Race Report

Through some combination of being overwhelmed by how long this post is going to take to relive and record, and the recent resurrection of my pre-Ironman social life, it's been a week and a half since the race and I'm just sitting down to write this. Every time I think I know where to begin or end, new thoughts or memories make themselves known. I suppose 3:30 am, Saturday, August 1st is a good place to start.

Just like before Wildflower, I woke up about 45 minutes before my alarm was going to go off, completely alert and ready to be up. Since it was 2:45 however, I went to the bathroom and then laid back down. My eyes re-sprang open at 3:29, and I waited for my alarm to go off for a minute. Then Rizzi and I both hit snooze and got up at 3:40. We sat up in our beds, looked at each other, and then said "Wh-ha-ha-ha-what??" Then we swung our legs over the beds, looked at each other, and said "I guess let's eat breakfast! This is ridiculous!" They had taken our bikes from us, our run stuff was already at T2, and they were going to drive us in a bus to the race start. They had made tri-babies of us.
We ate - cereal for both of us, and a PB&J for me - and dressed in our bike clothes. We went through our swim bags one last time and I realized I had lost my goggles; Rizzi lent me a pair of his. Scary. We kept giggling and telling each other we were about to do an Ironman, realized how strange it would be to be back in the room in 19 or so hours, and then headed to the lobby.

4:20 am at the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country was Nerve O'Clock - 28 pacing teammates in a too-small lobby, looking and talking, laying on the floor, getting up again, taking pictures, here and there someone humming the Rocky theme. On a day where you will have such intense inner focus driving you forward, and focus constantly on your own will to keep going, its strange to just stand and wait to be told that the bus is here to take you away - there are no decisions to make or power to exercise, and it made me incredibly anxious. Maybe I was already anxious. I blame something! I blame helpful infantilization!
Got to hug Momm-ee and Dadd-ee before the bus came, which was nice even though I was fundamentally distracted. Eurie and I found each other and did our routine of being funny and cynical but really happy and proud, and went outside to sit on the steps away from Jiggle Nerve Party.

The buses arrived and the team distributed across two of them, so that everyone had their own seat; they turned off the lights and we descended down the hills in pre-dawn darkness, and we all fell quiet. This was the first time that I got a little calm, excited and overwhelmed by the feeling of sitting on this bus with these people, my team who I had been with for ten months, all being shuttled to a riverbank to begin doing what we all knew we were all going to finish. There was this question of how hanging in the air, but there was no disbelief - just waiting. Everyone in their heads, alone together on the bus in the cold quiet morning.
The drive is about 25 minutes, most of it along vineyards and through redwood forest. Just before we got onto the winding wooded roads, out the window the fog was pulsing some where it hung over a distant field. In the seat in front of me Carlos said, "Is that lightning?", as his nervous brain scanned for the race-worst possibility that flashing light in the sky could be, and we watched and quickly realized the pulsing was too quick and too rhythmic for nature, and thought maybe it was runway lights for a mini airport. We traveled closer and the light doubled and continued to pulse, and we realized it was a RAVE in a field at 5 in the morning, and I loved this. We hurtled up closer and then past the rave, a bus full of people up far too early to do too much exercise, still waiting for our day to start, past a field full of strangers winding down their epic night, the silhouettes of their lights in the trees slipping behind us and then gone.

Hours.

I'm in the hotel room in the first tidepool of calm today has afforded. The window is open, traffic on the 101 whizzes by at a distance, the tree branches move just enough to vibrate the light dappling the edge of the room, a chain clanks on a flagpole a couple times a minute. There are still a couple bags to pack, though I have left my run things at transition, and my bike waits in a hotel conference room until someone who is not me will load it onto a truck, and reunite us tomorrow morning, while it is still dark. I am not with anyone, though Rizzi will be back soon, and I am trying to sink as deeply into this momentarily calm as I can. I do feel calm, and accepting, while I understand that there are hard times to come. I am just not stuck in them yet.

My brain is tight sort of behind my right eye. I have almost gotten my pee clear, but not quite. My body feels tense - less like a coiled spring, more like when you have to stand on a crowded train at the end of a long work day - being jostled and moved about, but still needing to stay centered and and ready for tempo shifts; knowing you are getting closer to where you are headed, but tired in the interim. Calm. I feel calm, and almost content, in this moment. There is just the slightest breeze.

I had a one-on-one talk with my coaches Paul and Rad and the thing they said that has stuck is - Stay steady. Steady will get hard. That will be tomorrow, and it has been today. I suppose its been all ten months...riding in aero position is probably what I've come to love most, and I suspect because it feels symbolic of the whole effort. It's not an entirely natural position to find myself in, and I've never considered myself...I should say, if I were to make a list of adjectives describing myself, I doubt "athletic" would make the top 20. This experience, however, has settled itself into myself, and I look up now to find myself quite comfortable, and steady, keeping up a healthy cadence as my legs go around and around, feeling my body sway so slightly side to side as the ground travels backwards under the bike. There are long stretches of straight, flat road where my hands don't even hold the bars, but sort of flop between them and over onto each other, my back is low and flat, I bend down my head for seconds at a time to watch my knees as pistons or the shadow of the gears against the asphalt, feel how physically close all the parts of my body are in that compact, dynamic position, and feel how connected I feel to all of myself, all of me hurtling towards a new achievement. Even feeling sweat trickling down my face and collecting at the tip of my nose is joyful - wiping it away is one of those small, intensely visceral pleasures where the seconds from when you realize you are going to do this small thing until the time you do it are filled with deep, rich excitement - all the senses centered on effort and its results.

Early on I had a mantra for myself that I'd forgotten until today - I'm not as weak as when I stop, I'm as strong as when I keep going. I forgot about this, and hadn't even realized it had melted away without notice until I was thinking about the new mantra, which came to me unwilled in the most acutely frustrated part of some long ride - I will because I can. I can because I will. It's simple and true. It works.
Steady. Can. Will.

I have some packing to do. And some pee to get clear.

Hella hella hella nervous, nervous, nervous

If my heart has a mouth and can vomit from it, that is what woke me up this morning. My heart puking. Usually when something momentous is going to happen, you wake up, wonder why you are in a hotel room, lie there staring at the ceiling while the color of the day slowly bleeds in, and you remember you are supposed to be nervous / excited. That's not what happened today. I think the "Oh shit Ironman is tomorrow" thought is what actually made my eyeballs flip open in a way that says You're never going to sleep again, buddy. I have a few things to do today, and a brain that is increasingly wanting to go Frantic, so here I go to think outloud:

8:30 am
-when I said I would get up. When Mom & Dad will call. Maybe should eat breakfast.
9 am - 11 am
-need to go to the store: cereal and soymilk, bananas and PB&J makings for tomorrow morning.
-need to get my bike back from Eurie's room, deflate the tire I practiced inflating with CO2, reinflate with floor stand.
11 am
-pack bike-to-run transition bag. will be dropping off at Transition Area this afternoon, and will not see until tomorrow. This makes me so nervous. Maybe I will take a picture of its contents to prove to myself, later, that I didn't forget anything.
11:30 am
-Brunchy/Lunchy at Hotel with Team and Family - coaches gonna talk to us.
12:30 pm
-maybe do that bike stuff here
1:30 - 3:30 pm
-meet Team in lobby to drive to high school for Official Pre-Race Meeting & Course Explanation
-Expo and Race Registration with Team; drop off run stuff at Transition
3:30 - 4:30 pm
-drive the bike course with my parents.
5:30 pm
-load bike into transport truck, not to be seen until I pull it off the truck, riverside, at 5 am. This also makes me nervous, but less so. Oh! I need to re-set the clock on my cyclometer.
-LA Team Pasta Dinner
6:30 pm
-Last talk from the Coaches, and then we head to bed. If last night is anything to go by, Rizzi and I will be overwhelmingly nervous, and attempt sleep many times before it's a go.

I have no more days left to separate me from the thing! Being able to take care of something later has slipped away. Being ready or not ready becomes increasingly moot. Every event we anticipate sneaks up as suddenly as the time we spent waiting seemed to crawl by; everything hypothetical rises as Real one morning, and we find out we want the anticipation back. Once it is here it falls off the agenda, stops being Special, and soon becomes Done. Ugggggggggh how is this going to happen? I rub my eyes, I rub my eyebrows, I rub my forehead, I rub my chin, I massage my worried face with two small hands like a forest animal. My stare goes blank and I stare at the computer screen for two minutes. My thoughts drift to my hungry stomach and my parched throat. Time to start the day, I guess.

p.s. Pardon the Gravy Train reference for the post title. If ever there were a song whose only relevant part was the chorus, its that one.

I Get So Emotional, Baby (Lobby Song)

I'm in the lobby of my hotel in Santa Rosa forcibly listening to '90's rock - songs I know but don't know the names of. In-room internet is $10 day, which is never less surprising for its determined anachronism, every time I travel. Come on, Hilton Wine Country! Cater to the business traveler / destination racer! Our rooms are in buildings named for wines - I'm in Cabernet but have to troop to Burgundy to see Eurie, and I think a couple people are in the outlying Chablis bungalows. The kleenex in the bathroom was shaped into a rose, and the two hand towels were used to make a giant bow tie, which was then placed in the towel rack over the toilet, just at eye height for wizzing gentlemen.

Being here with two days to spare feels like the rightest choice. I slept for 11 hours last night, punctuated by waking up to watch bad tv with Rizzi, my roommate, or being attacked out of sleep by Rizzi, the big brother I never had. We discovered "America's Got Talent," though we didn't stick around for the ending, as we'd stumbled upon stoppage time and then penalty kicks for MLS All Stars vs. Everton.

I ate 13 hours ago and it feels like two days. We went to downtown Santa Rosa, which has a Wednesday night Farmer's Market that closes a few blocks, and it was filthy with all-alterna-kids of every stripe, and I remembered that Santa Rosa was the last jewel in the Bay Area all-ages crown that I was never able to get...two hours from San Jose, it was too far to win parental permission. We asked some cops where we should eat, said we wanted pasta maybe, and they recommended a place called Checkers. I was concerned. Concerns were justified by late '80's-era giant paint splatter canvases, and disparity between fine table settings and generally low menu price point. In the end, food was fine, and I had a beer to relax even though it brought some color back to my urine

- - important interruption: "Kiss from a Rose" just came on, and I wish I could describe this guy that just walked into the lobby and know that you're actually seeing what I'm describing - -

We were supposed to swim at 9 am today, but enough people had trouble getting up in time that we've been given permission to sleep in, and meet at 11 to do bike check - make sure everything is happy, mechanically. We'll go down to the river to swim at 2. I can't wait for the river - my body feels creaky and extra. There is some balance being struck by the anxiety that keeps me a bit muted and the gnawing energy of my body that will be used in the extreme in two days but is being kept dormant now. I find myself daydreaming of the specific feelings of different strokes, imagining the feeling of my arm extending from the shoulder and drawing down across my body while my torso turns; feeling water on my face and hearing underwater then abovewater sounds in each ear. I want to be moving. I might sneak down to the pool.

Today's primary goal is to get my pee back to being clear. That feels really survivor-y! What a small, obscure effort! Also think I'll read some and try and get back to where I can type more clearly. I'm pretty hampered in weird sentence construction right now...nervous and not relaxed.

Anatomy of a .... zzzzzzzzzz

I'm tired. I made this picture. Everything I'll use on race day, minus my watch, which was hiding in a shoulder bag. I leave in the morning, still have a lot of work work to do, trying to see if I can stagger out of bed at 6 am to go swimming. Maybe write more when I get to Santa Rosa tomorrow. Sleeeeep nooooowwww....

I'm Gay for My Bike but Also I Wrote Some Real Things

I came out to the living room this morning to this vision in aluminum - look at her there, bathed in sunlight. I feel weepy and proud like a parent - either Stockholm Syndrome accumulated over literally thousands of miles on the road together, or a pre-race (5 days!) hormone surge. I just got her back from the shop yesterday - needed a new chain, shifting was getting a bit gritty - and apparently in the absence took to using personal pronouns to think and talk about her. I cannot rationally explain the love swelling in my chest at the moment; part of me wants to wax lyrical about all her mods, additions and sweat stains, but it's weird, possibly boring, and not what I sat down to write about.

I want to say, but not quite discuss at length, how strange it is to be this close to the event. Units of weeks have become superfluous to describe how long is left. We're down to days - in a focal point diagram of the last ten months, I'm past the point of focus and slipping down the narrow cone towards the thing itself. My days go Doppler Effect weeeeeeeerrrreewwwwww in anticipation. I am gathering up all the moments around me into myself, and I have so much time that I spend pondering that I want to describe myself as in a vast ocean of contemplative calm, so surrounded am I by the lapping of my thoughts, but even now, sitting on the couch before work, there is a filament running between my heart and lungs tapping and buzzing with energy.

People tend to ask two questions. Are you really gonna do it?, and What are you going to do after? I know the answer to the former, and it strikes me to realize - as all-consuming as this experience has been for me - how foreign it remains for most people I know. That that could BE a question strikes me freshly every time, in two parts. First, to realize the incremental acceptance and confidence in myself that I am going to achieve this - how its distance and difficulty has become relative, drawn down from the impossible to the possible - I realize that for most of those around me, the event has stayed as daunting as it ever was, was to me once, and I have moved toward a different conception of it, largely out of sight of my friends. I biked by Chris and Tati walking to brunch last Saturday, and Chris has commented since how good it was to see me actually out and doing it, in spandex and gear, on a bike and on the road. That is the second realization, just how invisible the process is, and how bizarre it is NOT to realize that, to come to understand that I can think and do something so much as to forget no one else is aware of it.

The second question chokes me up some. I don't know what I'm going to do after. I imagine myself a bit adrift, and the closest experience that comes to hand when I desperately grope through the inventory of my past is break-up. I will re-discover my time, and wonder what I did with it pre-training. I will certainly drink and be drunk more; I will go the movies alone here and there; I will fill my time with friends that I will try not to burden with hearing how much I miss it, and who will be nice, but won't understand. I will seek out others similarly heartbroken, and we will connect purely over our loss, we will order more rounds just because we are greedy to each be allowing us each to continue vomiting words, the permissive deserted.
I used to worry about being "heavier" than I wanted, or "thicker" or some other weird euphemism, but now I worry about getting fat - a sure sign of obsession, and weird because by and large I am so much happier about my body now, think of it more as a partner and tool than as a focus for issues or unhappiness. But I think the heart of the worry about getting FAT is an acknowledgment of the extreme level of activity I've come to live with, and a subsequent acknowledgment that it won't be possible to maintain - and this is the sadness. I have gotten so much benefit from this - a lot of which I am still processing - and I am scared and sad to step away from that. I have gained time to think, and be with myself in quiet and solitude; I have so frequently pushed through what I thought I could do that I have stayed cloaked in a calm blanket of pride and humility in equal parts; I have faced, questioned and tried to repair much of what I like least about myself; I have faultered, stuttered and doubted enough to start to learn to be okay with those parts of any process, and to be kinder to myself through that stage.
On Saturday the 28 of us were made to march through a room of prospective TNT participants, and a teammate and I whispered to each other at the back of the auditorium, before our show pony dance. We were discussing how we had each signed up, initially, for the half-Iron, how quickly we changed to the full, and how glad we were to have done that. About four sentences into our conversation we were both a bit teary, and took turns repeating to each other, "This has been such an incredible experience." So here I am wondering again, as I type and tear up for the billionth time this week, whether I am stronger or just comically constantly weak-exhausted; whether my humility is not just being worn out - maybe the fight has gone out of me because I'm just too hungry; where the line between struggle and achievement blur into each other. The connection to the cause - training for these events in the name of cancer research and treatment - seems so inspired when you dig into this cellar of thought, of going as deep into awareness of what is happening to you as you can. I am struck with such wonderment at people going through a struggle that was foisted on them, so brutally assigned, and not signed up for - and I wonder, though most days my thoughts are on myself and not anyone my efforts might touch, whether I could have or would have signed up, gotten through, or finished without that external motivator. It is the cornerstone and finial of the entire process.

Time for work!

Short Sentences on Big Question

It is one hour from midnight. At midnight it will be Saturday, July 25. Seven days from tomorrow I will do an Ironman. The idea seems distant while the time seems near. I know I will do it but I'm not sure how. It is a wide open feeling of waiting to find out. It is a small, cramped feeling of furrowing my brow and opening my eyes hopefully, extending my arms up from the floor like a child. It is my spine like a question mark. It is sitting on the edge of all my seats. It is a constant conversation at the back of my mind, it is the corner of the room my eyes dart to while I try to listen to what someone is saying, it is the texture that worries my dreams. It is a threshold.