A jam-packed post about a jam-packed weekend

It seems that no matter what I do in my personal life lately, it's just not right. Every time it looks like me and Grease Monkey may be back to something resembling normalcy, I fuck it up, or she backs off, or usually a combination of both. I turn crazy when there's uncertainty and a lack of control in my life, so each time the bottom drops out... well, let's just say it's not pretty. In this climate, I've been re-evaluating what's important to me in life, and trying to find my rock that's going to get me through this time. More and more, I'm realizing that this whole high-performance training thing isn't working for me. The last thing I need right now is another stressor. I've been giving my bike the silent treatment, pretending that I don't even notice that it's there when I do bother to go out and ride. What am I doing out on this road in the middle of nowhere? Not riding my bike, I'm just sitting here thinking. No riding going on here. Nope, not me. As you can imagine, my workouts haven't been very focused.

See, over a year ago, before Grease Monkey burst into my life, I was so miserably lonely. I didn't really talk about it, because... well, it's kind of embarrassing when your yoga teacher re-adjusting your shoulders makes your whole body relax and puts a lump in your throat because you haven't been touched by another human being since your last yoga class. A friend of mine told me that before she met her husband, she used to pay for massages just to get touched by someone else. I was always hopping from one group of acquaintances to another, jumping in to whatever sounded like fun because I didn't really have anything of my own that gave me that sense of "roots" or "community." Without drinking, I didn't really have anything else to guide my life. Then, suddenly (as always happens with lesbians) I had someone who cared about me, and someone to spend my empty moments with. Suddenly it was okay not to be so driven or spastic with a new challenge every weekend. I was really ready to settle down. I thought we were moving (ever so slowly) toward marriage, and I was even thinking about kids... me!

Now I promise this is getting to some bike racing in a minute... but just bear with me for a second...

So now that everything is gone and the dust has settled, going back to that Claire that would throw her hat into the ring for any challenge just sounds exhausting. I've dug deep and found things that I like and things that I don't, and I feel like I've explored everything I need to explore through athletics. Now I'm reading more books on business than on sports. I want to re-connect with non-exercise friends. I want to save money for something other than races. I want to go on vacation and sit on a beach somewhere without looking for a place to go for a long ride or an open-water swim. It's not burn-out, it's growing up. I want to settle down. And I've even been considering hanging up my bike for awhile until I can find some balance.

But the problem is, that all this hard training has had one very specific purpose: to keep my lips off a bottle of beer. And as I relax my focus on riding and athletic performance, the draw of each and every liquor store I drive by becomes stronger. It's been... bad.

All these thoughts were weighing heavy on my mind as I rode to the Wednesday night hill ride. This was the ride that I quit on after the first hill last summer because I was the last one to the top and STILL almost threw up over my handlebars. This time, I was not only the first girl up the hills, I was among the first riders. The fact that I rode so hard I tasted blood in my mouth was all worth it when one guy even called me a "climber!" Before this ride, I was ready to skip out on one or both of my weekend's scheduled races, but now I was a "climber." I was temporarily encouraged.

Race Number 1 was the Turtle Pond Circuit Race, an 11-mile loop that we would ride three times. The attraction of this race was that they had a separate race for category 3/4 women, which meant that I wouldn't be fighting with the experienced girls for upgrade points. When I got there I was a little nervous to see about 25 other women, but as we began to ride I relaxed. Despite only doing a handful of group rides this year, I feel at home in a pack these days. Today, we were riding at a pace whereI could easily accelerate to a better spot if I wanted to, and I wasn't in any hury to put any effort into the pedals.

The race began up a 5-minute hill that they made us take at a "neutral" pace until the top, when our race could start. For the first loop no one made any real moves, and like an obedient student I sat in the pack watching for other people's moves. Every time a girl popped off the front, I shot after her (a little over-eagerly) hoping for a long breakaway, and tried not to be too disappointed when she stopped working and the pack caught us within a minute. We came around the first loop without any major drama and started up the hill again. A girl who I had pegged as a good candidate for DFL (based on her cheap-looking no-name shorts and solid-colored jersey combo fresh off the rack at Sports Authority, and the Ray Bans she had trouble fitting under her helmet) totally surprised me by ripping it up the hill. What surprised me even more was that I was right behind her along with a handful of other girls. Then a car came along beside us honking up a storm and waving an arm out the window. When I saw the sign on the back windshield that indicated that it was the follow car I thought, WTF?!

"You're supposed to ride neutral!!!!!!" the official was screaming. What? How are we supposed to have a race if we can't drop people on a hill? I thought. After awhile (a long while) I figured out what was going on; one of the men's races that had left earlier in the morning was catching up to us. So what would have been a great breakaway was quickly quashed on a technicality.

About halfway through the race I had just accelerated to the front of the group when I heard a clatter that could mean only one thing: CRASH!!! It was right behind me, and I started to turn my head to see how bad it was when a girl next to me screamed, "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!" I didn't think that it was supposed to be good race etiquitte to make your move when there was a crash, but I'd be damned if I was going to let her get away with it. I accelerated with her and then crossed my fingers that they wouldn't ride like the dickens to take advantage of the crash. I certainly wasn't doing any work. I was relieved when the rest of the pack caught up with us.

Now more than half the race was behind us, and still nothing had happened. We were all in one big clump, so when we hit the hill for the last time, I pushed to the top as fast as I could. About six of us managed to break free, and a couple of stragglers caught us over the next couple of miles. But we had finally broken away. There's always one bossy one in every pack, and in this pack the bossy one was ordering us all to get in a paceline so that the main pack wouldn't catch us. A couple of girls would emerge out of the swarm and start to form a paceline; Girl Number 1 would come to the front and take a 30s pull and then peel off to the right, letting Girl Number 2 come through and start pulling. When Girl Number 2 peeled off, it was my turn. I pulled for about 30 seconds and peeled off to the left.
No one came around.
I looked back. Girl Number 4 was about 5 yards back, pretty much completely out of my draft. I sat up and waited for her to come up and pull, and she grabbed my wheel. Fuck you, it's your turn! I thought, and stopped pedaling. The rest of the pack came back around in a swarm until Bossy Chick ordered us into a paceline again, Girl Number 1 stepped up again, and the whole process started over.

With about 5 miles to go, the follow car pulled around again and told us to neutralize. "What the fuck?" I said to the girl next to me. "When do we get to ride our race?!"
Some of the other girls were less patient. "Come the fuck on! They're going to catch us!" the bossy girl yelled. We slowed down to about 16 mph and everyone in our pack got very edgy, except one girl that seemed to think that everyone was overreacting. I wondered what was wrong with her.
After awhile, a huge pack of men came around, and when they pulled ahead of us they were going about our neutralized speed. We couldn't get back up to speed until they did, and so we continued to hang back, getting even antsier (except that one girl).
"HURRY UP!" the bossy girl yelled.
"COME ON YOU FUCKING PUSSIES!" another screamed.

Eventually the 20 or so men pulled far enough ahead that we could start riding again. At this point we only had about 3 miles left, and I was still surrounded by half a dozen girls. Well if these dipshits can't hold a wheel, then I'm going for it, I thought. Just let them try to keep up with me! I clicked into a harder gear and started riding at about 90% effort. I wasn't going to really open it up to all-out time trial pace unless I managed to shake them. After about 2 minutes I looked back to see if I'd done any damage. Wouldn't you know, these stupid bitches had learned how to grab a wheel! I decided not to give it any extra effort and just save it for the end.

When we got to the 1K to go sign, I snuggled back to 3rd wheel and waited for other people to make their moves. Then, right before the 200m to go mark, they went. I was going to wait for the 200m line! I was caught with my pants down. I started to half-assed sprint. I half-assed it because, come on, it's me! I can't sprint, right? Then why was I passing girls back?! Then I started to really get up to speed. I passed a girl, then another, then another. I was about to pass another girl when I ran out of road.

By what I saw on the road I was unequivically in 4th place (2nd or 3rd Cat 4) and therefore up for some upgrade points, but when they posted the results, I was missing. "Unknown Rider" was in 5th place. What the fuck?! No points? I was pleased with how I'd ridden, but frustrated that I hadn't been able to outwit the weasels. My confidence was temporarily bolstered for the next day's race, but I still would have prefered to stay in bed.

Race Number 2 was the Quabbin Resevoir Road Race: 100k of relentlesly rolling hills. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, and it was in the high 40's and rainy as I drove out to central Mass for the start. I had no idea how to dress for a race where I would most likely be soaked to the skin for over 3 hours, so at the last moment I put on an extra layer that I would wind up regretting later.

This race wasn't a USA Cycling sanctioned event, and all the women from Cat 4's to Pro's started in the same pack. With no upgrade points on offer and no prayer of winning my share of the prize pool, my only goal in this race was to hang on for as long as I could. It was pouring when we started down the hill, and not 500m into the race a girl went down in a traffic circle. Seeing people go down always scares me, because they always lie there for a couple of seconds blinking behind their sunglasses. Those couple of seconds are the only couple of seconds that you can usually see them before you have to turn back to the road ahead, leaving a picture in your mind that looks like they're dead. So for the next half hour I couldn't shake the picture in my mind of the dead girl lying on the wet pavement in the rotary.

I was expecting the pace of this ride to be a lot stiffer in the beginning to shake off the rif-raf, but everyone was spooked with the rain and I rode my brakes for the first several miles. Riding the brakes was even more frightening because they were so soaked that they didn't work very well. With about 50 girls in the pack, I was finding myself choked in the middle with no hope of moving forward in the group to get some elbow room or safety from a crash. Zipping my jacket up higher gave me enough sidelong momentum to almost hit the girl next to me.

Finally we hit a hill and the big girls opened it up. Much to my delight, I kept up at the front on the first hill, and the next, and the next. But by about mile 18, I was getting to the top closer to the back of the pack. At about mile 20 it happened; I lost contact with the back of the pack by the top of the hill, and I was time trialing to try to catch up. When you're dropped in a situation like that--riding flat-out just trying to catch back on--you know you're screwed. I reached a point where I knew that if I even reached the pack, that I wouldn't be able to hold on for a nanosecond on the next hint of a hill.

For long, long moments I tried to decide what to do. What was the point of riding the whole race if I was going to be riding by myself? The rain had stopped, but it was still a shitty day for a ride. And I was tired. And I really had better things to be doing with my time than losing a race. I picked up another girl, and we worked together for about 10 miles, long enough to convince me that I might as well stay on my bike. When I couldn't keep up with her anymore, I had another battle with myself before 2 more girls came along and told me to hop on their train.

I really couldn't have felt much more awful than I felt on my bike finishing those last 40 miles. Even though I was hanging on to wheels when I could find them, I was going as hard as I could the whole time. My legs loaded up with lactic acid the second I tried to push harder in the slightest, and in general I just felt like I'd been smeared across the pavement. In the final miles I lost contact with my escorts, but I could see them up the road at exactly the same distance the whole last 4 miles. I kicked myself for not being able to concentrate for long enough to just hold their goddamned wheels. You stop paying attention for one second, and then some daylight breaks in between you, and you're working twice as hard to go the same speed with no hope of catching up without a herculean effort.

Climbing the 2 mile hill to the finish I entertained fantasies of stopping my bike right on the finish line and lying down on the ground. I was overheated from my extra layer and out of fluids. I hadn't exactly thought to bring a snack, and my heart rate monitor said that I'd burned through more than 1,700 calories in the past 3+ hours. Nothing hurt, but everything hurt.

There was a man in front of me in the last kilometer, and I decided to beat him. I stepped on it HARD, and beat him in a slow-speed moribund sprint to the line. The timers didn't even bother to write down my number as I rode by. I would have collapsed on the line, but the apathy and lack of congratulations from the race officials convinced me that I wouldn't get a gratifying amount of sympathy here, so I kept climbing the hill (oh yes, there was more) to where the women had convened: right in the rotary where the dead girl had been lying 3 and a half hours before.

Even though I'd ridden half of the ride not on anyone's wheel, I'd still managed to average 18.7 mph over the hills. That made me feel a bit better about feeling so beat. As it turned out, I had only come in 11 minutes back from the lead pack, and perhaps if I'd been fresher, in a better state of mind, or not such a tactical half-wit I could have hung on and stayed with them (riding in a pack your average speed is way faster with way less effort). As it was, I was quite done with the whole situation. At the time of this writing it's Wednesday and I haven't ridden my bike since.

Despite a harrowing weekend and thinking crazy thoughts like joining the military or a hippie commune in Arizona, there are exciting biking times ahead. I'm rushing to get this post finished in a Hampton Inn in Springfield, Ohio because tomorrow I have a 12-hour race with Judi tomorrow morning. And yesterday I booked a one-way trip to San Diego. I wish I could say the San Diego trip were to move out there, but it's for the next best thing: I'll be crewing Team Type II for RAAM! I'll be driving an RV from Oceanside, CA to Anapolis, MD to support TT2 in their goal of finishing in just over 8 days. The biggest relief for both of these tests of endurance is that there is no pressure to perform well in either one, which is exactly what I need right now.

I'd rather be time trialing anyway...

After our taste of summer last week, we were back to winter this week with temperatures below freezing. As I drove to this morning's race (a weekly club training crit), I was just looking for any excuse to skip it. At first I'd hoped that maybe I'd be too late to make registration, but it looked like despite all my dawdling I was going to make it on time. Next, I thought I had plugged the wrong town into my GPS, but no such luck. As I drove up to the venue there was no question that this circular road through office buildings was the right place, but where were all the bikes? I thought maybe the whole thing had been called off, but then I spotted a lone car in a parking lot and asked him if he was there for the race. "Yeah. I don't think that there's a women's or juniors' race today, so the first race will probably go off at 9:00."
Well that sounded promising! "No women's race, huh?" I asked hopefully. "Screw it, I'll just go home then."
"No, don't worry about it! It's totally not intimidating, and there were a whole bunch of girls in the men's race last week." Damn. Guess I had run clean out of excuses.
I had one last chance to get out of this stupid race. I walked up to registration and said, "I totally forgot to get cash," (a lie, I never carry cash). "Do you take checks?"
"Sure do!" he said. Crap. No more excuses. With a heavy heart I pulled out my checkbook and committed myself to the race.

Since I was in the first heat, I got to warm up on the course, which was flat and boring. There weren't even any sharp turns (which wouldn't stop me from spacing on one hard right turn on each and every lap during the race). I stopped to water the woodchips behind an office building, and was disappointed to find that it only ate up a couple of minutes before the race start. I discovered my bottles were empty, so I pulled into an indoor soccer arena and found a water fountain... and a bathroom. Guess I hadn't needed to whip my white ass out in the freezing cold after all. Oh well. Live and learn. On the soccer field there was a women's league game going on. Girls' soccer! Why didn't I think of that sooner??? What a flash of brilliance! Soccer players are hott! (see left) This is where I could pick up chicks! There's always a wealth of lesbians in any adult soccer league, and if they were playing at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, they couldn't be huge partiers. Right? Then I remembered that I couldn't play soccer, or even start a conversation about soccer, so I went back out to the road where the only people I pick up are straight men over 40.

In the cold I just can't feel my legs under me, so even though I'd ridden for half an hour, I didn't feel any more warmed up than when I started. I tried to do one lap at tempo, but my body just felt torpid so I pulled over at the start line and just found a straight man over forty to chat with until starting time.

Finally it was time to line up, so me and about 20 guys crowded up to the start line. It wasn't till half way through the second lap that I realized that there was another chick in the pack. Se was so bundled up that she looked like an ETA terrorist. The only reason I realized that she was a girl at all was her girlie teal and white bike, which made me look closer at her hips and notice they were a bit wide for a man's. Even then, I probably wouldn't have noticed her if she hadn't cut straight across my line six inches in front of me. Terrorists!

On the drive in I'd been thinking about a conversation I'd had with the King of the Bike Geeks at the bike shop.
Me: I'm just not a sprinter. I don't even know why I'm trying crits, there's no way I can ever do well in them.
KBG: With the power and endurance that you have you've just gotta keep attacking and attacking. That way you can drop the weak riders who are just sitting in, and tire out the sprinters. Then you might have a chance.
Me: But then they'll just sit on my wheel and I'll be leading some oportunist out for a great race.
KBG: It won't work every time, but that's why they have "Most Aggressive Rider" awards.

For a few laps I spun round and round the course with the pack. But these boys weren't riding in a clump, they were riding in a strung-out line. I didn't much feel like sitting in the back of the line anymore, so I swung out to the side and rode to the front of the group. When I got there, I was still feeling pretty good and there was a lone rider who had gotten a gap, so I rode on up to him. When I got there, I looked back and I'd gotten a gap on the pack too. Time to try out KBG's plan. But once I'd caught the lone rider, he stopped to have a cigarette break and the pack caught my tail in no time. I took a deep breath and planned to sit in for a lap and figure out how things were going at the front.

I could have used my position to my advantage, but then something very unlucky happened. At random times during the race, the officials would ring a bell and we would sprint the next lap for a preme. In this case, the preme was a muffin. As I led the pack over the line, the bell rang and the marshal yelled out "MUFFIN PREME! MUFFIN PREME!" For some reason I just forgot that there was a sharp turn coming up, and I found myself trapped on the inside and riding through a small sand patch. By the time I came through the turn, I'd slowed down significantly and everyone else was accelerating for baked goods. My legs were stuffed from my acceleration the last lap, and a little daylight got in in front of my wheel. Then some more, then some more. With about seven laps to go, I was already dropped.

My race had been brought down by a muffin.

I held the gap at about 50 yards for several more laps, but I just couldn't seem to catch on. It was a windy-ish day, and at some point I had to admit that the pack was gone and I was going to have to come to terms with coming in DFL (dead fucking last). The thought of just dropping out occurred to me. This was just a training race and my legs were feeling pretty crispy anyway. But then I spotted another rider in front of me. It was the chick in the burka! I pulled up to her, hoping that we could work together, but fashoom!, she was far behind me before I even got to gauge her strength. YES! Not only would I not be DFL, I would also not be beat by the other chick.

A lap or two later I spotted my straight man over 40 friend up ahead. As I came up to him, I said, "Come on, let's at least finish with our heads held high!" But by the time I finished the sentence and turned around to see if he'd caught my wheel, he was gone too.

By this point I was getting pretty tired. I had about three laps to go all by myself, but I just couldn't bring myself to cruise it in. I still had my pride and I wanted to finish strong if I was going to finish alone. Suddenly, up ahead there was a rider in my tream's kit with frog legs flapping all over the place. I'd never seen someone look so sloppy on a bike. I wouldn't figure it out till later, but I actually knew the guy. He runs the Wednesday night hill ride, which I have attended exactly 0.5 times. I showed up one night, rode up one hill, and was the last to reach the top. Once they hit the next hill and everyone started to accelerate I thought, Fuck this! I don't need this shit. I freewheeled uphill until the whole pack had passed me, pulled a U-turn, and went home. Apparently this man with the frog legs had made everyone circle at the top of the hill for several minutes waiting for me, and now I want to hide every time I see him. But as of yet, I didn't know that Mr. Frog Legs was the hill climb dude. All I knew was that I probably knew him, and he might help me to the finish. "Hop on!" I yelled as I came by him and tried to make myself big to block the wind. But I turned around and he was gone too.
Later he would tell me, "I stood up and tried to grab your wheel, but you were already gone."

So I finished the whole last half of the race time trialing. I was so far behind the lead pack that I didn't even hear their bell for the final lap. By the time I finished, the marshal had turned his back to the road to check in riders for the next race. Oh well. At least I wasn't the lanterne rouge, or the gatto nero, or DFL (whichever language you want to say it in).

I was surprised to see that my average speed was over 20 mph for the whole race. Not bad for a windy time trial with no aero bars. I'd hardly been breaking 16 mph during the warm-up, and once I'd realized I'd been dropped I'd hardly pushed more than about 80% effort. If only I hadn't been such an idiot again, I probably could have hung with the pack and finished close behind the leaders. Oh well. Live and learn. At least I hadn't finished DFL and I didn't have to deal with the pack too long. At least in this race I'd pedaled my bike.

A really good weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mental Workouts

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

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

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

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

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

Spiritual Revelation... Almost

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

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

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

Some Serious Yoga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sad, sad, sad post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working it out

Way back in the day in 2003, I got into exercise because of a break-up. Back then my eating was like something out of a Lifetime Original movie, and I still thought that being depressed and “tortured” made me interesting and deep. I was seeing an older girl who treated me like crap, and I was absolutely head-over-heals for her, partly because I liked being treated like crap back then. She dumped me and I literally thought I’d explode with grief, so I decided to go to the gym and kick the shit out of myself until I felt like I could sit still again. It worked for a few hours, so I went back the next day, and the next. I forbade myself to diet or let myself get down until I had reached a point where I didn’t feel like I was going to hurl myself in front of a train. Between the working out and hours spent drinking and journaling every night, somehow I managed to come out of that year that we spent breaking up and not getting back together with a positive outlook on life.. and a drinking problem.

My next break-up was resolved with working out as well. This relationship was even more dysfunctional than the last, mostly because the girlfriend in question was a certifiable psychopath. I was on one of my sober kicks when I met her, and she purposely got me drinking again, then she systematically went through and shit on everything that I liked about myself. By the time I left, I was at the point where my organs were beginning to show signs of damage, along with my self-worth. I had to leave the country (Spain) and start life over again to get away from her and my drinking problem, but again it was exercise that got me through it. Figuring out how to live sober was the hardest thing I've ever done. When I didn’t know how to make a decision, I made the decision that would make me least likely to drink. So this meant racing on weekends rather than going to bars, and making new friends who valued that kind of behavior. So what if half of them were 20 years older than me?! At least they didn't see anything wrong with going to bed at 9:00.

So this time around, when from one moment to the next my life came down around me, I thought I knew what to do. I sent an SOS to my coach and said we needed to do a crash week, now, or else I was going to crawl into a bottle and die. (A crash week is where you do tons of volume and tear yourself to shreds to try to take your training to the next level.) He responded by giving me about 24 hours of training for the week, with no workout being shorter than 3 hours. (I have come to adore him now that we’re focusing on cycling, and he’s been great with all my requests and inquiries).

But for once, the more I ride, the worse I feel. My first 4-hour ride was a trainer affair, and by the time I got to the end of it I was spitting mad. Literally, I had gotten myself so angry by the time that I got off the bike that I actually spit on the ground (on my sweat towel). I mean really, who even spits to show disdain??? It's so 1920. My next ride was a 4-hour outdoor romp with about 15 seconds of maximum force intervals every five minutes. I was despondent the whole ride, and hardly cared to put any effort into the pedals. By the time I reached the 7-mile stretch back home I had gotten so desperately crushed again that although I time trialed like the wind the whole way home, there was no joy in it and my heaving breath sounded more like sobbing than gasping.

The third day was the worst of all. They’d been forecasting snow almost every day for the past week, but it had yet to actually snow. So even though they were forecasting flurries, I decided to do my three-hour ride outdoors anyway. Big mistake. The flurries that began as soon as I walked out the door quickly turned to squalls of big fat flakes that melted into big fat drops when they landed on me. The squalls gave way to sleet and freezing rain. I couldn’t feel my fingers to shift. I couldn’t make my legs push into the pedals because they were so cold. It was near freezing, and I was soaked to the bone. And there was an icy wind. I don’t know if I’d ever been so miserable in my life. Normally such conditions would have made me feel at least a little hard core, but right now I just felt like a total loser. I didn’t even give myself the indulgence of telling myself I deserved it. I tore through red lights half hoping that someone would hit me. The next couple of rides were trainer deals. I used up all my Netflix DVD’s on Thursday’s workout, so Friday I was stuck with only music and a white wall to get me through the 2 hours I could fit in before work. But my headphones weren’t working… It turned out not to be a problem. I had so much thinking to do, and each thought exploded into a thousand other reasons to be angry or depressed that the two hours passed quickly, even though all I was doing was staring at a blank wall.

I keep thinking that this can’t really be it, because there’s no way that people who love each other can willingly cause so much pain to each other. But as I always do when my heart is broken, I find my way back to sad break-up songs, and the fact that so many sad, sad songs resonate with me right now means that people who love each other DO do this to each other, or else how could they write such poignant songs about it? And the worst part is that since none of the singers I’ve been listening to are dead, I’m going to have to survive this.

But it hasn’t been all bad. Surprisingly, the times when I feel best are when I’m at the house (OUR house: the house she tried to kick me out of). I haven’t rented a room/house since December of 2006, I’ve just been living in someone else’s space. So when Grease Monkey tried to tell me that I had to go, even though I was crushed and would have done anything to make her change her mind, I had to draw the line there. This was MY house, and goddammit, she had no right to kick me out of it. So I've been busying myself with carving out my own space.

I am not an organized person (not with physical space anyway). I could live in a cave, and as long as it had internet and cable I wouldn’t really notice the bat guano. My ability to survive in filth has been a point of contention in this whole situation, so as I build myself a new bat cave, I’ve been making it a point to pick up after myself. Once I had a bed, I started making it every morning. I’ve started doing laundry before wayward socks get so flattened into the carpet that they look like part of the pattern. I’ve been wiping down counters and emptying the dishwasher. I’ve been hanging up jackets rather than throwing them in a puddle on the floor wherever they happen to come off. And of all things, tidying up is what is making me feel most human again.

Friday when I came home from work, it was in the high-40’s and still sunny. I still had an hour left of my three-hour assignment for the day, but I knew I would miss the sunlight if I had to drag my bike out. Instead I dug out my Nike Frees (which were buried under a giant pile of laundry in my pig sty at my parents’ house), commandeered Grease Monkey’s dog (who had been cooped up in the house all day), and hit the road. We live a block from a lovely little pond with footpaths and trails around it. It’s been one of my favorite running routes since high school, and it’s best run at sunset. Dragging the dog behind me, I ran one loop of the lake. It was nice not to be chained to a machine and just putting one foot in front of the other. There was no pressure to run fast or to hurry the dog along when she took the world’s longest pee. It was just like last summer when Grease Monkey still loved me and I used to take the dog on all my shorter runs. When I got back to within a block of the house, I did something I never do and kept running for another loop. For the first time in a week (or more), I actually felt like I’d done something right.

I've finally made it through my seven day crash week, and tomorrow I get a much-deserved day off. Maybe someday the hurt will be mild enough that I can eradicate it with a ride, but for the time being, maybe solitary arduous activities aren't just what the doctor ordered...

Taking Responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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