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.