Grizzley Claire

Once upon a time, long, long ago in the summer of 2008 Shane and I heard of the Grizzly Century in the mountains between Yosemite and Sierra national parks. Shane rode it that year with a terrible cold and after hill after hill of harrowing climbing (as described by him) he finally abandoned the race somewhere before the final peak, not wanting to descend in the snow with his tuberculosis-like cough. He was sick for months after that, and this is the point where I suppose I should admit that he'd called me to ask if I thought he should ride that day and I'd told him to harden the fuck up and be a man. My curiosity was piqued, of course. I had meant to do the ride last year, but this is Northern California and people flaked on me. I was too poor last year to do the ride anyway. This year I put out the word on Facebook and one person was as intrigued as I was. It should be no surprise that it was Me in Boy Form, Counterpart Chris.

The original plan was to drive the 4 hours down to the race the night before and then just sleep in the car... and then reason won out. I looked at about 5 different hotel reservation sites to find a hotel near North Fork, CA. Mostly they seemed pretty expensive bed and breakfast type places, and then finally I found a cheap Motel 6 right in North Fork for about $60/night. Score! I got half way through booking before I realized that I was booking a hotel in North Fork, PENNSYLVANIA. Shit. I started again with the zip code, and again Hotels.com directed me to PA. I did a Google map search and all the hotels that showed up within 100 miles said "call for reservations." I'm a 21st century kind of gal, and I don't make 15 phone calls to comparison shop for hotel rooms. I do not even like to use my phone for calling. Twenty-first century fail.

There were more fails when it came to planning. "If the ride starts at about 7, then we should be done by about noon, one o'clock at the latest, so we can request a late check-out and come back and shower..." Counterpart Chris suggested.

"Uh, Chris, have you seen the course profile? There must be 8,000' of climbing in the first 80 miles. I can ride a sub-five century, but not over mountains. I was figuring more like 7-8 hours." I was beginning to fear that this ride would be ruined by trying to race through it in time to not have to pay for a second night at the hotel. When the cheapest hotel I could find was an hour from the start, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was absolutely no way we could get to a hotel an hour away and shower in time for a late check-out. I was free to enjoy the ride again.

We arrived at the start and rolled out a leisurely 20 minutes late after buying cartoon jerseys with bears on them. Mine had a bear making sushi and licking his fingers in a somewhat salacious way if you have the mind of a 13-year-old boy, which I do. The first incline hit after about a mile, and Couterpart Chris blasted off. I sat there grinding away on my pedals and breathing hard but refusing to sprint off after him. I could only lose that game, and I would rather hand him the car key in the first 5 miles rather than chase after him for the next 95 and dig myself into a hole I couldn't get out of. The day before I'd ridden a spin class (my 5th of 6 that week) on a CycleOps bike with a real power meter. I'd been crushed when the girl next to me was pushing the same power on the interval sets and didn't seem to be working as hard as I was. I too had become an "average" cyclist, and I had to respect my limitations with 75 miles of climbing ahead of me.

Counterpart Chris finally slowed down for me and I offered him the car keys if he wanted to go on ahead. He declined and we started climbing the first major climb from 2500' to 4500'. After awhile Counterpart Chris said, "Oh my god, when is this going to end?"

"Didn't you look at the elevation profile?" I asked.

"No." (And this is why we're the same person.)

"We're climbing pretty much straight through from mile 1 to mile 75 at 75000', then there's a 5000' drop over 10 miles and it's all flat home. I'm thinking of this as a 75-mile climb, and any downhills we get in between are bonus miles. This is going to be one of those 7 mph centuries." Silence. "Chris, how do you play the alphabet game?" I asked.

"You take turns and each person has to say a word that starts with the same letter. I played for five hours once. Mouse."

"Map."

"Mold."

"Musty..."

And much of the conversation for the day continued like that. When we spread out a bit or on the downhills we would have some time to think of new words, and then we'd pass each other again and yell out:

"Muckraker!"

"Moron!"

"Mastodon!"

"Mucus!"

"MULLET!"

People always knew that we were coming, and after recovering from the initial shock of a couple of kids riding by yelling, "Molester!" "Masturbate!" I think they figured out the rules of the game.

"Hey, it's the kids with the word game!" they would say.

The alphabet game ate up the first 60 miles or so of the ride, and we hardly noticed all the climbing. The views were typical California spectacular, with wooded mountains and those knobby glacial rocks that Yosemite is famous for sticking up out of the landscape. We took lots of pictures, but Counterpart Chris lost his camera somewhere between the ride and San Francisco, and I had an iPhone emergency and had to do a factory reset and lost ALL my pictures since 2009. I will instead tell you what pictures I would have put in here: Note: this is the one surviving picture from the trip.

We got to the top of the first peak where they were serving... lunch? "What mile are we at?" Counterpart Chris asked.

"Uhhh, 27," I told him.

There was an overlook and Counterpart Chris asked a stranger to take our picture. "Bend over, Chris," I told him. Then I stood behind him. Insert picture I'm describing here. Instead I will put a picture of something else. The people around us were shocked, and not in that good-natured kind of way.

"I'm glad that it's not the other way around!" one woman said.

"I think they're homophobic," Counterpart Chris whispered to me later.

"Aw, come on people," I said. "It's for Facebook. You've got to say something like, 'How did the hill go Chris?'" Sheesh, it wasn't Chris and I who had something up our butts.

I stuffed myself with baclava, nutella, and grapes and Counterpart Chris munched on potatoes for awhile before we got back on our bikes. Counterpart Chris is one of those people who can't eat anything. He's gluten intolerant, violently allergic to dairy, and eggs don't sit too well with him either. Plus, he's got a "no high-fructose corn syrup" policy, which is always good to have but was limiting his fueling options. As we picked our way higher and higher up the hill, we were each banking more and more "M" words as Counterpart Chris drifted back for longer and longer periods of time. Because I have grown up in the past few years, I didn't want to rub it in his face because he really did look like hell and I knew the day would come when I was feeling like hell and he would have to wait for me. When that day came, I knew that I didn't want him rubbing my nose in it.

"How are you doing?" I asked.

"If you drop me, I'll see you at the top," he said, which all endurophiles know means, 'Fuck off, I'm not in my happy place and I'm going to punch you if you try to help me.'

"What's the matter? You want some spice drops?" (Some things never change with me.)

"No, if I don't take a crap soon I think I'm going to die."

We hadn't seen a porta potty since lunch, and when we passed the 60-mile rest stop and there were still no facilities, I urged him to do it in the woods.

"What will I wipe with?!"

"C'mon! A leaf! What's worse, wiping with a big ol' leaf or shitting your pants. Just go! How do you think the bears do it???" In recent years I have also amended Claire's Number 1 Rule of Public Pooping: "Don't" to Claire's Number 1 Rule of Public Pooping: "Don't Unless You Will Be Done Before You Can Find Your Page/Load Angry Birds." Chris's angry turds could clearly beat Angry Birds in a race. "Hell, even I shit in the woods las week!" (It's true. Another life experience I can cross off the list.) So finally I stood at the side of the road and smiled and waved as people rode by while Counterpart Chris had a bear in the woods moment.

On the final climb up to 7500' I turned around to share a word like "Marjoram" or something and Counterpart Chris just wasn't there anymore. I had no idea how long he'd been gone and couldn't be 100% sure he was behind me and not in front of me. Anyway, this was the first time all day that I'd wished I'd had more gears. We had been climbing hills that were made for lots of traffic up until this point, but this was more like a service road that didn't bother to carve the flattest path but just followed the contours of the hill, which sometimes got uncomfortably steep. It was just hard enough that I didn't want to give up my mojo and wait for my brother from another mother. When we reached an impromptu water stop about 5 miles from the summit, it took Counterpart Chris several minutes to catch up and when he did he looked ashen and his lips were a funny color. I forced an Odwalla bar on him, despite his gluten thing because it looked like it was either going to be stomach discomfort or a long wait for the SAG van out in the middle of nowhere. He chose stomach discomfort. It was enough to get us both to the top of the hill where there was another spread of fresh fruit, baclava, and potatoes.

We had heard that there was a bad crash down the hill, so we decided to chill in the last rest stop for a bit to let them clear the road. They had a little fire going in a habachi, and next to it there was a pile of wood and... a hatchet!!! "Look, Chris! An axe!" I squealed, grabbing it.

"Uhhhh... be careful with that!"

I inexpertly raised the hatchet above my head and brought it down with pitiful force on a log. I think the log survived. Truth be told, I was too scared to chop hard. Weapons scare me, even hatchets. "Take a picture of me with it!" I said.

So Counterpart Chris took a picture of me looking WAY too excited holding an axe, and then made me put it down. Around that time a big ol' Jeep pulled up with a very dead buck tied to the roof. It was all covered in blood and stuff. I'm not so sensitive to the loss of an animal life as I used to be, so instead of mourning the deer like I would a cute puppy in an ASPCA poster, I just thought it was disgusting. I mean, come on. It's a carcas! And you strapped it to the roof of your car. How's that any different from picking up road kill at the side of the road (it's perfectly good meat, right? It didn't die of a disease or anything) or frying up your neighbor's dog because you're low on hamburger meat? "Hey, Earl! I just stepped on a huge roach! Go get me a cracker!"

Now that we were at the summit, we had a 12-mile, 5000' descent and then a 15-mile flat ride around the lake back to the start. On the downhill I tried to practice my countersteering by pressing on the inside drops, but even though they say it's supposed to be much more stable than being in the hoods, I just couldn't commit to being away from my brakes on a long descent and wound up descending at a comfortable 30 mph rather than pushing it to a pulse-racing 35-40 mph. Where did my huge balls go?

And that's pretty much it. We rode the rest of the way in, Counterpart Chris came back from his bonk. I murdered all the popcorn I could at the finish. Chris accidentally forgot his jersey in the school bathroom (which is why there are no pictures). I stripped down to nothing to change in the parking lot to save myself a trip back to the school, and was only vaguely worried about being entered into the sexual offenders registry for exposing myself on school property. Then we stopped at a Chipotle on the way home and I got terrible heart burn (something that happens to me about once every 2 years). Then we both got grouchy by the time we hit San Francisco again.

The End!

(By the way, does anyone know how to resize images in Google Chrome for Mac?)

Update

Claire... Claire? Are you still alive?


Yes. I'm still alive and well. I'm just working a ton: 12-14 hours a day plus 8-12 hours of paperwork in the weekend. I'm teaching about 5 spin classes a week and doing another 4 boot camps in addition to the personal training and it seems like my biggest achievements have been massive quantities of stinky and soggy laundry. It leaves me with so little energy in my free time when I think about writing it's like my mind splinters against any complex thought. In a recent interview with a cycling-specific gym the owner asked me what my last competition was and what my next would be. I hemmed and hawed and gave some bullshit answer. It wasn't until afterward that I remembered that I'd won my age group in a trail run the week before and was planning to do a 24-hour run. He was a putz anyway. Long after the fact and after much fractured rumination I realized that my biggest event lately has been my career. But my head is still in the game!

So what have I been up to? For the first year I was here, I felt like I was on a treadmill; working my ass of and not gaining any real ground. And then all of a sudden it was like I burst of the front of the treadmill and started running. I hit my stride and haven't slowed down since.

I have two career goals: to revolutionize how people think of training (putting the fun back into competitive endurance training), and to have people know I'm awesome without my having to tell them.

I don't have to tell you, I'm awesome.
This summer I finally got an audition at a local chain of gyms called Club One. I'd dropped off a resume a year ago, and it took this long for them to get me in the door. Once I saw the quality of the other cycling instructors, I knew I had a lock on it. The interview was structured like a class, with each applicant standing in front of the group and teaching a 10-minute set while the other applicants took it. When it was my turn, I could see several of the other instructors in my "class" smiling and one of the interviewers even whooped. Even though I threw the mic across the room in the middle of the class (it kept whistling), and saying something rude and presumptuous to the general fitness manager in that Claire way I have, I was the first call she made the following Monday morning and she rearranged classes to get me in.

Unbeknownst to me, after only a couple of weeks of teaching there, the fitness manager of the Olympic Club (a club where another member has to sponsor you to join, that hosts events like the US Open, and there are gilded marble columns around the pool) contacted the Club One fitness manager to scout cycling instructors. Then she started sucking up to me. Weird.

Meanwhile, much to my surprise, my clients started bringing me more referrals than I knew how to handle and other trainers started referring their clients to me. Every time someone dropped off of training, two people stepped forward to take their places. Where was all this coming from? I still felt like I was learning how to translate what I knew into other people's training plans, and suddenly people were getting results that I thought were due to gimmicky infomercials.

It's a good thing that other people are doing me the favor of singing my praises, because I'm so used to downplaying the races that I do in my free time that I forget to talk about them when necessary. While offhandedly listing your athletic accomplishments at a dinner party deserves burying a fork in the boaster's eye, mentioning that you've set a few course records yourself would actually come in handy if you're trying to suck up to the former IM Canada and course record holder when you tell him that you'd like to become his protege. Duh. Oops.

Changing the world
I still haven't quite figured out how I'm going to change the world yet. I have visions of owning my own facility with performance-oriented group workouts, getting paid to run training camps in France and New Zealand, and most importantly my meme stamped across people's asses, but I'm still waiting for the path to that one to materialize.

But when you're on the right path, doors seem to open of their own accord. Sometimes the path is circuitous and comes from your blind side. The spot where I work used to prohibit group classes because of space, but they recently decided to start running group classes. "We want you to do a cycling class and a running club," Ducky told me.

"Are you kidding me?!" I said. "You're not set up for indoor cycling. You don't have bikes. You don't have a sound-proof room. You don't have a stereo system, or a mic (which you'll need to be heard over the sound system in a non-soundproofed room). You only have one shower. It needs its own facility!"

"So open your own facility," was the obvious answer. Duh! I'd never really thought of that as an option before, but as I started visiting other facilities, I realized the poor quality of all the places but one that I visited and how much money could be made if you do it right. The plan started to germinate in my mind, I realized that that's what I'd been working toward the whole time without meaning to. Cool! I still have no idea how I'm going to get from here to there, but at least I have a destination and a compass.

The has-been
At the end of the day, though, I'm floundering. I'm not training for anything and can't get my head in the game for any performance goals. I wanted to train for a BQ marathon, but then only a few runs into the program I gave up. I just hated road running and was too tired to run fast anyway. I simply don't have time for training rides. I wish I had the fierce passion for competition that I had in Boston, but I spend so long thinking about the performance of my clients that when it comes time for my own workouts, I just want to unwind with a relaxing run through the woods or a long ride with friends. I'm never out of breath anymore.

I don't want to believe that my best days are behind me. My cycling power and muscle mass are at an all-time high. I'm even running as fast as I've ever run. I'm just flummoxed about what to do with it.

World's Toughest

When I woke up the Thursday before the World's Toughest Half and realized that I didn't even own a pair of tri shorts anymore it really hit me that I hadn't been a triathlete for quite some time. I hadn't even walked into a transition area since I lay in a heap at the Ironman Cozumel finish line almost 18 months ago, and before that I hadn't followed a triathlon through to the run phase (although I'd done a bunch of aquabikes) for another year or more. Now that I found myself mixing among tri-geeks again I bristled a bit, but it was more like coming home. As much as I griped and complained about how much the event cost and how much shit I had to pack, triathlons are familiar and tactically simple compared to some of the odd stunts I've gotten into since.

I signed up for this triathlon in part because it fell on a weekend when I had nothing better to do, and in part because I wanted to stalk a fellow blogger, Gretchen whose trail photos and stories I've been eating my liver over for years. Since Auburn is only an hour from where Gretchen lives in Truckee, it seemed like a great chance to track (stalk) her down and meet the legend behind the screen. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the week before the race I was experiencing a new sensation that has begun since my drunken hiatus from training last summer and fall: feeling tired. Now that I work about 12 hours a day running, demonstrating, and putting weights away, as well as a minimum of 3 spin classes and a boot camp class a week, I just don't get time "off." By my estimate, I probably do at least 100 squats a day, 50 deadlifts, a football field of farmer carries, 40 sets of stairs, and dozens of miles of walking before it even gets time for me to make the decision whether to do my own training or not. Sometimes it just catches up, and this week was one of those weeks where my hamstrings were tight, my butt was out of juice, my quads felt creaky, my core was achy, and my back needed some serious cracking. Also, this week I got another year older. Coincidence? Maybe not.

Now that my excuses are out of the way, I turned up in Auburn just as I was for the race expo not entirely sure what I was getting myself into. I hadn't been able to find an elevation profile on the event website, so I pulled a few guys over at the expo to explain what the climbing would be like. "Well if you've been out of it for as long as you say you have, you sure picked a doozy to start," a SMOFo told me as we walked back to the parking lot together (we were best buddies from the time we met, of course). "But this is only the World's Toughest Half because the other halves are so flat."

"Oh," I said. "I thought that they got the name because hadn't been copyrighted yet." I mean what did they do, go and check out every half ironman distance race in the whole wide world?! Based on a complete lack of evidence either way, I had decided that the race's name was an exaggeration. Still, it didn't bode well that I saw more drop bars in the parking lot than I saw bullhorns. I have done hilly triathlons before and even at those I felt like the only one with clip-on bars. But here some of the riders hadn't even bothered with the aero bars at all. Gulp.

Then I went to drop my running stuff down at T2, which was separated from T1 by about 7 miles (I hate it when they do that! The logistics are such a nightmare for a single person.) All my chores done for the day, I went to check into the hotel and scare up some dinner and breakfast for the next morning. I'd forgotten to bring a breakfast that met with my standards, and with no fridge, no silverware, and no plates or bowls, I was at a loss for what to have for breakfast before the race. I wandered around the upscale supermarket for half an hour before I finally located a breakfast burrito which I purchased and took home to have half for dinner and half for breakfast.

Once I bit into this "burrito", I found it to be was THE WORST BREAKFAST BURRITO EVER ASSEMBLED. It was made with what might have been a microwaved egg back in the mid-90's but now was just some yellow plastic, a slice of cheddar cheese from the sandwich bar, and some nasty white starchy rice that was so overcooked that it was the size of mature maggots. The second half of this culinary aberration found its way to my tummy at 4 o'clock on race morning, 2 1/2 hours before the start and sat there undigested until after the swim. I drove to the start, did my whole getting ready for the start thing, and then made my way down to the water with a few minutes to go.

They were shoving everyone into the water for a "mandatory warm-up," but I knew better than to go in past my ankles. It was a good thing too, because one of the buoys kept drifting off course and they had to start the race 5 minutes late so that they could re-set it. By the time the second wave (my wave) went off 10 minutes after they cleared the water, all the people who had "warmed up" were shivering and their lips were blue. I on the other hand was nice and toasty warm in my pee-filled wetsuit.

My swim training has been spotty at best, so I really, really, really didn't mean to take it out too fast. But I just got so frustrated by all the feet in my face in the washing machine that somehow I wound up out of breath and feeling queezy by the first turn buoy (of which there were six, three per lap for two laps). After that, "too much breakfast" said in a queasy voice pretty much sums up my whole swim experience.

By the second lap I had slowed down considerably and was still wondering whether I would need to take my face out of the water to puke or if it was possible to just puke right down into the water. I came around the second turn buoy, pointed toward the third and started swimming, and then I could see... THE BOTTOM! If you don't know, THE BOTTOM is where The Monster lives, and I really, really don't want to see that shit. I couldn't see THE BOTTOM on the last lap. What gives? I could see THE BOTTOM the whole way to the last turn buoy (the one that had been drifting at the start), and I certainly didn't remember that buoy being so close to the edge of the water the last time I passed by here. As I passed, I could see a kayaker holding on to the corner of the buoy so that it wouldn't float out of the water and onto the rocks altogether. Great. So now the swim course was long and me trying to hold down breakfast all this time.

As I aimed back toward the swim exit, I looked up and saw a paddleboarder next to me. Now what was he doing there? Was I swimming off course (I'd been doing a lot of that today too)? I breathed over my other shoulder to see what I could see over there and SPLASH! The lead sprint swimmer who was just passing me kicked a huge wave right down my throat. Now I really felt like I was going to puke. I cruised into the finish, and about 100 yards away I looked up to see where I was going and... 50 orange caps were coming right at me! As we were coming in, we had to cross through the "mini tri" competitors who were just setting out for their swim.

When I finally hit solid ground, I stood up and I walked. I had stepped on my foot funny and it really hurt, but that wasn't really why I was walking. I walked slowly up that chute until I was quite sure that that nasty excuse for a breakfast burrito would stay in my stomach where it belonged. Then I slowly puttered into transition to put on my helmet, sunglasses, socks, and shoes. Then I looked around to see if there was any other way I could put off riding. When I saw there was none, I took my bike and jogged toward the bike exit.

I mounted my bike and began to ride away. We began a roughly 10-mile, 2000 foot rolling climb right out of transition. Before we were even out of earshot of the transition area, one of the guys riding near me veered off to the right, hit the curb, and turned his right side into hamburger meat on the concrete and grass. There hadn't been anything in the road, he hadn't been in his aero bars, he hadn't been reaching for anything, there were no errant bunnies crossing the road to avoid, the road was relatively straight, we'd been moving at about 8 mph up the hill, and there were spectators who didn't seem to recognize him sitting about 3 feet from where he ate shit. So there was no reason to cut close to that particular spot on the side of the road. What's with triathletes and bike handling?

The SMOFos at the start had warned me that the hardest climb on the course was the climb out of the swim, but for some reason the difficulty still annoyed me even though I knew it was coming. It wasn't the hardest climb I'd ever done, or even the hardest climb I'd done in the past month, but in the first 7 miles it lurched up some 1000 feet, then topped it off with another 400 over the next 3 miles or so. The grades maxed out at about 12%, which was enough to have me breathing hard and push my heartrate into the high 180's. I felt like I was breathing through tissue and my aero set-up felt uncomfortable underneath me. Then this girl in a Cal skinsuit rode by me like I was standing still and I had no energy or desire to follow her. What was wrong with me?

I took a moment to beat myself up before I realized that I hadn't trained for this race. I had no right to get pissed about results unless I'd done some specific preparation for this race, or even this sport. I also realized that even if I chased someone down on the bike, it would all be over once we started running. Forget it! After that I just tried to enjoy myself and ride only exactly as hard as I had to and no harder. Make no mistake, there was no 'phoning in' this race. The total elevation gain in the first 30 miles was some 2000 feet (more like 3500 with all the crinkling up and down), and when it was time to go downhill it was usually too fast to even pedal. And while I'm complaining about the elevation, of the 2000' elevation gain, we only got to give about 1000 of it back because the finish was some 1000' higher than the start. So in short, even though I was dragging my feet, I was earning my lunch!

Right from the very beginning I felt a deep, not quite stabbing pain above the top of my illium (the big wing-like muscle in my pelvis). It was a familiar old feeling that I had always assumed was caused by yoga because I stopped doing yoga regularly around the time I stopped doing a lot of tri riding which was right around the time that the pain went away. It felt like I needed to twist and crack my back, or like someone was sticking a dull knife right into the spot above the bone, and the pain started radiating down my leg to my hamstring, putting a hitch in my pedal stroke. It started immediately on one side, and by the halfway point it was there on both sides. Was this what old guys meant when they said their backs were tight? Whenever I could, I stood up and tried to move my hips around, but by the time I drifted into transition my back was so tight that I could hardly move.

I hung my bike up and looked forlornly at my stuff in the grass. How was I going to reach it? Slowly but surly I got on my shoes and visor, tied my shoes deliberately (yes, I'd decided to skip lace locks) then grabbed a bottle and my race belt. Before waddling off I gave my back a quick twist and got a very unsatisfying crack, but my traps cramped up int he process. Fantastic. Now I would be running like Frankenstein rather than like a pirate with two peg legs.

I tottered out of transition and onto a flat little footpath through the woods. The run was a 3-lap course that broke down into 3 distinct sections:

• Section 1: Flat 1-mile on a narrow foot path next to a man-made canal where the only thing to worry about was not getting so out of it that you tripped or just simply drifted into the canal.
• Section 2: 1.5 miles downhill (roughly 400') on a mostly gravel path, plus a short, steep jaunt down another footpath through the grass.
• Section 3: Run back up the way you came, then skip the path next to the canal and instead turn toward the finish, run a loop around (and through) the transition area, and back out for the next loop.

It took most of the first loop for my back to loosen up. I only made the mistake of looking at my GPS once. When I was at about a 10:37-minute-mile on a flat road and had no hope of picking it up, I decided not to look at my pace anymore. I wanted to walk, but I realized that I was so knotted up and tired that walking wouldn't really feel any better and would just drag the whole process out. I just wanted to be done at this point. Right from the very first lap all I could think about was how great it would feel to lie down in the grass at the end.

During the first lap, before my back had loosened up and I could move a little more freely (if not more quickly) I put it out there to any magical or all-powerful entity out there in the universe that I know I have the physical strength to finish this, but if he/she/it would give me the mental strength to do it without too much fussing, that would be pretty fucking fantastic. Whether it was God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Mother Earth, the Universe, Allah, or the awesome power of my own determination that answered my prayers, it worked. When I started running, I felt on the edge of despair like I usually do at mile 23 of a marathon. By the last mile of the first loop, my discomfort and abjection had dropped back to about mile 22 of a marathon and just kind of sat there right at the point just before shit gets really bad.

A few chicks passed me on the run, but it was hard to tell how many because of the multiple-loop course. Maybe it was because I had gotten off the bike later than I used to, and maybe it was because of all the hills, but I didn't get trounced as thoroughly as I usually do in the run. Or so I thought. Ignorance is bliss.

By the final loop I was losing it pretty bad. I was hungry, my everything hurt, and I was beginning to lose track of what I was doing. My fantasies about lunch and lying down in the grass were feeling more and more real and I would snap out of it and realize I was still on this stupid hill that really wasn't pretty enough to be worth all this. Although I felt just as horrible at the beginning as at the end, now that I look back my pace had dropped from roughly 9-minute miles on the first loop, to 10-minute miles on the second loop and 11-minute miles on the third loop. Shit was going all bad and I had no idea.

"And here comes Claire [and then he pronounced my last name right] from Pacifica coming in to the finish!" the announcer said as I wandered down the finishing chute. I tried to put my hands above my head at the finish line, but more to stretch my back and open my lungs than out of triumph. A volunteer handed me a bottle and a medal still in its plastic packaging and I spotted a stool.

"Can I just sit down for a bit?" I asked. By degrees I lowered myself to the stool and sat there drinking water and being glad that it was done for several long minutes before I drifted out of the finishers' area. It took me a long, long time to get changed into regular clothes in the bathrooms, then I tried to scare up some food from the post-race buffet. Chipotle was making tacos, which meant just a little bit of cheese and a tortilla filled with pico de gallo for me (no shredded animal, thank you very much). Looking back, I think it was just lack of nutrition that kept me feeling like hell (I was dealing with some nausea again by the second half of the run), but right now I was preoccupied with another problem: my car was 7 miles away and that's where my wallet was. Until I got my wallet, I couldn't buy anything more than a tortilla filled with pico de gallo.

I got directions back to the car from a bunch of locals while their buddy threw up strawberries and tacos into the grass next to us, and then I got on my bike again with all my stuff in a side-loaded duffel on my back, and started back toward the car thinking the whole time about how fucked-up this was. My crotch hurt. Once I got back to the car, there was no way that I would have the energy to drive another hour north to see Gretchen and still be able to stay awake for the ride home. Fail!

Overall I did solidly average. I finished second in my age group, but there were only 4 women in my division. I finished 12th woman overall, but there were only about 39 women in the race. I finished 80th out of 160 overall. Overall I was 60th on the swim, 67th on the bike, and 96th on the run. It was nothing to brag about, but for once I was pretty darned proud to have finished. It hadn't been easy, and although I had a basic level of fitness in all three sports, triathlon is more than just a swim, a bike, and a run strung together. It hadn't gone as smoothly as I'd hoped, but I finished without mentally checking out and walking. So that was something.

The next day everything was sore. My back, my traps, my delts, my hamstrings, my glutes and even my SCM (that muscle in your neck that sticks out when you stick out your bottom teeth). Now I really, really, really need to take some recovery time before the AIDS ride and my 200 miler the following week. Will I do another one? Maybe some other time, but not for awhile.

Fewer teeth than a redneck

Given the choice, I never would have signed up for the Devil Mountain Double to begin with. Of the roughly two dozen double centuries held in California each year, this one had more climbing than any of the others by about 15%, and it was one of the first of the season. Mama didn't raise no fool, and I knew that between my six months off of riding and all those hills I didn't have a prayer of doing well on that course. Still, every year the California Triple Crown picks three of the toughest doubles of the year, compiles the times of all the riders (who have done all three) and treats the bundle as a stage race. Therefore, if I wanted to be in the stage race rankings, then I had no choice but to finish the Devil Mountain Double. Which is how I found myself in San Ramon at a few minutes to 5 in the morning with 200-some-odd other riders waiting to ride off into the sunrise.



I've gotten too good at quitting over the past few years, so I decided to check my ego at the hotel and enter this race just to finish. There was no way around finishing. I had to finish this race if I wanted to do the next 2. So I closed my eyes, gulped hard, and let the fast riders take off without ever even trying to catch them.

Mt. Diablo
start: 643' finish: 3553' length: 10 mi

Mt Diablo wasn't a severe climb, and it gave you its elevation slowly. We hit the bottom of the climb in a big clump, and in a big clump we stayed all the way to the top. Despite trying to take it easy at work for a week, four 14-hour workdays had forced themselves on me. Then I made the mistake of doing 8 blocks of rubber band runs, which shot my quads so badly that they were still sore to the touch three days later on race morning. As I was climbing, I already began making excuses for myself. I began to wonder if working this much was really worth it and whether I should quit my job or quit cycling. I was never going to be able to rest again in my life, I decided. In short, I was already feeling terrible and tired.

I found myself riding with one of my SMOFos, who introduced me to another rider (female, and I tried not to care). We chatted our way up the hill, but there were three guys on Steve Rex bikes who were weaving all over the place. I was in my lowest gear pushing that sweet spot in my cadence where I couldn't slow down or speed up comfortably without braking or shifting. I kept trying to edge around these guys, and then they would swoop toward me all of a sudden with a left or right hook. "HEY! WATCH YOUR LINES!" I snapped in spite of myself. Soon, every time I found myself coming up behind these guys I would zip past them as fast as I could and get a few solitary minutes to myself before the clump swallowed me again.


Later the SMOFo said to me, "Yeah, we were commenting on how you were wasting your energy sprinting up Diablo" (he pronounced it 'Die-ab- lo') "like that." Dude, I wasn't sprinting, I just couldn't ride as slow as you guys on the stepper shit in my non-pussy gearing! What inspired this conversation? Well, once we came up the final driveway to the summet, I stood up for the last push to the top. Only 100m from the top suddenly my body rebelled. I had that Oh fuck, I can't hold this anymore! I tried to slow down, I tried to stand up, I tried just sticking it out, but there was just no way around it. Giving up any shred of dignity I had left, I stopped pedaling and stepped off my bike when it stopped rolling. Then I walked the final 50m to the top.

I have not had to walk my bike since I lived in Spain, smoked, and rode a $500 bike in the Pyranees. I've ridden up some of the most famous climbs in France with a 32x28. The only difference was that today I had a 27 in the back rather than a 28. I guess that one little tooth could make a huge difference.

At the top everyone was settling in for a fine breakfast, so once I filled my water bottles I skidaddled in a hurry so that I could take the switchbacks and unguarded drop-offs with the road to myself. Now that I'd turned around I could see that I had been in The Pack. I had seen only no women coming down the hill ahead of me, so I must have left them the rest of the chicks in the crowd at the top. I sailed down the mountain at a leisurely pace, trying to keep my back and neck loose despite the early morning cold and 25mph winds.

Morgan Territory
starting elevation: 948' summit: 2030' length: 8 mi

Off of Mt Diablo we dipped into the valley and under the tree canopy on one of those narrow back roads where two cars can't pass each other. It was a pretty and gradual 500' climb for about 20 miles, and then suddenly the road started pitching up spastically like someone retching. It was like the road had been feeling nauseous all afternoon and now was finally throwing up. Steep grades in the high teens would throw you up into the sky and then let go for a second, only to upchuck you a little further. Here I began to notice that I was passing a lot of people on the climbs. This made no sense, because I wasn't climbing hard. I just couldn't go as slow as they could. Later, more and more people would comment on how well I was climbing and I wouldn't know what to say because I was climbing as slow as my bike would go. That was how I figured out that everyone who wasn't riding a triple had a 30-tooth cog in the back except me.


By the time I reached the top of Morgan Territory, I was already unraveling a little bit, getting grouchy and upset at myself for even being out here. I dumped my bike on the ground and stomped over to the table and started shoving boiled potatoes into my mouth. There was more salt and rosemary on them than there was potato. It was disgusting. It was delicious. I would have liked to have stuck around shoving more and more food into my face, but the 25 mph winds hadn't died down yet and it was just unpleasant standing around in wind like that, so I got back on the bike to give all that elevation back.

Patterson Pass
start: 383' finish: 1381' length: 3.5 mi

I rode through flat and downhill farm land with the wind at my back for a glorious 15 miles, then over a small bump that I don't even remember called Altemont Pass before I reached the bottom of Patterson Pass. Somewhere in this space a group rode by, and I saw one head with a ponytail turn to look at me as they rode by (this head will introduce herself at the end of this story). I knew better than to chase. Today I was not a competitor, I was in it for something else. I just didn't know what that was yet. And anyway, there was something disheartening about riding through wind farms, even if the wind was at my back for the moment.

Right at the bottom of the climb I found myself surrounded again by a clump of SMOFos. I remember that they were there because when I heard the "clang, clang" of something and said, "What the fuck was that?!" no one answered me and I remember thinking that was kind of rude. I kept riding as the hill got steeper and steeper with every step.


I don't know what made it come into my head, but I thought, What will I do if I broke a spoke? I'd never broken a spoke before. That was something that only happened to fat guys who tried to ride low-spoke wheels (yeah, like those spokes are really making a difference when you've got the frontal surface area of an aircraft carrier!). Well just call me Clyde(sdale), because when I heaved up the last 20% grade ("Oh my gawd hill" was spray painted on the pavement) into the aid station at the top and checked my bike, sure enough there was a spoke missing from my rear wheel.

"How bad is it to ride without a spoke?" I asked one of the aid station volunteers. He did that thing that I do when I don't want to admit that I don't know the answer where I pretend like I'm looking into the matter until I'm pretty sure that you're not paying attention anymore and then just go back to what I was doing. Okay, fine! I spun the wheel, and the brake was rubbing with each revolution. I loosened up the brake pads so it wasn't rubbing anymore, but if it had already gotten this out of true in a few miles, then what would happen after another 125 mi?

I didn't know what to do about the situation, so I went to pee instead. This was one of those bald California hillsides that remind me of the old Windows desktop, with absolutely no cover. "Do you have any facilities for the ladies?" I asked one of the female volunteers. She pointed to one of those electrical box things across the street. To crouch behind it, I had to climb over a rotting wooden fence and through some rusty barbed wire to pee in plain view anyway. When I got back to my bike I decided I would figure out what to do with the spoke while I was on the road. You couldn't ride for more than half an hour without seeing a sag wagon anyway.

And sure enough, not 10 minutes later as I had fallen in next to some middle-aged lady (who I didn't think should have been strong enough to ride with me if I hadn't spent so long at the rest stop), I interrupted her to wave down a truck with half a dozen wheels on the roof. He said he would pull over at the next turn-out, and I dropped the old lady (who had lower gears than I did) to roll to the top of the hill for my wheel switch.

The car had RAAM stickers on it, and the guy who popped out looked like a skinny Santa Claus, and I couldn't believe my luck. I must have flagged down the Sheldon Brown of the west! "What kind derailleur do you have?" Sheldon asked.

"I've got 105 on right now," I said, feeling poor and wishing I could say at least Ultegra.

"Great! I've got a 105 wheel right here!" he said, trying to pull my wheel off without flipping the bike over. I could tell by the way that he wasn't pulling the derailleur out of the way to get the cassette free of the chain that this guy was no Sheldon Brown. So much for my hopes of a quick switch-out.

"Look, why don't we just flip it over?" I said, pulling the wheel free. We counted the gears on the new wheel and thank goodness it was a 10-speed. He had more trouble getting the new wheel in than he had getting the old wheel out, so I asked if I could try. As the only employee of Valencia Cyclery who was asked not to build bikes, my mechanical ineptitude is hard to beat, but here he was showing me up.

The skewer was screwed all the way down, so I had to loosen it to get it into the dropouts and then Sheldon started trying to get his hands in there again. "No, it's not in yet! You can't tighten it down yet!"

"I'm loosening it," I said. It finally fell into the dropouts.

"Is it in yet?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"I don't think it is."

I looked closer. "No, really. It's in there."

"It doesn't look like it." I sighed. This wheel was 100% seated in its dropouts, but I let him come around and put his big face next to the wheel. He was saving my ass after all. "Oh, I guess it is." Only then did he let me tighten it down.

"Do you have a pump?" I asked. The wheel felt like the tire pressure was about 60.

"Oh, right, right! A pump." The scene was more comical than anything, and I'm not so cold-hearted as to be bitter about the 5 minutes I lost when I could have had to drop out altogether. Sheldon put a piece of tape on my wheel with my number on it and handed me a business card, telling me that he would forward my wheel on to the finish.

Once I had a new wheel, something in my mind switched on. I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I had had a good reason to drop out, and fate had intervened to make me keep going. I don't know what changed, but suddenly I made the mental shift from trying to have a perfect race to being willing to push through whatever the day threw at me. Which was good, because what I hadn't discovered yet was that the wheel that Sheldon had given me only came with a 25-tooth cog in the back, and I still had about 10,000' to climb.

The warm-up was over.

Mines Road

start: 600' finish: 2788 length: 20

Off Patterson Pass there was a long, fast climb called "the plunge" which I took with my rear brake caliper open (because half cocked and under prepared is how I roll). Before long I found myself alone at the bottom of a long, winding climb that reminded me of a climb that Shane and I had done in Provence. It was gentle and twisted civilly up the side of a hill with nothing but low trees and nature everywhere. I easily passed another chick on the climb and wondered how it was that I hadn't passed her before, since I felt like I was climbing easily in my easiest gear.

Then the grade eased off even more, and I was climbing through trees alongside a river. I kept checking the river thinking that I was riding downhill, but the river was flowing in the other direction. This is what cycling was supposed to feel like. Which is not to say that I wasn't tired, just that I was glad for the flat road (something that I hadn't seen all day). In fact I was still waiting around every corner for a downhill and some free miles, but if I was going to have to ride my bike then this was what I wanted to ride on.

On this climb I caught up with another rider; a heavy guy with an underbite that made him look like a Cretan. Once I started talking to him and he told me his story, I changed my mind about the guy. He wound up being the only other rider I would spend a significant portion of time with all day.

Here's his story: Back in the day, he'd been your typical really fat guy who never got off the couch. But the reason that he never got off the couch was because for a year he was paralyzed with MS. And he was depressed, because when you've got MS you've got a lot going against you. Once he began to recover a little bit, he still used to stay up late on the couch hating himself until one night he saw an infomercial for a motivational speaker. The unnamed speaker said that he should write down all the things he didn't like about himself on a piece of paper. He did it, identifying what he could change (being a fatass) and what he couldn't (the MS). Then he bought a bike from Toys R Us and he rode the same trail every day until the thing fell apart underneath him. Then he replaced it with a nicer bike and started riding the a different, longer trail every day. Then the bike shop guy put him on a road bike and he never looked back.

The MS still left him with some cognitive and neuromuscular problems, but he'd gone back to school to become a shrink and a nutritionist, and he'd done this race every year for the past X years. One year he crashed on the descent off Mt Hamilton (coming up) and cracked a few ribs. His legs were "all jacked up" too, so he'd had to walk up Sierra Road (still to come). And yet he'd still finished at about 2 am. "I just don't like to quit because of some of the stuff I've been through--the MS and all," he said.

I had a long while to chew on that. I had been too good at quitting when the going got tough because I wasn't challenged by "just finishing" anymore and didn't know where else to go in my head to find the motivation to push through. I hated myself for it. How much more could I have accomplished in the past few years if I hadn't quit when things weren't going my way? I could think of half a dozen bike rides just this year that would have put me in better shape to finish this very ride that I was on, had I stuck with them.

At the lunch stop, my gentle Cretan friend (let's call him) Ralph stayed to eat a sandwich. I walked around shoveling whatever I could find into my mouth for a minute. I ate the most delicious slice of Costco cheese that had been sitting in the sun all day that there ever was, and then I set off without Ralph so that my legs wouldn't freeze up waiting for him.

Mt Hamilton

start: 2066' finish: 4160' length: 6 mi

It was the hottest part of the day when I hit the final 5-mile push up Mt. Hamilton. The number of miles to the summit had been painted on the road for the past 40 miles or more, and now with 6 miles to go the road finally started climbing in earnest. Up I went, pushing my pedals over slowly and moving at about 4 mph. I couldn't remember a time that I'd ever climbed below 6 mph, and yet my bike stayed upright and I was passing other riders who were weaving all over the road in order to cut the grade. They were moving so slow, that I could see the individual spokes on their bikes from 50 yards away.

I passed yet another guy who cheered for me and told me that I was climbing really well. "I'm in the last gear that I got," I explained for the millionth time. "I've got nowhere else to go, I'm stuck with this pace for better or for worse." We were on the non-windy side of the hill and I felt like I was just straining to push more and more sweat out of my pores while my bike was going nowhere. I was moving so slowly that the flies came and buzzed around my head and I couldn't get away from them. So not only was I riding slowly, but I was twitching like a mad person. One of them bit me through my shorts and I've been scratching my right ass cheek all week. My hands were too sweaty to grip the handlebars when I was standing up (I frequently ride without gloves), so I was stuck sitting. And there I sat for about an hour as I wound my way up Hamilton.

I'd heard that the road levels off in the last mile into a few rollers, but when I reached the 1 mile to go mark the road was at the steepest yet and would stay there for another half mile. I stuck with it for a few minutes and finally got off my bike. I hate it when people lie to me about what I'm in for. I'd been pushing the pedals around at about 50 rpm for an hour and my quads just couldn't take the strain anymore. With but one (or maybe two) walking breaks, I got to the top and mounted my bike again. Then I rode down, down, down glad that I wouldn't freeze my ass off on the 10 mile descent.

Sierra Rd
start: 209' finish: 1945' distance: 3 mi

Sierra Road was the last significant climb if the day. When the 10 free miles off of Hamilton were up, I found myself back near sea level, back in the stifling, dry San Jose heat and facing a wall. Everyone had warned me that Sierra road was a bitch, but this? This was cruel. There had to be another way over this ridge that wasn't this steep! The road would pitch up to a 20% grade for a few hundred yards and then flatten out to a more manageable 5% or so for a few hundred yards before getting even steeper. The first time I walked my bike, a woman riding down in the other direction said, "It gets better after this!" It had better, I can't imagine cars getting up roads that were any steeper! But it didn't get better. Time and time again I had to get off and walk. What the hell was wrong with me? To say that I felt like a failure is an understatement. I just couldn't understand what my body was doing to me.

Finally I reached the top, and some lady came out from behind a car to snap my picture. "You did it!" she said.

"Yeah, well you're not going to get a smile out of me," I said, suppressing a smile. I felt like I deserved every inch of that descent off of Sierra Rd. I had about 40 miles to go and the world owed it to me to be downhill for the rest of the way. Now it was time to face a fact that I'd been ignoring all day because I didn't want it to be true: the course wasn't 200 miles, it was actually 205. Fuckers.

Palomares Rd

start: 252' finish: 1194' distance: 2 mi

I got to the final aid station at mile 180 just as the sun was starting to set. "Congratulations! Only 25 miles to go and only two more climbs!" the aid station volunteer said.

"What do you mean 2 more climbs?" I said slowly in a very serious and very stern voice. I may have sounded drunk, my mouth wasn't working right at that point.

"Oh, they're nothing compared to what you've already done," he said cheerfully.

"How tall are they?"

"If you did Mt. Hamilton, you can do these."

"How tall are they?!" I asked.

"Aw, you'll get up it no problem," he chirped.

"WHY WON'T YOU FUCKING ANSWER ME?!" I screamed, hoping he would think I was kidding even though I really wasn't.

"400 feet," he said and walked away.

400 feet. Okay, I can do 400 feet, I told myself. That's just 100 feet taller than Johnson Rd at home. That's 100 feet less than Sharp Park which I do my hill reps on. That's a 10 minute climb. I can do 400 ft.

As I started climbing up Palomares Road, the sun set for real. By the time I was half way up, it was pitch black and all I could see was the lights of riders in front of me and the reflectors in the road going higher and higher and higher up ahead. I had no reference points to go on, and I felt like I was making no progress. The road just kept getting steeper, pitching up in the higher and higher teens around every corner. All I could hear were frogs and some farm animal screaming. As I was finally nearing the top another rider came up next to me. "How are you doing?" he asked.

"They lied to me!" I sobbed. I'd been crying by myself in the dark for the last few minutes and now I was sobbing so hard I could barely breathe. "They told me that this climb was 400 feet. Why would they lie to me like that?!" I was serious. I'd been thinking about one of my coworker's clients who had done a strongman competition and pushed herself so hard that she started crying and said, 'Call the police!' before collapsing into her trainer's arms. There was no way that pushing someone this hard was legal.

The End

When I came down off of Palomares, I had about 7 miles and one small climb to go. When I'd first gotten on my bike this morning I'd had a nascent saddle sore that now made it hard to sit on my saddle at all. The athlete's foot that I can't seem to get rid of on my left foot made my pinkie toe feel like it was the size of my head and both my big toes felt like I was pushing on raw bone inside my shoes. My low back was alright, but my upper back was sore from the bottom of my rib cage to my shoulders from pulling on my handlebars. My lungs and intercostal muscles were even sore from pulling so much air so hard into my lungs on the steeper climbs as I rode at my maximum effort. And still, they had tacked on these last fucking 5 miles so that we could go over one more fucking hill (this one really was 400 feet) just so that we could reach a round 20,000 ft. It was cruel.

After the final rest area was the first time I actually allowed myself to think about finishing this ride, as in being done with it and life going on. Now it felt like the end would never, ever come. That moment when I got to get off my bike would never happen. I'd died and gone to hell and this was it, just one long climb after another. I really couldn't imagine this ride ever stopping, no matter how I tried to get my head around it. Once again, I thought I would cry as soon as I finished this damned thing.

By the time I finally rolled into the hotel 16.5 hours after leaving it, all I wanted was a shower and to curl up in my bed and never move again. I rolled around the parking lot for awhile looking for where the finish was, then I tottered into the banquet hall, gave them my number, and tried to find my way to a seat. A volunteer swooped in, plopped me in a chair, and told me she'd bring me everything. "You want water? You want the cheese or the meat lasagna? What kind of dressing do you like?" she asked. Wow, they really do a good job taking care of the riders on this ride, I thought. I had to hand them that. I would have to include it in my statement when I called the cops, maybe The Law would be lenient. Then I looked around. The other riders were in line for the food; no one else was being waited on. Then it dawned on me, I must really look bad.

Once I'd eaten 2 helpings of lasagna, I tottered back over to my bike to pull off the borrowed wheel. I crouched down and counted the teeth on the biggest gear. ...22, 23, 24... motherfuckingsonofabitch! Yep, just as I'd told everyone but been too scared to check and make sure just in case it wasn't true. The climbing gear was only a 25. Flatlander gearing. Fuck me sideways.

I handed off the wheel and stumbled back toward the door. The ponytailed woman (one of several who had beat me to the hotel) came up to me. She introduced herself and was all smiles and salt on her face. "Hi, I'm [whatever]." Why is this woman talking to me?! I grumbled to myself as I told her where I was from, how the hills had been nothing like I'd ever seen before, and who I rode with. "Listen," she said. "I've got a hotel room here. You're welcome to stay the night so that you don't have to drive home." Oh, so that's what it is. I must look really bad. But there's nothing more humiliating than accepting something that you really need from a complete stranger who's offering it to you.

"No thank you, but I appreciate the offer. I've got things to do in the morning!" I told her.

Reading this race report you may think that I'm bitter about my bike giving out under me and ruining my race. Actually, I'm glad it happened. Sure, it took me a long time and I felt like hell, but I forced myself to push through despite things not going my way. And not only can I blame any disappointments on the gearing, I also know that I was tough enough to finish on gearing that no one else was dumb enough to try. I'm grateful for the deposit in the confidence bank. I hope there will be less quitting in my future.

Looking at the preliminary results, it looks like she may have won (although they didn't separate out men and women, so it's hard to tell). Hmmmmmmm... Can I make up an hour over the next 400 miles? Nice Lady from Santa Rosa: I've got you in my crosshairs! Just you wait till I get my bike right!

"Recovery"

Life is hard.

Sometimes life gets really rough and it's not any one thing that puts you (me) over the edge, but the fifth, or tenth, or forty-second thing in a row where you finally snap and no one quite understands where it came from. It's kind of like overtraining in that way. How can you put your finger on the one workout that made your knee hurt? You can't. It just happened. Wherever I've worked I've been known as "moody." Goodness knows why people continue to put up with me, but I try to do my part to keep it under control by stomping off to stew in private until I eventually get over it and there is no need for confrontation. Every once in awhile someone will interrupt me in my private sullenness. It's like they stepped on a landmine and don't know what hit them.

I don't know how I get away with it, but I try to apologize sincerely and articulately enough and then paste a big smile on my face and make fun of my temper. Really good people (especially men) can chuckle at my "hotheadedness."

This week not one but three of my coworkers were the unsuspecting victims of my vitriol. I was in rare form and had to do a lot of mental acrobatics before I could see another point of view and apologize. What the fuck is wrong with you? I ask myself frequently. I'm surrounded by a group of the most positive and driven people I've ever met, and they never seem to throw cell phones across the room (my housemate says I should be a commercial for Apple for the number of times my phone has survived this treatment) or tell each other to fuck off. I can't imagine how I'll ever adjust healthily to the pressure and responsibility of being my own business.

But the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a way of reminding you what it's all about sometimes. And He has a twisted sense of humor.

Late fall 2006

I woke up on Saturday to a Facebook message from the psychotic (not an expression, really psychotic) ex in Spain. I hadn't seen the girl in three and a half years and hadn't heard from her in about two. I had told her some time in early 2008 that I didn't want to hear from her until her life was sorted out, and since there was no way that that was ever going to happen, don't bother contacting me with your lies either. The profile picture that she'd chosen was a close-up of her middle finger and the message was to-the-point. "¿Es difícil mantenerse recta en bicicleta cuando estás borracha? Aún me debes mucho dinero, vigoréxica." (Is it hard to stay upright on a bike when you're drunk? You still owe me a lot of money, [and then something like] you exo-rexic bitch.")

Usually when someone picks a fight with me I can feel my face flushing, my blood pressure rising, and adrenaline spreading on the sides of my tongue, but this just made me simmer. For half a second I wanted to respond that I'd been sober for all but two months of the three years and seven months since she'd seen me, and that clearly she was as fucked up as the day I'd left her to rot alone in her apartment. Obviously this was a clear case of drunk and coked out facebooking if there ever was one.

A little history about the psychotic (no, for real psychotic!) ex:
At various points before and while I knew her she was diagnosed as bipolar, borderline personality, bulemic, clinically depressed, obsessive compulsive, paranoid schizophrenic, sociopathic, and batshit crazy. She'd fried her brain completely with hash and spent six months in rehab (where she even tried smoking goat shit to get high), then went out and got hooked on coke on purpose. She'd had multiple psychotic breaks (including one when I was there). She was 33 years old and her parents still controlled her bank book and made her take a piss test every Monday and Friday. She gained 40 pounds in the year that I was stuck with her. She was a hot mess. She dragged me down with her.

May 2006

When I met her, I wasn't drinking and was training like crazy for a half ironman that I never got to do in Portugal. I was traveling all over Catalonia almost weekly for biking, running, and swimming events. She hated that. She hated being stuck in the apartment by herself. All she used to do all day was sit in bed smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall, and when I was out doing my thing, she had to do that alone. We would rent movies, and then I would wind up watching them alone because she preferred to stare at the wall than follow the plot of a movie. It was fucked-up shit.

She could have come along on my adventures, and occasionally she did but I always regretted it. She came to the Pyranees with me for a bike race and slept the entire 8 hours that I was riding, even missing the finish. She came to the finish of a half marathon in Tarragona, stood there for 5 minutes and decided it was too crowded. Then she went home and when I didn't show up right on time she called the Tarragona cops to see if I'd died. "The people I was seeing cross the finish line looked terrible. I figured that if you were behind them, you must be dead," she told me. Once I ran the Barcelona Marathon, which passed within a block of the apartment. She didn't even get out of bed to watch. Instead she'd spent the night doing coke behind my back because she knew that I wouldn't get out of bed to bug her about it.

Later she admitted that she purposely got me back drinking so that I wouldn't leave to work out so much. She thought I was addicted to exercise, and wanted me to just act normally already (which meant partying like crazy, chain smoking, and eating crap food). She told me that exercising that much just wasn't healthy. Another time I bet her dinner that she couldn't run a kilometer without stopping. We went to the track and she did it, but her lungs hurt for two days afterward. Her conclusion: running (not smoking) is bad for your lungs.

Since her parents tracked every penny she spent, we came up with an arrangement whereby I would buy all the drinks and she would buy all the food. Of course she didn't tell her parents that she was drinking, and instead told them that I was having a tough time and couldn't afford food. They would tell her terrible things about me, and she actually began to believe them. I began to dread every time she went to see her parents because she would come home and rail on me for a day or so about things that had only the slightest resemblance to reality. As she got fatter and fatter and her parents started to criticize her, and it also fell to me to buy the junk food (I was eating less and less at this point because I was drinking more and more). She would eat until she was sick. Once she ate two hot dogs and a giant bag of pork rinds in one sitting. When she went to work the next day, she felt sick to her stomach. They demanded a doctor's note before sending her home, so sent her to the company clinic where the nurse asked if it was something she ate. No... she lied. Then she came home and ate the same thing that night and had to go through the same routine at work the next day. She was the most addictive personality I have ever seen.


Meanwhile, as she got crazier and crazier I became more and more trapped in the apartment. I was even afraid to leave for work because she would pitch such a fit every time I tried to walk out the door. She frequently begged me to call into work and stay home drinking with her. I couldn't sleep. I was hardly eating. My drinking would start with breakfast (or in lieu of breakfast) and go into the wee hours of the morning. I couldn't write in the morningsbecause my hands would shake so badly. I woke up every morning with a feeling of impending doom because I didn't remember what I'd done the night before and I was afraid of what might happen today. More and more I was stuck in that bed staring at the wall too. The only hope I ever felt was when I thought about escaping and getting sober. That thought was why I got up every morning.

Winter, early 2007

When it was all unraveling so quickly that neither of us knew what to do with ourselves, she admitted, "I had no idea that you had such a problem with alcohol. I thought you were exaggerating about being an addict. I mean, how could you be if you stopped on your own and exercised so much? I had to go to rehab for 6 months to quit hash. But you really have a problem." Now neither of us knew how to stop it.

One night about a week before I finally left, she went to her parents' house and I came home from drinks with a friend to a particularly evil look in her eye. "I cheated on you," she said.

"Oh?" I asked, disinterested.

"When you were home for two weeks I went out and found a guy and I fucked him in our bed all night for free coke." She'd never even been with a guy before. It all sounded like the most terrible night ever for her. I had no pity, only disgust for her.

"Well that sucks for you," I said. I really could not have cared less.

When I moved back to the States, I was so happy to be free that it gave me the fire in my belly that I needed to sober up on my own and the willingness to go out and try anything. I beat my mind into submission, and that fire took over a year to finally die down to the point where I felt like I could really touch it. My "Recovery" was from alcohol, but it was also a second chance at life and I understood how precious it could be to go out and see the world. But that was almost four years ago. Life changes. You forget.

That Facebook message brought everything back, and suddenly life looked bright and shiny again. That morning I laced up my running shoes and made it out for the first trail run I'd been able to squeeze in all week. I ran the most direct (but also steepest) route up the tallest mountain on the peninsula, and found that I was able to run almost the whole thing. The trail starts in a eucalyptus grove, the moves up the side of the mountain through manzanita trees with views of waterfalls and the steep ridges next to me. Then you tromp through the brush and onto the sandstone as the brush gets thinner and the trail gets thicker and you pass old hermit caves and skeletons of half-century-old car wrecks. At the top I could see the bay to the east, the ocean to the west, Half Moon Bay to the south, and past San Francisco to Marin to the north. It made me furious that I'd even had to argue about whether this was healthy or not.

After my run, I showered and met up with a client/friend to go to the rock climbing gym. At one point I fell off the wall and collapsed onto the mats in a fetal position, which got us both rolling on the mats and laughing hysterically. We climbed until my rhomboids exploded and my forearms were so useless that I couldn't even tie my shoes. Sure, I'd spent the afternoon sitting there staring at a wall, but then I'd gone and climbed it.

My life may be hectic and I may be barely keeping it together most of the time, but that's because I'm trying to cram so much in. Despite many of the speedbumps I've encountered, I have pretty much the greatest life there ever was. Even on the shitty days I have at least one moment where I look around and think, I am so lucky that this is really my life! And look at the cool shit that I get to do with it! I've gotten to ride my bike over the most famous mountains in France, done an Ironman in Mexico, driven cross-country as part of a RAAM crew and saw the sun set over the Grand Canyon and the sun rise over Monument Valley the next day. I have the endurance to run for hours through some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and within an hour I can ride from where I work to a 2500' mountain top. And people pay me to play with them all day. How many jobs can you say "fuck" in front of a client?!

I wish that I could take all the bright, vibrant colors of my life and put them up against the dingy yellow cigarette-stained colors of the psychotic ex's life and rub her nose in it. I wish I could take the full magnitude of it, bottle it up, and spray it in the middle of an AA Meeting and scream, "FUCK YOUR 'PROMISES,' HAS A MEETING EVER GIVEN YOU THIS?!" I wish I could drag Lindsey around on my shoulder for one single day so that she could see what is possible when you just get out of your own head and let opportunities come to you. But most of all, I wish I could just figure out how to shut up that little voice in my head that compiles tiny imaginary tragedies to compound them on one another and tell myself the story that my life is drama. I like the Epictetus quote, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." And then there's the Martha Washington quote reminds me that it's the stories I tell myself about my life that are what matter: "I have learned that the greater part of misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition."