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!
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