlie (real name) is the best, but the woman with a face like a foot has a crush on her. "Herro, Rady!" Cindy with a face like a foot said to Scout when she saw her walk in, face bright as the sunshine.

The receptionist said something in Cantonese to Cindy with a face like a foot, and I heard "XXxXXxxXxX xXxXX xXX Charlie XXX xxXxX xXXxxXXX." Cindy with a face like a foot's face darkened and she looked at me. "She your friend?" she asked Scout. Then Cindy with a face like a foot begrudgingly ordered me over to a chair. "Here, Rady. You sit." I spent the next hour wondering if Cindy with a face like a foot would break me just to be vindictive. But the massage didn't even hurt. I've humped foam rollers this week, too, and that didn't hurt either. (And yes, I'm doing it right) In fact, very few massages have ever hurt, and only once on my legs. I wondered for the second time that week what it was about me that kept my muscles from tying themselves up in knots like other people's. I wondered if it had something to do with my not getting tired like other people when I've been doing a lot of exercise. Oh well, something to think about...

A waste of a perfectly good bike ride

I've been loving trail running lately. Claire, the one who hates to run (although admittedly I don't think I've ever said that about trail running) has been having "Oh my god, I love my life! I wish I had more time to run" moments every time I hit the trails. On Saturday I went for a 10-mile trail run, up out of the canyon, up a 2000' mountain, and then back down. Normally when I'm finishing a hard 2-hour run, I will round kick someone in the face (or aim for the face and hit the knees) if they get between me and my car, especially if I've been out of water for an hour. This time, though, as I was running through the neighborhoods back to my car, a girl who looked like maybe she could strip off her rainbow leg warmers and star in Twilight yelled to me, "Have you seen a boy?"

Boy. Yes, I have heard of such things. They are like men only smaller and with less hair. "Uh, I don't think so," I said. "I'm sorry, I wasn't really looking." With my visor on and my head down, I wouldn't have seen a charging elephant... or so I thought.

I continued running down the road and about 3 blocks later I came across a 10-year-old boy with a committed rat tail, running next to a friend who was on a bike. "Hey, kid!" I yelled. "I think someone's looking for you!"

The kid suddenly cut in a different direction and ran down a side street. "He's running away from home," his not-so-bright friend on the bike told me right before following him down the street.

I'd been running for 10 miles. I hate kids. I hate rat tails. I had every good reason to just keep on running and leave this particular dispute to resolve itself. Instead, I took off after him at top speed. He turned with that "Oh fuck!" look that a bunny gets right before it bolts from a barking chihuahua under the wheels of a speeding Mack truck. The side street turned out to be a cul-de-sac and he was cornered. He started weaving back and forth as you would if someone were shooting at you. "Sorry, kid!" I said as I hopped back and forth through the street toward him. "I just can't let you go. She's worried about you."

"You can't win this one, Jimmy!" the dim boy on the bike said.

At that moment little Jimmy saw the Twilight girl. She saw him. "Jimmy, stay right fucking there!" she yelled. He darted across the street. "Oh my fucking GAWD, Jimmy..."

This was my cue to leave. Fast. And I wasn't even feeling sorry for myself for having to run so hard at the end of my epic run. Where was the Mexican soap opera that I was always the tragic hero of by the end of my runs?

I was high on life from my run all that afternoon and into the next day when I had to do a (dun, dun, duuuuuun!) crit. Now if you haven't been here for awhile, let me remind you that I fucking hate criteriums. They are races that discourage strong legs and reward the weasels. They are dangerous and ugly. I hate 'em, hate 'em, hate 'em. But crits are a necessary evil in cycling because they teach good pack skills, because they usually figure into any stage race, and because early season training crits are a good chance to network. Since I really wanted to ride with a team once I was back in shape (although that may take a year), I reluctantly went to Freemont for the Early Bird training crit.

The Bay Area is generally beautiful, but Fremont is an exception to this rule. To get to it, I skipped over the impressive Bay Bridge, passed by the neutral San Mateo Bridge, and went over the ugly Dumbarton Bridge. There were no pretty hills on the horizon, and it was the kind of ugly low bridge made from pilings that they have in Florida. Rather than dropping us back to earth among skyscrapers, the Dumbarton Bridge farted me out in the middle of a marsh among a forest of power lines. Even the name of the bridge starts with "dumb." It was a beautiful day, and here I was in a concrete jungle of the East Bay.

I'm sure that crits are the same the world over. If I went to a criterium somewhere in Nepal or Somalia, I'm sure it would still be held in a deserted office park. I drove into a deserted office park just like the deserted office park in Boston where the training crits were held there. I filled out the same registration form for one-day entries that they use all around the country and sighed. Was I really skipping a chance to go on a real ride to ride a 1.5-mile circuit around the Dell building? I handed over $20. That was a lot of money for a race that was only going to last 40 minutes and where they wouldn't even be keeping score.

I stood in line for the bathroom with the same cyclists who look the same the world over waiting to deposit my Starbucks (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog), when... No way! Holy shit! ... I saw the chick who was at every single race I ever did in New England. I had seen her at brevets, training crits, time trials, road races, women's training rides, and out-of-state races, and now here she was 3000 miles away in a NEBC kit. "No way! You've gotta be shitting me!" I said. "What are you doing here?" I hugged her because it seemed the thing to do, but once we were already hugging I think both of us thought better of it and wondered how soon we could politely get out of touching each other.

"I just moved here 2 months ago."

"I just moved here 6 months ago."

She looked at my number. "What?! You're still a four?" Every time we'd raced against each other in a time trial we'd finished within seconds of each other, we could easily ride together in the same pack, but any time tactics were involved she knew what to do and I chickened out. That's why she'd cat'ed up to a 1 last season, playing soigneur to a pro team this summer, while I was still a cat 4 and spent the summer drunk and getting fat.

I explained that I hadn't raced since spring of last year, and even if I'd won all those races, I still hadn't even done enough races to get the points to move up a category. "Plus, I'm really out of shape," I explained. I was looking forward to hiding in anonymity until I had my legs back. She was spoiling everything.

She looked at my legs, like you could see what kind of power was in them just by looking through my leg warmers. "You don't look like it." Yeah, thanks. Believe me. "Okay, first rule of racing, don't put your number on upside-down." She re-pinned my number. I thought about punching her. I hate being called out on a rookie mistake. I will ride off the Dumbarton Bridge on a 40* day saying it was all part of the plan before I take advice from someone more experienced than me. I wanted to stick the safety pins in her eyes.

"Thanks," I said.

After a brief warm-up, we lined up for the start. There were about 50 women, and they had us break into groups of those who had done more than 10 races, and those who hadn't. Again, not willing to admit to my beginner's status, I lined up with the more experienced girls, figuring they would be safer and forgetting that I hadn't ridden in a pack since the spring.

Off we went. For a couple of laps, I tried to sit near the front, but every time I found a comfy spot at third or fourth wheel, another train of girls would come up to the inside. Now the other paceline was the place to be, and I had to wait until they'd all gone to hop on the train.

Then there were the turns. I'm comfortable weighting the outside pedal and swooping through tight turns, but every time we came into a turn, one of the pack "mentors" riding in orange vests yelled, "Pedal through the turns, girls!" (note the photo in a previous paragraph, where all the riders have their pedals in the same position and are clearly cornering and not pedaling through a turn.) But I was in too high a gear to pedal through the turns, and if I were to spin my pedals, then I'd go right up someone's ass. So I started downshifting as we approached the turns, but because I'm more of a gear masher (yes, yes, I know...), it was awkward for me, and I would lose a lot of speed.

Only a couple of laps in the mentors started telling us not to panic, but that they were neutralizing the pack so that the other group of girls could pass. I pretended like I got caught out on the side (or maybe I really did, I don't remember) and used the chance to move up to the front of the pack. That was the last time I saw the front of the pack and I stared longingly as the inexperienced girls rode by hauling ass from 5 laps out.

I hate crits.

After a few laps I just resigned myself to the back. There was no sense in trying to get to the front if I would just wind up in the back anyway. Why not just conserve my energy in the back and then blast to the front on the final lap? I hoped I wouldn't be caught behind a wall on the final straightaway. "You should move forward," the Familiar Face told me.

"I'd love to, but I'm feeling a bit skittish."

"It's safer up there." Don't you think I know that?! If I could, I would, dammit! Don't make me use my safety pins on your eyes, because I will!

The final lap came, and I tried half-heartedly to find my way to the front before the final turn. Then in the final straightaway I found an open stretch of road and just tore forth. I passed ten or more girls, but I was already starting about 50 yards back from the leaders, so although I closed some of that gap, I really didn't have a prayer in the world. Crits are dumb.

There was a "post-race debriefing" that I had every intention of skipping, but everyone rode right into a parking lot to talk about the race so I figured I'd join. The mentors told us we were doing a great job, and despite the fact that I picked up a few pointers on how to move up without killing anyone (all of which I have forgotten by this writing), praise was thick, and the fawning, supportive tone made me want to bust out my eyeball pins again. "Noooo, you guys did GREAT! And especially for women, because everyone knows that women can't ride a bike. Bike racing is hard, and you're all winners just for getting out there. Of course you will never really be able to hack it, but you all go home and tell your friends that you did a bike race today while we talk pajoratively about these training races behind your backs. But no, really, you were awesome." Or that's what I heard anyway, because I was busy trying to dig the pins out of the back of my jersey and put them to better use.