Six-pack abs: It's not just leanness, smartass

My readers are not idiots, so when I mentioned in my previous post  about how I wanted abs like a male gymnast you may have thought, Ah, but I am no fool. I know that spot reducing doesn’t work. You can’t do lots of crunches and just expect your stomach fat to disappear and abs to pop out. Having a visible 6-pack is just about leanness, or having so little fat that you can see the muscle tone underneath. Readers, I am so glad that you’re not idiots and that I don’t have to go over all of that stuff yet again, because frankly I’m tired of having that conversation. 

I’m talking about varsity-level training stuff here, though. Just like running a sub 15-minute 5K is a whole different animal than running your first 5K in under an hour, a lot of that kindergarten fitness knowledge gets flipped around when you look at more advanced stuff. Which is not to say that I’m the equivalent of a 15-minute 5K runner, oh god, I’m NOT saying that. I’m just saying that the rules change a bit when you move up from peewee to NCAA division one. 

Yes, having a six-pack depends on how much belly fat you have, but it can also depend on how big your muscles are. Picture the bird-boned elite marathon runner such as Paula Radcliffe (left). You can see her abs because she is so lean, but they don’t look like the rippling things that you could wash your shirt on. They look more like the deflated plasticized jerkey that you see at the Bodies exibit when all adipose tissue has been stripped away. Now picture a sprinter’s abs, Marion Jones, for example (okay, I'm showing that I haven't paid attention to track and field in over a decade, but see the picture below anyway). Jones is an especially good example, because the dude hormones that she was taking at her peak made her build more muscle mass, making those abs pop even more. At her peak form, Jones probably had around 16% body fat, and yet you could see all six lumps of her abdominals poking through because they were big. 

Think of it this way: take a pillow case and fold it up, then put it on your bed. Then take a pillow and put it on the bed. Then pull a big, fluffy comforter over both. Do you see the pillow case? How about the pillow? The larger your abdominal muscles are, the more you’ll be able to see them through your fluffly comforter of fat. I would rather build giant towering muscles than do what it takes to get rid of all the fat sitting on top of them. I just like cake too much. And while we're speaking of it, I will never have a waist because my obliques are too damned big. My challenge is staying lean enough that you can tell that my Ken doll muscle isn't all saddlebags. P!nk makes the Ken doll muscle sexy. I'm built more like a P!nk than a Heidi Klum. 

But how do you get strong abs? Crunches? Fuck crunches, they’re overrated. You don’t even get close to your full range of motion and you’re only lifting a tiny fraction of your body weight. Any exercise that you can do for more than about 15 reps or 30 seconds isn’t going to make great big abs that erupt from your belly. To build a rack of tall boys instead of nips, to get abs on top of your abs, you will need to get a little more advanced than anything that you can do while lying on the floor.

Here’s a quick kinesiology lesson: the abs bring your hips closer to your ribs and vice-versa. Gravity only goes in one direction. When you’re lying on the floor twitching like you’ve been tazed, you’re working at an angle to gravity, so not only are you only lifting a small fraction of your body weight (your head and shoulder with a crunch, your legs and hips with a reverse crunch), but that resistance actually becomes less depending on what angle you’re at. That’s why the bottom 1/3 of a sit-up is so much harder than the top, because that’s the only section where you’re actually pulling directly into gravity.  Mat work sucks for abs worthy of a men’s magazine. But we all knew from experience that that was true. 

If you really want to build a washboard stomach that looks like a chocolate bar, you’ve got to go for the advanced shit that pits you against gravity, or loads your abs up with lactic acid like a squat or a bench press does. I’m talking hanging leg raises (where you’re changing the tilt of your pelvis, not just lifting and dropping your legs) aka “knees to elbows,” GHD sit-ups, and other advanced moves that you won’t find in most ab classes. These are things that you need pretty gnarly core strength to even be able to do one of them properly. 

Now, before you think I’m an idiot again, I know that the abdominals’ (all of them: the rectus abs, transverse abs, and obliques inside and out) main function is to stabilize the body. Again, it depends what you are stabilizing against. If you put a relatively light load on your abs through activities such as running (Paula Radcliffe) or doing plank on a solid surface, your abs will quickly adjust to the load and won’t grow any further. Again, anything that you can do for more than about 30s isn’t going to put enough strain on your muscles to effect change. This is why you have to find ways to make your planks harder: do them with one arm and one leg, doing them on Bosus and with foam rollers under your elbows and toes, force yourself to hold the movement while your limbs are moving (i.e. spiderman plank or renegade rows), doing chest presses or playing catch with yourself while trying to stay horizontal on a decline ab bench, or put a freaking weight on your back. If you actually want to achieve anything with "ab" training, then it shouldn't be easy enough to be a cooldown. Otherwise you're doing about as much abdominal conditioning as a Zumba class, and having a lot less fun. 

Another thing about stabilizers is that they are usually small movements or isometric (without movement) contractions, and it’s the eccentric or “down” phase of a movement that causes the muscles to grow. If muscles don’t go back “down” against resistance, then they won’t grow. This is when your $10 ab roller, medicine ball catches, and holding a partner’s ankles while they throw your legs toward the ground come in. You've got to move muscles to make them bigger. Sure, 5 minutes of plank will make them more resistant to fatigue and will make you damned sore, but it won't actually give you a 6-pack. 

I've been at this core training thing for about 3 weeks. The first day I felt like the muscles weren't sore, but if you'd drawn a six-pack on me every line would have been sore through and through. Then again, I'd been down with strep the week before and was pretty damned weak. Since then, my core hasn't really been sore. What I can tell you is that whether it's the change in my training, because I've just been going through one of my phases where I'm eating better, or specifically because of the core work I've been doing, I saw my abs straining to poke through my fat on some kettlebell swings today. I'll keep you updated on their progress. 

I've been gone for awhile. I'm saying this just in case you just woke up from a coma and don't know what year it is. If there's anyone left to read this, I'll be quite surprised. Why the long absence? Well, the usual excuses about being busy and boring and all that crap, but I've also slowly fallen out of endurance sports in the past couple of years. I've been fraught with quite a bit of frustration, and then depression, and then resignation with maybe a bit of shame that I didn't quite know how to reconcile. Who the hell am I if I don't spend my whole life going long and slow and racing on the weekends? Life was getting in the way of my training, but the truth was that I was so far beyond burnt out that my bike seat became a very tedious place to sit.

After a year of gradually quitting (without even really noticing), frenzied fits oftrying to care coupled with the disgruntled realization that when you don't train you can't expect to be as fit as you used to be, I finally gave up. I was no longer at the top of my sport, and I didn't like the feeling. I gave myself permission to hang up the bike, say no to running races, and try new things that there was no way I could be good at.

A thing that I'm really, really bad at: Brazilian jiu jitsu

I got into Brazilian jiu jitsu (BJJ) reluctantly. I was at the world's most boring staff meeting and while the HR director was going through a powerpoint presentation of all the emergency exits in the building, the guy sitting across from me wrote me a note that said, "What are you doing on Tuesday from 10-11?" Since my superpower is an inability to say no, even under the most extreme circumstances, I turned up the following Tuesday at an MMA gym across town without even the vaguest sense of what jiu jitsu is. I'll spare you the mystery, it's basically wrestling in a funny karate robe called a gi ("ghee").

It was only me and one other girl at that class, and at least she was kind of cute. I just thought I would be punching and chopping stuff. I did not yet know that I would be rolling around on the floor with this girl for the next hour in the most intimate of positions. "Today we're going to learn choke holds," my colleague/instructor said. Wha-whaaaaat?! "Claire, start lying down with your legs wrapped around her waist, Claudette, put your hands on her chest." So we got into this overtly sexual position and she laid her hands on my boobs. I could grow to like BJJ.

I spent the rest of the hour alternately getting choked out and doing the choking. I was trying very, very hard to be professional about the whole thing, but I won't say the human contact didn't feel good... or the getting thrown around. It had been awhile. This only made me feel more like a sexual predator and made me more uncomfortable, but I've been going every Tuesday since.

Of all the new things that I've tried, I suck at BJJ the most. Memorizing complex sequences of movements and then applying them when someone is grunting and sweating on top of me comes to me about as easily as peeing standing up, but there's something so gratifying about using my hips and core muscles at 100% of their power in 360º. It is the most gratifying and stress-relieving activity that I've ever done. And I do feel the difference in core strength in my running.

Most of the time I'm the only girl in class, which leads to an interesting dynamic, not only because I'm rolling around for an hour with my head between some guy's legs. I'm also learning to throw guys around who are nearly twice my size. Or more accurately, I'm learning how I could throw those guys around if I didn't suck so horribly at it. And since it's a martial art, there are strict rules of conduct that prohibit any of the guys from getting all pervy about it. To be fair, I'm probably the most titillated in the class about acting out the karma sutra through violence, and I have a lot of trouble not giggling sometimes. For about a month I was a little skeeved out because I thought I felt the guys' erections every time we rolled, but then I figured out that what I was feeling was the knots on their belts and I chilled out. 

Since most of the guys are Brazilian, they don't speak much English. I usually get paired up with a guy named Paolo who is one of the guys small enough for me to fit my legs around his waist. He is considerably more experienced than I am, has better-than-average English, and is very patient at explaining things to me. On Valentines day we were doing something where he was lying down while I had to put my hips next to his chest on my way to fucking his shit up. But I was bringing my hips too high, near his head so he offered me the helpful suggestion, "Don't come all over my face." Then he couldn't figure out why I spent the next 2 minutes rolling on the mat laughing.

After a few weeks I just started changing in the changing room with all the guys, taking off underpants and all. Hey, I'm usually in too much of a hurry to wait, and after you've spent an hour with your ass in someone's junk throwing them over your shoulder, who really cares if you show them your butt crack?

Another thing that I'm really bad at: Rock Climbing

My actual rock climbing gym

I first started rock climbing over a year ago, but since it's one of those things that is much better with a partner (or impossible without one in the case of top roping on the big wall), I hadn't done it much. I am deathly, not funny, "I can't get myself off the top of this building because I need to lie down on the floor and touch every inch of my frontal surface area to the ground to keep from falling off the edge which is 10 yards away" scared of heights. About a year ago my friend set me up with a girl who was a climber and she wanted to take me top roping on our first date. "I'm really afraid of heights," I told her, "like not funny for real afraid of heights."

"You'll get used to it," she told me.

"No, I'm really afraid of heights," I told her. "Can't we just go bouldering?" (Climbing without a rope on a wall that's only about 8 feet high).

"No! I'm going to teach you to top rope," she insisted. There's no motivation like trying to get laid to convince you to do something colossally stupid.

I went on said date the following week, and of course she took one look at my big and useless upper body muscles and put me on one of the tallest walls. I got about halfway up before my mouth went dry, I couldn't breathe, and every instinct I had said to hang onto the wall tight and cry for help. "C'mon, Claire! You can do it!" she said.

"I'm coming down," I said.

"No, you can reach, keep going!"

I climbed another 10 or 15 feet, hyperventilating, the wall feeling wavy, and every muscle in my body shaking from fear. As my arms got more and more tired, the terror of slipping off without any warning or control got even stronger. "I'm coming down."

"You can do it!"

"No, I'm coming the fuck down!" I screamed. Paradoxically, letting go is no problem at all, and she slowly lowered me down to the ground. When I got back onto solid (foam-padded) ground, I tried to say, hang on a sec, but when I opened my mouth I almost threw up. I thought I was going to cry and tried to walk away so I could compose myself in private, but I was still tied to the damned wall. It took me several minutes to pull myself together.

It didn't work out between that girl and me, but we remain friends and when she hears people telling me that top roping will help me overcome my fear of heights, she's quick to jump in and defend me. "No, I've NEVER seen someone as scared as she is. I don't know if you can get over that kind of thing."

So I boulder. Every week I spend an hour or two on the bouldering wall climbing 8 feet (often less if I can't complete the route) and then dropping happily back to the ground. It has massively improved my upper body strength. I can now do 4 strict pull-ups in a row (no swinging) which is more than 4 times what I used to be able to do when I first started.

Something I'm so-so at: Crossfit

Aaaaahhh, Crossfit. Crossfit is the new polarizing issue of the fitness industry. Is it the best thing to ever happen to sport, or dangerous and overstated? It is undeniably an ingenious business model... If given a scale of 1-5 where 1 is "Crossfit is evil" and 5 being "I drink the Kool-Aid before every WOD" I tend to be about a 2 on the Crossfit Kinsey scale. I believe it's got its place as part of a well-balanced fitness routine, just like Froot Loops are part of a well-balanced breakfast (just as long as you've got the turkey sausage links, nonfat milk, and a piece of fruit sitting alongside the bowl of sugar, processed carbs, and artificial colors and flavoring). Crossfit does teach excellent technique, when they take the time to do so, but they distill what should take years of establishing base strength and technique and boil it down to a handful of sessions that they call an "onramp program." Then they hand you your barbell and they say, "Here, perform these dangerous lifts, pick your own weight, and we're going to time you and pit you against everyone else in the room and hope that you don't lose your form or put on more weight than you can handle to try to impress the bro next to you." 

Also, since everything is timed, many of the exercises that form the basis of the WODs (workout of the day) are full of so many workarounds and cheats to increase the weight and number of reps that you can perform to exhaustion that they are barely related to the original motion. For example, a pull-up and a kipping pull-up place completely different demands on the body. While a pull-up is a fairly straight-forward (or straight up and down) and challenging exercise for the traps, rhomboids, lats, and biceps, the kipping pull-up uses more abs, hip flexors, and even some chest, adding the back muscles as nearly an afterthought (and mimicking the movement of a row much more than a pull-up). But no matter, kipping allows you to perform more repetitions, so Crossfitters will hang from a bar wriggling like fish on hooks to get through their WODs at lightning speed. 

And dedicated Crossfitters are annoying, just like tri-geeks are annoying. The similarities are actually striking. Tri-geeks and Crossfitters both have an unhealthy attachment to compression socks, wear nothing but t-shirts and paraphernalia of their sport, have a cult-like mentality, and believe that they are the fittest people in the world. The fact that each does so much trash-talking of the other's style of fitness is another irony that I find delicious.

So why did I walk into the Crossfit gym in the first place? Because I was looking for the Froot Loops to add to the center of my strawberries, fakin' bacon, and low fat milk breakfast. It had something that I wanted. After several months off the bike, I turned around one day and my butt was gone, replaced by a deflated and planar thing restrained from falling to the backs of my knees only by the sausage casings that I called pants. This was definitely counterproductive to my life-long goal of achieving a Tour de France ass. I knew that if I wasn't going to be riding 15 hours per week, then I would need to do squats and deadlifts with some regularity. But knowing myself, I knew that I would never actually do squats and deadlifts with any regularity. I would need to increase the odds of deadlifts and squats finding their way into my life by leveraging myself with some accountability. At Crossfit I would have someone else writing my workouts, I would have other people in the room to feed off their energy, and most of all my best fuel: Competition! Crossfit would also develop an aspect of my fitness that I had never tried to improve before (strength, agility, fast-twitch fibers, and top-end aerobic capacity).

But there was another reason, too. Around the time that I started this whole new fitness project I had also decided that I no longer needed to be single, and I wanted to join Crossfit to meet chicks. I'd watched all the Crossfit ads on youtube with beautiful women in booty shorts and sports bras doing thrusters (a squat with an overhead press) in slow motion while their glutes and abs rippled under their 12% body fat. I wanted to meet those girls and sleep with them. 

When I told my clients that I had joined a Crossfit gym one day a week, many of them were shocked. "It's like you're telling me that you're becoming a Muslim," one client said.

"But I'm doing it to meet chicks!" I told him. I felt that this was the best justification of my lame decision and would keep me from having to go back on all the trash talking of Crossfit I'd done over the years. "I want to meet girls like on Youtube."

"And do the girls there look like that?"

"Well, no. Most of them are kind of fleshy, dumpy, and not particularly good looking. They kind of look like the people you see walking around the 'hood."

"You fell for the 'light beer commercial' ploy!" he pointed out. "You bought the product because you thought it came with beautiful women!" True words.

How is the Crossfit going? Fairly well. I excel at some things like the squats and deadlifts, but I have surprisingly little upper body strength. I am the most uncoordinated human being on this earth as well, so while I can teach a snatch and a power clean I am having a lot of trouble actually doing them. When I am having a particularly bad day, I have them put a different name on the board next to my results, like Igor, Wilbur, or Petunia. For the time being nobody but the people who work there actually know that I work in fitness, and I appreciate that. Although some people give me dirty looks for insisting on being called Thaddeus or Norbert, I like being able to work out in a place where I don't work and nobody is going to ask me questions.

The most surprising part of Crossfit is that it has been a boon when I write the workouts for my own clients. While I don't train them in the traditional Crossfit style of warm-up, dynamic stretching, strength component, metabolic conditioning, Crossfit does have a wealth of sample couplings of full-body movements that fit well together and creative structures to their workouts. Every week when I have to come up with 25 unique and challenging workouts for my clients, I have Crossfit's WOD shop open in the background and I'll flick through until I find a workout that inspires me, and then I'll flesh it out (sometimes replacing every element in the workout) for that particular client's needs, abilities, goals, and personality.

My next goal: Men's gymnastics

I've been following my routine now for about 3 1/2 months, and I have become somewhat capable in each, but it's time to find a new challenge before things get stale. One of my clients (the same one who said I was becoming a Muslim because of the beer commercial trick) came to me a few months ago with the goal of doing a muscle-up on the bar (the bar is much more challenging than gymnastics rings). Since I cannot do a muscle-up myself, it has meant many hours of reading blogs and watching tutorials in order to be able to coach him. Once we achieved 3 bar muscle-ups in a row, he selected his next goal to be the human flag. Time for more tutorials.

When you look these things up on YouTube, there are always half a dozen suggestions on the sidebar of videos by tattooed shirtless homies on playgrounds doing gymnastics over a gangster rap background. Every once in awhile when I needed a distraction from work (and when I had run out of Crossfit porn to watch) I would watch these homies on monkey bars or competitive men's gymnastics routines. But it was always, always, always dudes. Of course a chick could never do a Maltese or an iron cross on the rings like a world-class gymnast, but surely a girl could learn to do a muscle-up on the bar, a human flag, or a planche push-up. Women's gymnastics, pole dancing, and yoga all incorporated similar moves, so why weren't chicks out on the playgrounds too? And to be perfectly honest, I still wanted abs like those that popped out on those shirtless thugs as they did L-pull-ups.

So I have decided that my next project will be to follow my dream of becoming a male gymnast. It's actually not out of line from what I have already been doing with the upper body strength from rock climbing, the core strength and agility from jiu jitsu, and the brute strength of Crossfit, so the workouts will only be an extra 20 minutes or so a day to build up the specific strength for the movements I want to work on.

I have put together a base strength program and have selected 5 movements that I want to learn to do in the next year.

1. Muscle-up
   
   
2. Human flag
   
   
3. Planche push-up
   
   
4. Handstand push-up
   
   
5. Flare
   

I'm going to try to resurrect my blog as I work on these goals. It'll be the same Claire and the same writing that you know, and movements and skills that are probably totally foreign to you. I'll see you on the bar!

Mindfuck

This week I came back to Boston for the first time since I moved to San Francisco about 16 months ago. In all that time I had never had the desire to visit, especially since I was afraid that seeing many of my old friends would reopen wounds that were still tender. But it had to happen eventually, and so last Friday night I boarded a plane to revisit the site of the worst 6 months of my adult life. I had mostly put the past out of my head (fresh starts are good for that), and it wasn't until the week before my flight that I even let my mind return to everything that's happened over the last 2 years. I hardly recognized myself in that confused, anxious, downtrodden version of Claire that suffered through January until June 2010. I was happier, optimistic, much more self-confident, and richer. I had also started wearing "girl bras" rather than walking around with the sports bra "boob loaf" all the time, which makes me feel like a lot more of a grown-up (even though the bras come from the girls' section of Target). Life was good and I had moved on.

One of the first things I did once I'd landed was to contact Michelle for a trail run. Talking to her and then Big Red the following morning gave me the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from hanging out with people who truly love you and bring out the best in you. Red, Michelle, and I had a synergistic summer in 2008 where we all pushed each other to the best fitness of our lives, and reliving those days was nothing but sweet. Once I saw Michelle and Big Red again, I couldn't believe how much I realized that I missed them.

That night I went out to dinner with the Rockstar Housemate who kept me from cracking up completely in those months after the break-up. It was an unseasonably warm night, and I was feeling all warm and fuzzy inside knowing that Rockstar Housemate was one of the people who had seen me at my worst and still seemed to enjoy hanging out with me. "How's the house?" I eventually ventured to ask. "Is it still a shithole, or have you guys done some work on it?" To be honest, I didn't even know if he still lived with Lindsey. Did I care?

"That ratty blue couch is still in the living room. With the third housemate came another dog, so there's room for two people in the middle of the couch with a dog on each side." It didn't take a genius to deduce that Lindsey's new girlfriend had moved in to the shithole house. I decided that what I was feeling was more than not caring. I really, really didn't want to hear anything about it. Not that I was jealous that her new girlfriend had slipped right into my spot in the shitty life that Lindsey was stuck in, but more that hearing anything about her filled me with so much revulsion that I wanted to run out of the restaurant screaming. I changed the subject.

But the flood gates had been opened. As I visited people over the next few days, everyone wanted to tell me about her, talk shit on her new girlfriend, and in general relive my former disgraces without my even asking. "Have you been seeing Lindsey since you've been back? Because if you have, I'm going to punch you in the face," said her former housemate (the one she lived with before we moved in with the Rockstar. I find it gratifying that people who lived with us in both houses all came down on my side.) "She really downgraded on her new girlfriend," he offered. "Have you ever seen Pink Floyd's The Wall? You know those people with no faces that they put into the meat grinder? She looks like one of those. NO! You know what she looks like? Did you ever watch the Muppets? You know that Muppet with the long blonde hair that sings in Animal's band? She looks like that!"

"I don't care, Rich," I told him (I don't remember what nickname I gave him in the past).

"Have you been to the shop yet?"

"I don't want to go to the shop. No one works there anymore that I can't see outside the shop." He paid me no mind and called. "Hey, is 'One-Bike Lindsey' working today? No? She's off till Tuesday? Great! Thanks."

So despite my protests, after pumpkin shopping Rich took a left out of the parking lot rather than going straight back to the house and dragged me to the shop. I hardly recognized anyone on staff other than twiggy and an annoying little compulsive liar that they called Gnome. Not to let things go by unnoticed, Rich gathered everyone around and said, "This is Lindsey's ex. Isn't she hotter than the new girl?"I wanted the earth to swallow me up.

"Yeah, her new girlfriend is weird. So you dated Linsey, huh? How did that go? I thought you moved out of state," said the new retail manager. Really? After all this time and all the hours in the saddle with all these people, this is who I am? Frankly, I was surprised that I'd come up at all. I was under the impression that I was a subject that just wasn't brought up around Her Royal Highness anymore.

"I came out ahead in that transaction," I said. "I got to move to California and be happy and she got to stay here with her shitty life." And then I refused to answer any more questions. It came out bitter, but sheesh, is there a way to come out of that situation sounding classy and gracious?

When you haven't seen someone in awhile, it turns out that they don't want to know about all the cool things that are going on in your life since you left, they want to fill you in on what's been going on in the place that you left in your absence. Piece by piece, people started telling me more and more about Lindsey. Slick told me that he had seen her at a cyclocross race and she was interested in buying a cross bike, but then had wandered off when he was trying to introduce her to reps. Typical, half-baked ideas and no fucking follow-through, my mind griped before I noticed how pissed I was getting and changed my mental subject. King of the Bike Geeks asked me if I'd seen her, and then told me it was probably a good idea that I'd called ahead to make sure that she wasn't working that day. Do you still believe the fucking ridiculous lies that she told about me? Do the years of riding next to you and chatting with you over a work bench mean nothing to you? You used to respect me and be one of the biggest advocates of my riding back in the day, I thought, and then made myself stop before I got too upset. Michelle told me that she'd named her new dog after Michelle's own dog. I don't know why this made me furious, but it did. Teen Idol told me that after his bike accident a year ago that put him in a wheelchair, she had basically dropped him. How can someone be such a fair weather friend that they can't even come see their best friend every once in awhile, just because he's in a wheelchair? She didn't even spend her dad's last Christmas with him! What kind of soul-less person does that? my mind screeched. Instead I gave him a hug and told him to keep on his physical therapy because the next time I was home, I wanted to go on a walk with him. And when Rockstar Housemate told me that her new girlfriend is a personal trainer I absolutely lost it. "Listen! I don't want to hear about her anymore! I don't want to hear that she's doing well, I don't want to hear that she's doing badly. I have moved on, and I just don't want to go there anymore!" It was true. I really, really didn't care what she was up to, but hearing that she was the same old flakey, lazy, condescending, unreliable, entitled, retarded douche that she'd always been just put me back into a head space that I never wanted to revisit. The thought actually crossed my mind to egg her house, although I knew it would be more fun to fantasize about than to actually do it. It just didn't seem fair that someone should be allowed to hurt another person so much and then have absolutely no repercussions on her life, and just replace me like an old iPod. I had to get out of here!

On my second-to-last night home it was all getting to be too much. I'd been hanging out with people nonstop since I landed and I just needed some quiet time. While we were visiting my grandmother, my mom must have asked me 5 times over the course of the afternoon whether I was coming home for dinner. "No, mom, I don't think so."

"Oh? Who are you going to see?"

"I don't know, Mom." Which she heard as, 'I'm still free, why don't you invite me for dinner again.' Finally I told her, "Tell you what, if I haven't called by the time you've made dinner, then just assume that I'm not coming." I'd hung out with her every day since I arrived, and my mom's not the kind of mom that you can be best friends with. You've always got to filter what you say to her so that she won't worry or pry.

I finally broke free from my mom, and ignored the 2 voicemails she left in quick succession, "So will you be coming home for dinner?" A few hours later drove to the Whole Foods to get a salad before I hunkered down in the hotel to watch some Netflix. It was 7:45, so I figured she would already be at home cooking or eating, so there was no chance I'd run into her. And then I looked up and... there were my mom and dad coming right for me. Are you serious?! I had to get out of this small town as fast as I could. "Hi hon," mom said. "What are you up to tonight?"

"Just chilling." Now this is the point where my mom should have figured out that I was here in Whole Foods getting food for myself because I would rather spend the night alone than come home and have an uncomfortable dinner with her and dad.

"Are you coming over for dinner?" she asked. Oh my god, I'm never coming home again! I thought.

After three days of revisiting my old life, it was time to check out of the hotel and spend my final day at my parents' house. The hotel was about 8 miles from my mom and dad's house and right smack in the middle were Lindsey's house and Lindsey's work. I couldn't avoid one without passing the other. My luck couldn't hold out. After checking out of the hotel I stopped by a Starbucks that I never go to. I swung into the parking space, and in the second before my car came to a complete stop, I looked into the car facing me, and there in the passenger seat not 10 feet away was fucking Lindsey with her girlfriend in the driver's seat. In a flash my eyes registered her smile and the familiar way that she sipped her coffee and then my fight or flight instinct kicked in.

Before my eyes even had much time to focus, I threw the car in reverse and gunned it out of the space and across the parking lot. I didn't know what to do, but priority number one was not having to see her or have her get a good look at me. I couldn't be trusted not to be a total bitch and my hands couldn't be trusted not to shake. In fact, they were already shaking like crazy as I threw the car into drive and floored it across the parking lot to where I hoped there was an exit. There was no exit, so I just parked in the far corner of the parking lot with my hands shaking until I was pretty sure they would have left. Who cared if she recognized me, who cared if she walked into work and said, "I think I just saw Claire," and someone said, "Yeah, she's been coming by all weekend." Had I run away because I was ashamed of anything that had happened over a year ago? Hell no, she was the one that owed me an apology.

The reason why I sat in the car behind the dumpster in that parking lot was because if we were face to face and she asked me, "How are you?" Or even if she saw me at a distance, there would be no way for me to express to her how well I'm doing and how much I now despise the despicable life that she's still stuck in. And I realized that until I can face her without shoving in her face what a loser she is, I wouldn't be fit to face her at all. So what if I make three times what she does? So what if I live in this beautiful place? So what if I'm out doing all the types of events she only talks about? There is absolutely no way to express all that stuff without undermining it by being obviously boastful and bitter.

Hiding out in the Starbucks parking lot made me realize another thing, too. That I still wasn't as confident as I would like to be. You can make all the money in the world and your phone can be ringing off the hook with people who want your time, but until you have the confidence to walk past your ex girlfriend and not even care if she's looking, then you've still got some work to do.

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.