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.

The Post Where I Try to Think

Once, walking along an East London street on a November morning, I shook out the last bits of tobacco from its pouch, and rolled an anemic cigarette. I turned to Dan, the smoker of my two companions, and my bleary, hungover, upturned eyebrows asked him if he wanted to split it with me. He shook his head, which meant that we were really hung over. I felt a bit chastised for wanting to smoke, and bent against the wind to light it, saying, "This is either going to go really badly or really well." Dan chuckled that he understood, and I felt at least a bit less disgusting and totally alone. This post is going to be like that. Pardon my thinking outloud.

To swim, I need my tri shorts and bike jersey on under my wetsuit. I need a swim cap under my goggles and then a swim cap over those more to protect against my superstition that the goggles will get knocked off in the scramble of the swim start than to actually protect against that happening. I become a really nervous version of myself before sports happen. The top cap will be provided when I check in on Friday by the race people, so I have the right color for my wave. I just need to bring the bottom cap. Maybe I will wear the cap from Wildflower, as a talisman that I Can Do This. No, that is crazy. I have worn the black cap all season. I will wear the black cap.
I need to lube my wrists, NECK, and ankles with Body Glide to protect against chaffing. I prefer to spray PAM on my wrists and ankles to get the wet suit on and off more easily. I heard once that this is bad for the wet suit, and I am borrowing the wet suit, so I will feel bad when I do this, but I will do this anyway.
So for swimming I need:
-tri shorts
-bike jersey
-swim cap x2
-goggles
-Body Glide
-PAM cooking spray
-ah, and I will have to have my timing chip on my ankle already.

When I transition from swimming to biking, I will need to have my towel, laying under my bike on the rack. I need to lay things out in the order I will need them. I will have begun stripping off my wet suit upon exiting the water and running to my transition area. I will get that off. I will already be in my biking clothes. I will sit down on the ground, and rub my feet on the towel to dry them. I'll put Body Glide on my arches, across the tops of my toes, and on the back of my ankle, along my Achilles. I will wonder if this will still be present at all by the time I am running, when I really need it. I will need a second tube of Body Glide in the Bike-to-Run transition area (note for further down). I will rub some Body Glide on my arm pits which are nowhere near rubbed raw at all, but which I am superstitiously worried about, never having attempted this much effort in one day. My socks are in my bike shoes, I put on my shoes, I put on my shoes. I think I should spray more sunblock on myself, but I think they have more on the course, and I will skip it. I stand up. My helmet is resting on my aero bars on the bike hanging from the rack. In the helmet, on top of a pile, is my bike cap. I put it on, backwards, tucking my hair in the back; I turn the brim of the hat up. I shove on my sunglasses. I pull on my bike gloves, which I have made sure are ready to go on - the fingers are not bunched in their holes. I put the helmet on, adjusting the back around the brim of the bike cap, and pulling the front down low on my forehead. I tug down my jersey, I pull my bike off the rack, I run to the mounting line. I get on my bike, I bike out of Guerneville.

WAIT.
Shit.
Fuck.
Water bottles. Food.
On my bike I have four water bottles - one an hour, a low average of 15 miles an hour. This should get me to Mile 60, and Special Needs is at Mile 57. The first and second water bottles are Food Drink - Sustained Energy, no flavoring. The third bottle is Gatorade, probably Fruit Punch. I'm basic. The fourth bottle should be Gatorade, but I have been advised to make it straight water, to douse myself with when the temperature gets to 95 or so. I will most likely throw this and any other empty, non-nutrition bottles away in the course of the day, in favor of bottles full of water handed out along the course. There should be two or three aid stations before Special Needs. I briefly (now, not on race day) think about taking fewer bottles. I decide, now, that this is not worth the possible panic this will give me on race day. I have already had anxiety dreams where I forget to bring ANY bottles to the race. I have two PowerBars, each cut in half, that I shove in my jersey. I will eat these during the second and fourth hours. Part of me is scared that I should take more food, even though, if anything, this is more than I have ever needed. There are Clif Bars at the aid stations. I decide not to carry more food than I am used to.
Now I ride out of Guerneville.
For the bike ride I need:
-towel x2 - for feet and just in case
-Body Glide
-socks
-bike shoes
-bike cap
-sunglasses
-bike gloves
-helmet
-sunblock?
-Water Bottles x4 - 2 Food, 1 or 2 Gatorade, maybe 1 water
-two PowerBars - a Chocolate Brownie and a Honey Nut
-Survival Kit - spare tube, CO2 cracker, CO2 cartons (shit! I need to buy more!), patch kit, dollar bill, tire irons - should I carry an extra spare tube?? I am so paranoid!!!

At Special Needs, I will have a spare tube and that one Allen wrench - my water bottle cage always gets loose, and I might need to tighten it a bit. I will have two empty water bottles - they will each have Sustained Energy powder in them. I will have two store-bought bottles of water that I will have cracked the seal on - I will dump water in the Food bottles now, and give them a shake, but save most of the shaking for out on the course. I will have two more bottles - maybe a Gatorade and a water. I will have one more store bottle of water, in case I want to dump the Gatorade and just have water, if it is very hot and artificial & sweet foods are cloying to me. I should have spray sunblock in this bag, probably. This is probably a better place for it than at Swim-to-Bike. I will have two more PowerBars that I won't be able to cut in half - they will probably melt as it is, even in their wrappers.
To pack my special needs bag, I need:
-water bottles x4 - two with only Powder, 1 or 2 with premade Gatorade, maybe 1 just water. Wait, go with one just water. Will need for dousing, it is 1 pm or later and very hot.
-3 store bought bottles of water. Is that right? I don't want to read back. Sure, three.
-spare inner tube, maybe a spare tire. Oh, spare CO2 in case I have used it all. Allen wrench.
-two Powerbars - chocolate brownie & Honey Nut
-spray-on Sunblock
-my capitalization is going tits up.

For bike to run....oh I am feeling tired just thinking through it all. I want to change my jersey, I do not like running in this jersey. Stop. Lay it out in order.
I will have a towel on the ground, underneath where I will rack my bike. I will use the colorful squiggly beach towel, so I recognize my spot quickly. I will rack my bike, toss my helmet off, rip off my gloves. I will rip of my jersey and try not to mind that I am losing time. It's already been nine or more hours. What's 30 seconds? I pull on the new jersey. I sit down. I take off my bike shoes. If I think I need more Body Glide, I will roll down my socks and put it on. I take my watch out of my left running shoe and put it on my wrist. I slip on my running shoes WHICH ARE UNTIED AND LOOSE, ready to lace and tighten!!! I quickly apply Body Glide to my armpits and under arms. I start heading to the RUN OUT, and I turn my bike cap around so the brim is in front. I forgot my bandana. I have a bandana, I tie it around my neck. When I get to the first aid station I will soak this with water, maybe pack it with ice. I forgot my food. I have four GU's (flavor = Just Plain) that were on the towel - they go in the pockets of my run jersey, but it is cumbersome to put on if they are already in it. I don't need a water bottle, because there are aid stations every mile. Hm. I will take a water bottle. I will chuck it if I don't need it.
To run I need:
-run jersey
-running shoes
-watch
-Body Glide
-1 GU per hour - 4 - is this optimistic? I think its okay...there is food on the course...
-water bottle (take from bike)
-Head Lamp - for when it is dark on the course. I won't pick this up til the 2nd or 3rd (please 3rd not second, please never maybe!) loop through transition, but it needs to be in the bag.
-spray on sunblock

Is this it?
I should go away from this for a day. Read tomorrow. See if I forgot anything.
Pheeeeee-eeeewwwwwwww.....ffffffffffffff (deflation sound).

Where Dd Me Go?

See what happens when you make a promise to yourself to post everyday? Life explodes.
We've been tapering, whch - sigh. Ths s a good tme to say that the "i" key on my laptop s n functonal revolt. I can make t work, but It's very HARD.

We've been taperng, whch means somethng very dfferent leadng up to an - oh how rIdIculous thIs Is - Ironman than a half Iron. Before Wildflower we were barely movng, and felt fat, useless and sleepy. Maybe a bt cranky. Our training schedule snce we've entered taper - two weeks ago - has ehm...I wouldn't call ths a taper. We stll are supposed to be workng out two times a day, more often than not - say a 45 mn run and an hour swm. We stll bike for 2 hours on Wednesdays. But we must be doing less, my body s achy in the way t gets now f I haven't moved for a three days...and the funky moods are palpable.

I've been gettng reinvolved very intensely wth SFSU - specfcally the Theater Arts Department - my alma mater and undergraduate department. The CA budget crisis has become really dsastrous for the CSU, whch has been n slow declne - in terms of budgets and how faculty and admnstraton are meetng the challenge of reduced fundng - for as long as I've known it, since 2002. Most recently, ts been realzed that not only are thngs beng slashed drastcally - 30% fee increases for students at the same tme that 1,200 sectons are beng cut from the fall semester, and mandatory 2 day/month furloughs are gong nto place for staff; lecturers are next n lne at the choppng block n those departments whch they have not already dsappeared - the pcture s not gong to reverse or even much mprove any tme soon. I got wnd of how bad ts gotten and thought that many years of frustrated hypothetcals and ideas I ddn't thnk could get heard to be tred were maybe fndng ther moment. Two of my frends and I spent a week craftng an open letter to the faculty, I spent many hours gettng to know and talkng wth one of the most actve current students, and went sent t off. I was staggered as I watch ths effort throw itself to the top of my pile of priorties, supplantng Ironman n the homestretch. My traning dropped off - at one pont I went Sunday through Tuesday wth only a 45 mnute run - and everytme a team emal came n, or a bt of plannng for the trp up north needed consderng, I would realze wth a shock how much there stll s to do, and how much I had relegated the thought of all of t to the back burner. The Vineman anxety dreams kcked in almost on the eve of sendng out the letter. Now we're at the foundng an Alumni Associaton stage. I hit a wall yesterday. I found some new limts to how much I can take on. Full tme job, near full tme training, part time alumni network foundng and department restructurng correspondence, etc etc. Spent a large part of yesterday cryng and askng friends to help me, or just lsten. Also I forgot when to break up large blocks of text nto smaller paragraphs.

There were some smaller, more contained topcs I've wanted to wrte about lately, so I thnk I'll go grab a beer, sit down in front of the Tour on tv, plug in an external keyboard, and start a new post.

FUCK

I'm at work and don't really have time to say anything except: the Vineman people just emailed all participants to say the Race program is online.
I clicked, and while waiting for it to load discovered I feel very much like I'm going to throw up. This just became real.

Money Party!

I had my fundraiser party (a.k.a. Major Source of Stress) last Saturday, and it went almost as well as I'd imagined and hoped. Which doesn't mean it didn't go really well, just that I always imagine astronomic possibilities for any endeavor I undertake. As a delightful internet list, reasons the party went well:

-raised $800 dollars ($798 to be exact). As a portion of my total, doesn't sound huge, but it got me to within $400 of the $6500 mark. Wonderful!
-all my great friends pitched in, and it was fun: Colin got 250 bottles of beer donated (!!!); Dave and Marly booked comics and hosted & performed, respectively; Lee DJ'd; Tina, Sam, Trevor & Mike let me use their lovely backyard; Rizzi leant me a PA system; Keith brought some mic's and Bella the Dog to wander around; Charlyne and Mookie performed; Raj Desai performed, who I would like to call my friend but am still a little on the creep-stranger side for that; a few others helped just to get things set up last minute, especially Mike, Josie & Delia; and Justin really helped with picking up chairs and tables & swooping into BevMo to rescue me from my keg indecision (ANCHOR STEAM).
-people's 'tudes were swell, and getting them to toss donations in was relatively painless. I was really grateful for this.

The atmosphere was as cozy, familiar and specific, which is what I had wanted - I wanted people to get some genuine fun in return for their 10 bucks, and a community-based night as unique to our Angeleno microcosm as it gets.
The fundraising meta-lesson learned was: low overhead, fearlessly asking for volunteer help, negligible ticket price, keeping people happy. Everything I need to know about throwing fundraiser parties I learned from throwing house parties in college. DIY: Achieved.

WIP

Just got home from swimming and then bar with teammates, and I'm t i r e d. I'll start this post for daily posting technicality's sake, and then zzz-time.

Eastbound & Down loves picking on tri, and it's right on in a way that makes me feel horrible. Searing, missile-guided truth-sting. At about 1'45" into this trailer is the joke from the first episode that I can't rattle out of my head, and which makes me run for the thesaurus almost every time I write about tri now. A weeny, suburban, shit-grinning guy who thinks he's nice and got it sorted out says he does triathlons, and lays out the news waiting for the awed reaction he usually gets. Reaction: "I play real sports, I'm not trying to be the best at exercising."


More later....

Picture Feeling

Okay. Blogger won't let me toss a third photo onto the last post, forcing me to create a whole new post for one picture, which is...I'll say TRIPLY embarrassing as its just a big shot of my grinning mug on a bike.

Last Saturday on the century my teammate Floyd rode up behind me, whipped out his camera and grabbed this shot. He did it quickly enough I didn't have time to process more than "Camera equals smile," and I like it! I look happy, and I feel proud, remembering at the time - mile 15 of 100 - how well I felt the ride was going, how much progress I felt I've made.

One of my friends, Joe, I met while he was at SFSU on exchange from Britain. In the couple months we hung out, I drove him all around the place - up and down California, Vegas, the entire Bay Area - and he would buy a disposable camera about every week and take some fairly boring photos. Finally, being overly opinionated and far too forthright, I told him he was taking pictures of nothing he would remember, or nothing special enough to be memorable. He looked at me and told me one of the best things I've ever heard (as well as something that ages his comment at just before the digital watershed). He told me that he was taking a picture of what he was seeing at the moment that he was FEELING something he wanted to remember feeling, and that the vista he was capturing would basically just be a psychological mnemonic - that when he remembers trips, he naturally remembers the highlights, but then gets out these unremarkable shots and has memories flood in of the minutia that really made up the texture of an experience. Needless to say, beyond the fact that I'm proud of...well, LOOKING like a triathlete, the bigger importance of this photo for me is just that - it got sealed with everything I was feeling when the shutter closed. Here it is.

Illustration Post Counts Double

Vowing to post every day = best way to ensure you just pass the heck out two nights in a row. Last night I got in from my run at 10:12 pm and was asleep by 10:20 - and then I sprang up, chipper and literary, five minutes ago! Hello morning!

Let's just do a couple pictures. Three. Three pictures.

One of two chaffed-raw armpits after my 22 mile run on Sunday. Four days later they are healing well, but I have to run like a chicken and sleep with my sheets tucked right up in there. I BodyGlide 24 hours a day.


Dirt tan after the 22 miler. A good part was trail, I'm not just a filth magnet.

Funburn

You know, I wrote a whole other post a couple days ago and then just closed the browser. Like the red button was the publish button, I just cruised the mouse right up there and said Goodbye Forever. I don't even remember what it was about anymore, which brings us to a simple goal that I can't believe I'm making:

I have 25 days left until Ironman, and I'm gonna write something here every one of them.

It really shouldn't be hard, but I take it so hard when I don't do what I've said I would. Okay, so I'll just do it. Okay.


I did a lot of working out this weekend. "Shit ton" is an apt description, and the vulgarity suits a couple elements of both days. Generally, probably because there's only one real training weekend left, the unbidden theme my mind kept coming back to was Where I Used to Be, Where I Am, and Where I Still Have to Go.

Where I Used to Be
-once I'd committed to doing this, but before training started, I went out a ran a few times for, I'm guessing, about 30 - 40 minutes. Our first training session at Griffith Park was a 40 minute run - 20 out and 20 back - and I ran harder than I was used to, keeping up with some of my teammates for the first time. I had to walk a little bit at the end, and talked with Coach Paul while he rode next to me, about picking a point up ahead to keep running until, or to start running again upon reaching.
-I used to run at the gym! On a treadmill! HOLY FUCKING MOLY, DUDES.
-I used a stationary or recumbent bike at the gym! A few times! For like an HOUR. Pure torture.
-I'd come home and make a bowl of pasta 1.5 times the normal size and think I was really getting away with something.
-I got away with washing my hair maybe...once every 2 days.
-Haha, I just remembered: I used to go around Echo Park Lake twice, and then come home. Are you waiting for that sentence to stretch out? It's not going to. Remembering rules.
-I didn't take squat with me to eat or drink, used to be. I suppose I took a bottle of water on the bike, and once we got over two hours I grabbed a PowerBar. The first time my calves cramped so hard I couldn't get out of the pool was the first time I realized I needed hydration every workout - when I almost fell over getting onto dry land because my leg muscles were actually in too much shooting pain to be useful, and my coach smirked and said, "Welcome to Ironman." In 7 years as a teenage swimmer, I had never experienced anything like this. It was strange and totally fascinating.

Where I Am
-Saturday, July 4, 2009 - up at 5 am, on the road at 6, biking out of a parking lot in Moorpark, CA at 7 am. By 10:30 I am 50 miles away, in Malibu. 6 hours and 12 minutes after I started, I'm back in the parking lot, my second 100 mile ride a fact. Then I eat 6 pieces of pizza.
-Riding into a headwind that won't allow me to go faster than 7 miles an hour for 25 miles elicits only ONE occasion of actual out-loud profanity.
-Sunday, July 5, 2009 - running by 9:40 am. A 3.5 mile loop up into Elysian Park behind my home, then a couple miles to the reservoir. Around that three times (6.6 miles) - at the end of the second loop I can feel my armpits starting to chaffe a bit, and I'm worried I haven't put enough BodyGlide on them. By the time I leave the reservoir to head to the lake (around that twice), I know they are going to be raw, but what am I going to do? Stop this run? I pitstop by my house for a third Gu - eating a Gu is the grossest sensation on earth, a grossness not tempered by your body's pure desperation for ANY nutrition, and I choke-gulp it down every time - and then go back up the park to do the trail loop a second time. 22 miles, total. A thing I do on Sundays.
-There are chaffings that, a day later, are now scabbing over, in both armpits. My right Achilles tendon is surprised that I'm such a jerk every time I attempt to go down stairs. Other than these things - maybe that should read "even with these things" - I'm in a great mood.

Where I Still Have to Go
-140.6 in a day. Four hours of running gives you time to wonder how it will feel to be doing the same after 8 hours of biking (the swim being such a long forgotten fact as to be inconsequential). I can't say. I don't know how much pain it will take to get through it, but I know I will. It's a strange but calm thing to feel, and turn over in your quiet head. Technically I suppose I don't know I will make it through - but...? I do? I just do.
Haruki Murakami, who I haven't quoted in awhile but quietly guides my training, has a simple phrase his brother told to him - Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. Thinking that sentence through a couple times gives me a gentle brow furrow - it strikes the simplest chord in me in terms of running/biking/swimming, but it's a chord of such resonance that I come to understand how this entire activity - not tri, but the journey - is reverberating in my life. I'm an Overthinker and a Dweller, as well as an epic Feeler of Feelings - REAL ones, guys! Big old real FEELINGS, you know? - and I hope that when the lessons of this experience settle into my self in a few months, I'll have learned how to step back, and breathe, and think, then act, and then step beyond the Thought Thing.
-Deep into my run on Sunday, I finally let myself realize that I want to apologize for something, a way I mistreated a friend about a year ago, an underestimation of how my actions could impact someone else. The crucible that lets physical movement sublimate into psychological reaction and reasoning is still something I am learning to articulate. It could be a factor of pure alone time - you come to think about almost everything, so certainly failings come line up to get considered. But I suppose it is stretching out for hours the place of being Weak Strong is how, for now, I'll choose to explain it. You come to face some limits, or at least some literal pain, and understand that just yourself is both what keeps you from going further and the only thing you have to continue. With only the purest of external inputs - the temperature, time passing, the quality of the road or your running shoes, maybe an appointment you have later in the day - the internal becomes everything. It is the reason you are three hours into a run, the excuse you think of to stop as well as the motivation you find not to listen to the excuse; it is the signals traveling up the legs or from the stomach to become Who shouts saying "Feed us or stop,"; and it is the flabbergastment (yep) of Mile 20 making Mile 22 inevitable. I can't explain it better than that for now, and I'm as amazed and grateful to have experienced it as I am wary that I sound like a hippie in explaining it. I suppose it is a pride that understands its own relationship to necessarily humility so well that...I don't understand well enough yet to write the sentence correctly. I will sleep and see what I come up with in the morning.