What Two Inches of Seat Post Feels Like (That's What She Said)

What do I possibly have to say? What is there? I'm so tiiiiiiired of training. I want my life back. Ah, that's not true. I do want my life back, but I'm not sure if I'm tired of training - I'm still making gains.

I'm still proud for having done the century ride last weekend. I swam just under 2 miles today. Yesterday - no new distances, but I rode with a bike that fit me properly for the first time and WOW! I can ride my bike, it turns out. Went fast, kids; I'd say I started to lose the line between a person on a machine and an organ-muscle machine riding an aluminum one, but the sweat, aches and occasional crankiness kept my wah-wah humanity front and center. My first impulse is to say it was exciting to feel my potential opening up, but I feel more like a basic frustration melted away - I wasn't fighting anything, and my bike was letting my legs do what they were really capable of. $200 well spent? Sigh. Probably. Ugh.

Getting really stressed about the fundraising, and opening myself up to the possibility that I'll be going out-of-pocket for what I can't raise between my current $4300 and the $6500 I need. I have 80% of a party planned, but a couple details just won't settle themselves...and the training schedule doesn't leave a whole lot of time for much besides work and tri. But! It's what I signed up for, so ahead I charge.

My brain feels flattened out.

Bike Fit, Schedule Insanity & 100 Mile Ride

Dateline: Overwhelm City.

Okay, that's as conceptual as I'm getting. I don't have time for brain things. Today I will talk about:
-how busy I am with tri and with the things that I wanted to get motivated on, hiding from which and getting pumped for which were the reasons I signed up for tri
-getting a Not-New New Bike
-and oh yeah that century ride this weekend

So. How did I ever get signed up for Ironman? I was walking along, doing my desk job, minding my own post-collegiate beeswax, thinking about my dreams and goals and how I have a lump in my throat about how to start achieving them. I felt like I was cresting the hill of not being scared, but wasn't quite there, and I needed to prove something to myself. Creepily, Danielle Hinde IM'd me pretty much RIGHT as I had this realization, and told me I should do Ironman. And that folks, is how 9 months of body mutilation happens!
But. It worked!
I'd barely started training in December when I started pursuing the insurmountable dreams in the rest of my life. I met the kids I've been waiting and wanting to meet in my LA life, and wrangled a few of them into a directing / producing / whatever group - still finding its feet, but that door became more doors, and understanding what I'm good at and want to do out here in Hollywood. So now I find myself planning to make a pilot in the fall. That's interesting! That's real stuff!
What it brings us to is how full to the brim all my minutes are...work is 9-6, working out bookends my days, and when I can fit it I'm making plans for the big stuff after the finish line. And this week I am having to get my fundraising party together, to close that last $2000 gap. Even while I know I need to keep Ironman up top for just another month and a half, my mind is moving beyond it to the things I feel really ready to tackle after the experience it has given me. Again: it worked! Tah dah! The metaphor lives! The girl struggles to breathe!
PHEW!

Next thing: I got a new bike! Except I didn't! This is a very good time to acknowledge how much I have or haven't abandoned the "on a shoestring" premise I originally had for the training and the blog.
I've spent a lot more money than I wanted to on this. I've spent a lot less money than most people would have. I've spent money only when I couldn't justify not doing it any longer. All this adds up to my having spent a lot of money much later than I should have, and giving myself a lot of indecision headaches in the meantime. I still don't have a wet suit, because a teammate has leant me theirs for so long I've forgotten I still have another $160 to lose. I'm not going to Vineman training weekend, because I saw the course so intimately last year that I can't justify the cost of travel, hotel and a day off work one month before I do it for real - even though this will probably be an excuse for anxiety in one way or another. I run without a water bottle more than I should because I don't want to buy a jersey or a run belt that will let me carry it - I toss it in bushes along my route. Etc.
The most worrisome thing I've put off has been the bike fit. When I bought the bike in December, the shop roughly fit it to my body and expected I would be back for a fit quite soon, since the shop is run by people with enough experience that they are sensible and believe no one would put their own discomfort above shelling out $100 for a fit. I sure showed those jerks. And then they showed me back by actually charging $175. I don't know where I got $100 from, probably made it up.
As our mileage has crept up, the pain in my knees has gotten increasingly excruciating. Touch the back of your knee with your leg extended - feel those sinewy bits on each side? Those - on both knees - feel like they want to snap after about mile 70. It was scaring me, along with how bright red the fronts of my knees would get. I'd noticed that each time a teammate got a bike fitting, they seemed to really improve. All of this = Sunday found me at Cynergy cycles, biting my lip about the 200 bucks.
Usually in a fitting, there are a lot of pretty small adjustments that get made - the seat post goes up or down a couple centimeters, a new seat post or handle bar stem goes in that brings it forward or back a couple centimeters, etc. We ended up raising my seat two inches. Extraordinary. I've been told I'm effectively riding a new bike, and boy does it feel like it.
Full disclosure forces me to mention that I also traded out my half-platform pedals (for commuting in pedestrian shoes) for, uh, I don't know what they are called - here's a picture:

And of course you can't get Speedplay Light Action Pedals (looking for a picture necessitates actually figuring out what they are called, ironically) and plan to use them with your ancient mountain biking shoes that you have been using all season in the name of not spending money...especially when the last pair of Specialized BG Pro Road Shoes with Body Geometry Engineering and Lightweight FACT Carbon Soles are on "sale" for $190 and every time you touch them in the store a new employee or customer walks up and goes "OH! Those are AMAZING!" OF COURSE YOU CAN'T DO THAT! OF COURSE YOU MUST SPEND THIS MUCH MONEY! Your knees!!! NEED IT. Oh, did you want a picture?

I'm trying to remember if I've ever, in the style of a cartoon Rich Guy funding his Young Beautiful Mistress' every shopping whim, actually felt faint when receiving a total before. Oh wait, it was in December, when I paid $1,600 for a bike. You would think that would have toughened me up for Six Hundred Dollar Sunday. It's an investment in my future / continued ability to use my knees, right? That's what she said.

Geez blogging makes me tired! No, wait. Disorganizedly trying to jam three blog posts into one blog post makes me tired. No, wait. Planning my fundraising party while writing a horrible blog post makes me tired. No, wait. Planning my party while blogging while trying to get my work at work done so I can leave it time to make it to swim practice makes me tired. Yeah, that's it. No, wait. Planning my party while blogging ABOUT SPENDING ALL MY MONEY while working while swim practice looms makes me tired. Yeah. When do I get to be President? I'm ready!

In other news, I rode 100 miles on Saturday. Anaheim to San Diego. 6 hours, 26 minutes. Anything else I could say about it is going to have to be officially filed under "Fell Through the Cracks."

BYE!

Wildflower: The Bike

I was pretty excited to get out of the water and onto the bike, since I felt good. Before my swim start, wandering around in the transition area, I had almost been run over by some pro's doing their bike-to-swim transition - for them all it consisted of was ripping of their wetsuit, clipping on their helmet, grabbing their bike and running to the bike start line - their shoes were clipped onto their pedals, and I guess they just jam their feet in once they are on. This is nuts, not to mention sockless. Have I said already that I think one of the coolest things about this sport is that you are in the same race as the best people in the world at it? Not that I would say we are competing. They are just there, being freaks, quite close, and that's interesting.

So. I ran to my rack, I ripped off my suit, pulled my jersey on, socks on, shoes on, gloves on, sunglasses on, helmet on, grabbed my bike and ran. James and Justin were right at the mounting line - neat again! Here's a picture they took! I'm the one in blue looking way more action-y than whoever THAT is next to me.

Weird energy took me up the first mini-hill standing and through the first mile, just until I began the ascent up Beach Hill. Then I did what I normally do when met with scary hills on the bike: can't stop my eyes from going all big and scared, wonder how I'm going to make it, put my head down, and start pedaling. Look, sorry reader, but Fuck the Guy who put a 1 mile climb + less severe but still WHAT climbing for another 3 miles after that right after I get out of the water. DID YOU SEE? I SWAM A BUNCH? WHAT'S YOUR ISSUE?
Point being that even though I powered up Beach on the practice weekend, on the day I actually pulled over, put my right foot on land for 30 seconds, WTF'd a couple times, and kept going. WhatEVER.

The special thing about being a good swimmer and a mediocre cyclist is getting passed every 5-10 seconds for basically the entirety of the bike course. Meh. The weather was nice, I tried to enjoy myself, and I was averaging about 1.5 - 2 mph faster than I had a month before. There's just not much to complain about.

As the miles counted up to 41 and the dreaded Nasty Grade, my brain got a bit cloudy. I was doing a lot of negotiating with myself - I essentially accepted that I would be walking my bike up Nasty, but left a small sliver of a chance that I might surprise myself. I think this sort of giving up was the only option I had besides berating myself for not believing in myself outright, and so was some perverse respite and good mental survival option. Have I not explained Nasty Grade and the black cloud it built in my brain? Here's a course elevation:
You don't need to understand much to see that piece of crap matterhorn towards the end. GROSS. They - the tri community, universally - call it Nasty Grade, no article. That's its name, it's personified. You know the only soulless things that get names like people? Demons. The point is I was ready to walk the last bit of Nasty.

The way Nasty works is this: you start climbing, and its a good, consistent grade for about 3 miles - you (if you are are me) can go about 10-11 mph up this - down from a usual 17 or so. The breeze drops away, so there is suddenly no noise but your gears, your breathing, the leather of your shoes heaving, and your inner monologue. The road winds, and as you turn corners, the pack of cyclists goes in and out of view - a scattered mass of backs in colored jerseys, rhythmically humping up and down as they slowly power up ground you have not quite reached, which part of you doubts you will reach as they have reached, which part of you takes their having reached as proof that you can reach, a scattered mass that understands you but is not doing this with you, that you are part of having your very private struggle. The experience is not unique, but the struggle makes it very specific, and this sense of going in and out of individuality and community is strange - I think it is a pendulum of continuance as much as the muscles.

Nasty turns a few times, flattens out slightly a few times - has a water stop just before the last big surprising turn, where kids are handing out water bottles and high fiving, which is as cartoonishly heartening as if I were a marooned WWII paratrooper being given bread by village children. The kids really helped. JESUS I KEEP SWITCHING TENSES AND VOICE. That's a sign of trauma, right??

So the real dirtbag thing on Nasty is there is this steep climb that leads to a sharp left - its one of those turns that disappears off and to the left in a way that just has to be a crest, it has a telephone pole at the top that looks so alone that the wires can only be falling off to where you can't see, and this. just. has. to be. the end. You ride up, using the pole as your goal - when you get there, you're there, you're there, and you crest and turn...and there is this unbelievably straight, dishearteningly steep...climb...still ahead of you. Betrayal is palpable, and the wrinkles in your brain become question marks - why is this happening? What haven't you proved? Why was that turn built like a trick ending? So this is where I had told myself I could walk. I knew the trick turn was there, and I was convinced I would be tricked by it. I turned the corner, and my memory of the sight of this climb and the actual sight of this climb left their red and blue corners of the ring, ran towards each other and became the 3D knowledge of the climb that I was really on. While those reckonings met, I found myself still pedaling, all the heaving backs ahead of me pedaling...I don't know why I didn't stop. The climb was surely not what I had made it in my head, in weeks of anxiety; not that it wasn't a beast, but not the beast I had expected. A guy in a speedo on the side of the road holding an inflatable woman told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world, and I'll tell ya - platitude as pure jet fuel - the power of just a bit of humor to put the worst suffering into perspective! I could see a teammate up ahead, powering up standing in her pedals, and I was climbing at 4.5 mph - a month earlier I'd been barely managing to keep my bike upright at 3 mph. I have no idea where the will comes from, but it bubbled up, and like anonymous cyclists had called out to me in the same spot a month earlier - Nasty didn't last forever.

The rest of the ride was still climbing, still struggle, and not comfortable at all. But it just doesn't need recounted - that is, my self doesn't need to remember and relive those last miles, because they weren't where proof happened. The hill was the hill and the hill was what I made it, and I got up both.

Procrastination via Dreams

I have a giant post to write about WILDFLOWER, but instead I'm recording my two worst anxiety dreams....the Wildflower post will be heady, I need a couple hours to relive it.

CHEESE WHEELS
This dream struck about...hmm Tuesday before Wildflower, so five days prior. It started as a run-of-the-mill anxiety dream, with the bike course refreshing endlessly out in front of me, ineffective pedaling, hills growing cartoonishly steeper in front of my eyes. Eventually, I found myself on the backside of the course - hitting the course up a month early to help visualization also makes your crappy dreams more accurate and frightening - amongst the wildflowers. The more I pedaled, the more I felt like I was going nowhere; assuming I had a flat, I looked down at my tires to find they were made of cheese, and the more I pedaled, the more the friction melted them away. So I pulled over into the technicolor flora, put my bike upsidedown, and had a hard think. I wanted to CHANGE the tires to wheels NOT made of cheese and finish the race, but I also wanted to EAT the wheels. I cried on the side of the dream road.
Ding!
The team said they were going to nickname me Cheese Wheels after hearing about this, but NOTHING DOING. I'm as nicknameless as the day I was born.


COACH FIGHT
This is actually becoming its own genre of dream, as this is about the third like it I've had. Ostensibly it's about my insecurity that my coaches LOVE me, and how much I want to please them and hop around like a kid and have them love my ebullience; on a "Oh, that's for real" level, its about how I feel I am not as dedicated to the training as I should be, how I make excuses, and how I beat myself up for this even while unconscious. HEAVY.
The actual dream was a practice we were apparently having in a Van Goghian cypress forest - the scenery was painterly, the sky textured 3D with gesso and painter's medium, the field crowded with looming trees. We were all there for bike practice, and had all our stuff, but I had forgotten my helmet. There was enough of a delay for one reason or another that I apparently had time to ride back to my house to get it, but I was over a barrel about wanting to do so - I don't know why. So I whined and whined and asked everyone whether they thought I should go get it, taking up the time I needed to go get it, and knowing it. Finally Coach Paul took me aside and in words I can't even remember enough to paraphrase, but remember the sharp sting of acutely, told me all I ever do is make excuses; to grow up and stop. The dream ends there as far as I know.
I feel pretty bummed out to even relate how lamely I treat myself when the answer is to just stop being lame and then lamer in retribution, but....that quandary lies smack at the nexus of WHY. Why I signed up for this in the first place. The WHY that I circle around while I'm out on the course. In all things - I think I can, and largely I know I can - and I still back off where it really counts. WHY.
I should say that I had this dream on Monday night - two days after doing the hardest thing I've ever done, and being pretty proud of it, too. Back to the grind.


WOW SORRY DUDES
Next post is VICTORY post I sweeeeeaauuhrrrrr

Rage like a Baby

I either did not set or never heard my alarm this morning, and woke up at exactly the time I should have been 30 miles away, hopping onto my bike with the rest of the team for a 60 mile ride. When I realized what I had done, I decided to drown my frustration with myself in a deep pool of more sleep. However, I didn't plan on another FIVE HOURS of sleep, and thus found myself gearing up for a four hour ride at 12:30 today - I had an inner tube to change, and a new double-water bottle holder to mount (for a total of FOUR water bottles being carried on my bike) before I could get started.

I didn't want to drive the car to a superior path or mountain or blah blah, so I just left the house and headed for Griffith Park and the LA river. My whole goal today was to keep my average speed above 15 mph if I could, and try and bring my 60-mile time a bit below four hours. I figured since the river path was mostly flat I'd do okay. I was wrong. Not dead super gross regrettably wrong, but wrong.

The loop I'd set, from Fletcher & Riverside to Forest Lawn & Barham, is apparently not that long - 7.71 miles each way, so just about 15 in total. It looks like this:
Objectively a 15 mile loop seems like that should just about do you, but something was really demoralizing about having been in the saddle for a couple hours and knowing I needed to loop around two more times. This coming from someone who spent 3 hours a day from age 8 to 16 turning around every 25 yards in a swimming pool. I just wasn't going as fast as I wanted - I kept up 18 - 20 mph on the flats, but felt totally brutalized by the slightest hills. Probably from trying to burn on the flats. Sigh.

Eventually I decided to ride into the park and try and do the Griffith Park Dr hill, which was probably a good choice - I was going miserably slowly at the bottom, trying to just keep moving without using my two lowest gears, and about 60% of the way up I decided to just stand, which is really laborious & generally a frightening prospect to me, and to not stop standing until I reached a particular "Horse X'ing" sign. By the time I'd reached the sign, the crest of the hill had come into view, about once again the distance from when I'd stood to the horse sign, and I decided I had it in me to reach the crest. That little victory was lovely, and the 28 mph decent felt nicely earned.

Then I went back to that stupid loop again...Somewhere around 3 hours, I got angry. Really irrationally angry. I think the first time I ever got angry in this mode, where you try and resist it, knowing its stupid, but it just gets out of control, was one time Kevin & I were on a road trip, exhausted, and I had three pieces of bacon at some crappy breakfast place. He kept joking that he'd take one, and I kept laughing while fighting the creeping annoyance the whole thing gave me, and when he ended up grabbing one, I lost it so badly all I could do was swerve verbally between screaming at him and laughing, and felt like I was going actually crazy from the disparity between how retarded I knew I was being and how nuclearly upset I was. The visual of my fork going into the back of his hand made me feel both more creeped out by myself and slightly relieved. Maybe a weird aside, but I thought a lot about the bacon thing during the last hour and a half of my ride.

At one point I rode over probably not that big of a rock, and the jolt it gave me translated into a flash of red in the neanderthal part of my brain - shouting "Motherfucker!" through gritted teeth five times seemed, to whatever part of my mind wasn't being an asshole, like not the best solution, but it got me through. Immediately after I stopped shouting, the back of my bike made a weird noise that felt like the wheel was falling off, and I angrily RIPPED my feet out of their clips, pulled the biked over and shouted at the bike before even trying to see what was wrong. 20 feet back, the new water bottle cage was sitting in the road - as it was falling from the seat post, it was dragging on the back wheel, which was the noise, and really a pretty okay problem to have. I still had 20 miles to go, and really wanted to make it in 4 hours, so I didn't want to take the time to reinstall the cage. Result: it's still on the side of Forest Lawn Drive, under a shopping bag under a tumbleweed - I'm not joking, thank god for LA trash - and I'll go get it later when I'm not angry at it anymore.

So kept riding, etc etc, getting pretty angry and my legs increasingly ineffectual - these are the moments where I realize what I'm attempting, and somehow that thought actually bears some fortitude, and its the pain & annoyance, I guess, that somehow are what allow you to keep going. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Goals. Huh.

In the end, got home 3'54" after I left, and had done 56 miles. I stopped checking my distance after 42 miles, and stopped checking the time after 3'30". Just kept my ass in the saddle.

Ignorance is the only thing making this possible

That's part of a hill. I climbed it this weekend! And now I'm all about self congratulation. Here, look at it like this!:
Yeah, I dunno! You can tell there's the ocean on one end and a mountain on the other, and from what I know about oceans being low and mountains being high, I reckon that's a real ride.

Somewhere in the middle of the 10 mile climb, I figured out the key to training for Ironman: don't pay as much attention as you should when they explain what you're about to do. I didn't realize it was a 10 mile climb, or that it was around 2000' up, or that I'd be climbing for a solid hour and change - although all of those facts together still probably would have found me mostly in the dark. At some point, you just get on your bike, and decide you won't get off it until you get to the top. That's how you climb Latigo Canyon.

I also want to give the first ever Gnarly to the Max Award to my coach Paul, who biked up behind me, said I needed to pedal harder, and then PUT HIS HAND ON MY BACK AND ACTUALLY MADE ME GO FASTER. By pushing me! While he also was on a bike. Going up hill. W. T. F. Amazing.

Other things I learned / figured out:
-standing up in your seat IS really helpful, for the 20 seconds I can manage it
-going downhill at 25 - 30 mph for 10 miles is really. really. fun.
-don't not take a water bottle on the hour-long run after the bike ride

Aaaaaand as a little icing on the cake, the free masseuse that rubbed me down after the work out told me I have one of the tightest IT bands (the helpful tendon that connects my knee to my femur / hip along the length of my thigh!) he's seen recently, and that he thinks it could snap. I need to talk to my coach.

I still have a permanent personal Chemical Brothers soundtrack going in the back of my brain after doing that climb though. I'm rawesome!

SHAME (& Minor Victory)

OH MY GOD. It's been THREE MONTHS since I wrote anything here! Ridiculous.
My guilt muscles are pry the most active in my body, and when the holidays bled into January and I hadn't written, I got all blah blah; which made it easier for January to become February, etc.....silence.

The quiet on the writing front does not, however, correspond to a break in training, and I figured today was a good day to say:
I RODE MY BIKE SIXTY MILES TODAY, and boy are my legs tired.
My butt hurts. Like. HURTS.
I have a weird tan on my arms, where I pushed up but did not take off my long sleeved shirt.
My knees are looking at me like "WTF?"

I haven't been on a bike since around....February 17th or so. Travelling around Australia is not much conducive to cycling for 3 hours every few days. The point of which is that I was shitting bricks before this morning's ride, and I feel like I did okay. I kept an average speed of 15 mph, which isn't great, but takes into account the hills where I chugged along at 6-9 mph, and the headwinds I was dealing with for the last, oh, 2 and a half hours of the ride.
I know I need to get that average up...at that rate I'd take 8 hours on the bike on race day. Wait, that's not that bad actually. Hmmmm!

Someone the other day asked how I don't get bored on long runs / rides, and I thought about that a lot today. The closest thing I can figure out is this:
1. Generally my brain is way overactive, and being forced to have nothing to think about except, often, keeping going, is a really nice experience, and I feel much calmer mentally than usual. Which I guess is the opposite of what you might expect.
2. Any thoughts I do have, which tends to be me trying to plan things - work stuff, writing stuff, paying bills stuff - aren't really ever able to go on for longer than a minute, really, before they get interrupted by thoughts about continuing to keep the pedals going around / the feet in front of the other / the arms pulling & legs kicking, checking the timer, drinking water, adjusting in the saddle, etc. Which again I think is an improvement, as temporary thought un-pattern, over my usual circular routine.

I read Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running in about a day and a half while on vacation - I'd wanted to read it for awhile, and was stunned to find whatever he's talking about sounds, to me, just like me regarding distance events. He had this to say about what he thinks about while running:

I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.
On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on the hot days. When I'm sad I think a little about sadness. When I'm happy I think a little about happiness. As I mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don't think much of anything worth mentioning.
I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People's minds can't be a complete blank. Human beings' emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.
The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn't exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn't. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.

Which reminds me: the ride today was on the Pacific Coast Highway, and shortly after I turned around, in a few nice minutes where there wasn't strong wind or a hill and I was able to chug along nicely, a seagull flew alongside me at head height - two minutes at 18 miles per hour with a bird gliding with me. That's all I really thought about just then.

More on Why the Bike & Grr the Bike

Alright. I laid out some basics, and am going to skip straight ahead to the shop talk,
as that's essentially what happened for me in buying the bike.

Tri bikes, when one gets serious, are alien spaceships.

I was glad to know I had no interest in one of those, from either a practical stand point - I'm not good enough for it to make sense; a financial stand point - $4500+ anyone?; or an aesthetic standpoint - the high forms of any niche are an acquired taste.
I knew a couple of things: I would pry use it for commuting a fair bit, and therefore wanted something that was almost shitty enough that I wouldn't mind locking up. This isn't the last bike I'll buy, so it didn't need to be top of the line for my price point, but should be an educational bridge from single/fixie world to road-land. I did not want a ladies bike, as they all seemed to have condescending paint schemes.

The original plan, owing to my budget, was to have Charles Spano, friend and son of a custom frame builder, help me ebay a great bike. For around $500. I want to be clear that this would have been totally possible, had I more persistence, time, and trust that everything would ultimately be okay. Even my coaches were alright with this plan.
In order to shop at distance, I needed to make sure I knew my frame height correctly, so I went down to Cynergy Cycles in Santa Monica to get a rough fit, and ride some Specializeds.

Long story short: I ride an Allez, which is the bottom of the good line of basic road bikes. It LOOKS H.O.T.

I want this bike. I want it. It costs $880.
That is $380 more than I had planned to spend.
I ride it. It rides well, but is a strange transition from my old Surly, which I think was too big for me, caused me to over-extend my upper body to the handle bars, but which I got used to, and I am still un-learning.
They urge me to ride the women's version of the same model, which looks like:

This is not a cool bike. It is almost pastel, and it has floral decals. The handle bar tape is THICK. This is rude.
I ride it, but I don't really pay attention to it, because I just can't make myself. This bike is $940. Hmph.

A week goes by, where I stress over whether I will be ROYALLY SCREWING myself by not getting a women's frame (mental freakout/hyperbole) and how dumb I am being to let aesthetics trump performance (mental abuse/hyperbole), and the feeling that if I'm dropping that much dough, I should get what I damn well want (clarity/sanity).
One day, driving on a random street, I go, You know what? Screw it. It's MY damn bike, lots of ladies rode man bikes for long enough, I'll be FINE, and then when I eventually get a ladies bike, I'll know whereof the differences lie.

I go back to Cynergy.
I ride the Allez again, and crazy Randall the world's ultimate salesman soothes my fear that I should be buying a women's, and says its okay to get the Allez. It's a nice bike. I say to Randall, just to be educated about this, let me ride the Dolce (women's frame) one more time. Except they don't have the Dolce I rode last time in my size. Now all they have is a Dolce Compact. This bike has nicer gears than the Allez or the first women's bike I rode. This is dangerous. This bike costs $1600.
I ride it, for about 5 minutes.
I didn't cry, but I could have.
It was a massively better bike, and you could feel it from the first moments. This is a machine I am going to be on for hours at a time, covering 100's of miles. I have no money, but I want to do this for myself. I want to go to the outer limit of what I am comfortable with financially, and get a bike that will make me love this race.
I buy it.
I go into overdraft, unwittingly (I thought I had $3000!) at that moment.

Possibly more troublesome, it looks like this:

Puke. Really. Puke.
Apparently the CEO of Specialized had been at the store 30 minutes before I came in to ride. That was my chance to let someone know. Instead, I'll probably just paint the frame. What's another $100-300 at this point, right?

I'm in deep.

Sixteen-Hundred Dollar Shoestring

If I don't finish the race, then MAYBE I'll have something bigger to fess up to than what I'm 'bout to fess up. Maybe.

I bought a bike, and its fantastic. I spent $1600.
How much is that to me? Two months' rent. Somewhere not much less than one month's paycheck. Twice my annual car insurance premium. 53 months of gym membership. 20 pairs of running shoes. Probably the approximate Blue Book value of my 2001 Corolla.

How did I get here? Why am I okay with it? Why do I think its not a total derailment of the "Tri on a Shoestring" philosophy? Tuck in, this entry's gonna be a doozy.

BIKES.
If you're not young and familiar with the cannibalization of competing genres of youth culture, you might not be aware that bikes are a hot, burning topic. I've tried to stay mostly out of the fray, and know enough to not destroy my bike, and to vaguely understand why the bike moves the way it does when I push on the pedals.
My last bike (R.I.P) - which was also my first "adult" bike, i.e. a purposeful purchase, and not a movement machine that happened to drift into the maw of my life - was a 54cm Surly Steamroller flip-flop that I rode single at first, and then fixed. I'm going to go ahead and tell you what all that meant, since it was all bewilderment to me until about 8 months ago. Let's break it down a phrase at a time.

54 cm The size of the frame - the most basic and rude measurement for fitting yourself to a bike. It refers to the seat tube post (that's pretty self explanatory if you're looking at a bike), though from which exact point to which other point varies slightly between manufacturers. I believe, but could be wrong, that from the center of the pedal-gear thing to the top of the tube is the measurement. Anyone?
I was happy on this frame, which was probably ignorance. I'm on a 51 now, and I feel sort of squished, but I can feel my body having an easier time getting up power.
The big throughline of the bike buying experience has been getting a women's vs a men's frame, and I'd like to drop on you a fundamental difference in physiologies that entails the need for frames to be built and sized differently: short torso/long legs (women) vs. long torso/legs (men). See how that combo can mean that, even sex being constant, two people of the same height might need a different size bike? Know this.

Surly Steamroller I'm not going to get into this too much, but this was a BAD ASS bike. Steamroller for ruhlz, that thing could jam through any pothole, crappy surface, get hit by a car, and sustain no damage. Amazing. Steel frame but light. When I first got onto an aluminum Specialized, I was disturbed to describe the sensation of the ride as "hollow" - the lighter frame and better shock absorption meant I wasn't "feeling" the road as much, and this freaked me out. Think Corolla - reliable, sturdy, economical - vs whatever your Mommy drives - smooth, quiet, clearly more expensive. It was like that. God I miss that bike. God I love my new one.

Flip-flop/single/fixed//road/track Explaning this is almost totally unpalatable to me, so strong do opinions run...I'll just try and succinctly relate my experience.
I bought the Surly as flip flop because I wanted to have something I could treat badly and still have be a workhorse, and was afraid to go totally fixed, because I didn't understand it. So I rode single for a few months - that means I had one gear, and could coast - I could glide along without the pedals/my legs moving, or even move them in crazy backwards circles.
People kept explaining fixed gear to me, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. One night, my friend Bryan flipped the back wheel (with a single gear on one side of the hub, and a fixed gear on the other), and I tried to ride fixed. It was unsettling - if the wheels are moving, so are the pedals. Get me? If that bike's a-rollin, your legs are a-movin' - whether you like it or not. So now I understood, mechanically, the deal, but didn't understand what the intrinsic value might be.
Closest as I can tell you, based on personal experience, is this (and this basically matches what anyone will say...I think...): you get better at pedaling, more evenly, and more appropriately to whatever you are trying to achieve, speed or strengthwise. You get better feedback from the bike on what it wants to be doing, and you adjust more instinctively. Your legs are the gears, so you know how hard you are working; exactly how steep or long the hill is; and how much resistance you really need to stop. I never rode without a brake lever, and after I got hit by a car because I couldn't stop fast enough with one brake, I got a second one put on.
I'll never say that any sort of gear system is better than another, but the weirdo versatility of fixed should be experienced. Mechanical symbiosis and geeky thing-love, where your bike suddenly becomes a beautiful horsey you want to pet and canter with forever, is the best way I can explain it.

All of which is just set-up for the much more massive learning experience of buying the new bike, a 51 cm Specialized Dolce Comp. With a horrible paint job.
And why I head to bed with zero twinge of guilt that I've betrayed my mission or outspent my budget.
That'll have to be tomorrow's post.

All Systems Go

Arright arright arright.
Yeah yeah yeah.
I haven't blogged in a week. OKAY. But guess why? Becaaaaause....I've been busy...training! I work out twice a day now! Yay! Ugh! Awesome!

Let's start again, with a *little* less vernacular.
I think, for all intents and purposes, its not wrong to say that this week has been my first full week of training. I only had one day I didn't work out, I had two team practices, and I now own - at least some version of - all the equipment I will need.
Quick run down of the week's workouts, should you be curious:

Saturday
Ran in San Francisco. This was supposed to be a 40 minute easy run, which became an hour and a half-long odyssey, punctuated by walking backwards (cross-training!) up hills that were just not happening. I got lost deep in Upper Noe Valley, and spent literally 45 minutes running into & back out of streets that turned out to be dead ends. Whatever happened to "No Outlet" signs, SF? "Not a Thru Street," Gavin Newsom? Hmm?? The extra fun in this was that it was mostly on a hill overlooking the street I wanted to be on, and could have been, if I'd just committed to a sharp, steep tumble.

Sunday
nothing! ha!

Monday
Oh wait, nothing again. I lied before when I said there was only one day off. The curious thing about this rest day was when my body started to hurt. Around noon, I got growing pains. They throbbed gently until I went to bed. Interesting?


Tuesday
Morning - Swim, 45 minutes. LA Fitness Radio has some shockingly bad tunes. It's really stunning. Glad when I swim I only hear it while I'm in the locker room.

Wednesday
Morning - Bike, 1 hour. At the stupid gym again, but I did the recumbent bike this time. I'm not sure if this "counts", but I had sweat on my face and no bruises on my butt, so I think it was the right choice.

Thursday
TEAM SWIM PRACTICE!!!!! I don't really think of myself as an athletic person, but I do consider myself an athletic childhood person; I was ECSTATIC, in my own way, to be in the pool with 40 other people, to be circular swimming (!!!) after years of feeling bad for chasing down grandmas and loquacious Russians at the Y, and to smell grass from the nearby soccer field on the walk from and to the car.
It stuns me, occasionally, to realize how busy I was as a kid - swim practice twice a day, soccer a couple times a week, ballet once or twice a week, piano lessons - and to see how "busy" I feel now, without being as diversely developed as that. Mike (Rizzi, my training buddy) and I have talked about this a few times, but especially on Thursday. I also asked my Mom recently whether having us in activities was partially done so that Mom & Dad could have a little extra work time without having us be abandoned, and she said that was about half of it, the personal development being the other half. Trick! Good parent trick!

Friday
Morning - Run, 40 minutes. Beautiful morning in the neighborhood. Got further up Echo Park Avenue than I've been before. My first workout that felt slightly taxed the entire time; consequently, my first workout where I started to realize I'm pretty proud of myself.

Evening - Swim, 45 minutes. Again, felt a bit tired, but loved it.

Saturday
TEAM RUN!!! The run was haaaaaaaard, I was tiiiiiiired, but it also felt gooooood. At the end, some of us did stem cel donor test kits - 4 cotton swabs in the inside of your cheeks, then S.W.A.K. - for a teammate's friend. They'll keep my results on file until I'm 60. This was something my uncle Randy and his donor, Uncle Boo, went through....what an organization Team in Training is. It's easy to forget.

OMG I bought a bike after practice! It deserves its own long, impassioned post!

Sunday
Swam, 45 minutes. Can feel myself improving, though far and away the best part of the workout was the warm down, when I just splashed around for awhile. Water! So strange! People can't float on land, you know? It's COOL.

I have a lot of thoughts surrounding all this working out - I'm HUNGRY all the time - but for now I think they are the beginnings of larger thoughts developing. The really remarkable thing is the improvement in my mood generally. I don't really know where I stand on the kinesiological-psychological connection - where what my body does plugs into what my brain does, and vice versa, and how much I think they are interdependent - but there is definitely some mental garbage being expunged through movement. That's most of what I'm thinking about right now, how much I'm thinking right now, and more at peace with it being my own quiet process, rather than running at the mouth as much as I am wont to.

I Get Knocked Down

Remember yesterday when I was shaking, worried about spending more than $500 on a bike?
Today I went to the gym and did an hour on the stationary bike. That experience gave me no less than six reasons I have not only ZERO objection left to spending that much, but in fact an EAGERNESS to spend at least a good $900 to never have to live through that again. In no particular order, those reasons are:

1. "Tubthumping" - Chumbawumba
2. "1985" - Bowling for Soup, apparently
3. bizarre "I Just Can't Get Enough" remix
4. "American Idiot" - Green Day
5. no one would play racquet ball directly in front of my bike! only two courts over, where I could only see the ball every 10th hit!
6. BRUISES ON BOTH BUTT BONES.

It should be noted, however - as a surprise even to myself - that "Beautiful People" has a much more complex bridge than I had ever realized, and that I like that song. Huh.

Note to everyone ever: barring permanent winter, nuclear winter, being part of a Space Station Crew, or large money being in the bargain, never get on a stationary bike. It will not be worth it.

I made the hour though! Already, the MIND of a triathlete!

Rest Day = Nail Biting

Here is a thing that rules: I did not work out today.
My coach told me not to.

Here is a thing that does not rule: buying a bike.
I am sure I'm going to spend $800.
And you know what happens when I tell other triathletes I'm gonna spend that much?
"Dude, don't worry, you'll be okay on it!"
:(

I'm trying to do this thought exercise: remembering the 9-month-long anger and agony of being on an entirely unsuitable bike (some sorta mountain-road hybrid), and use that as mortar to build a little brick wall around my weeping impoverished heart.
Itwillbeworthititwillbeworthititwillbeworthit.

If you are reading this, I am totally open to you buying me a bike.
Mom. Dad. momdad momdad mom ad dad anyone anyone anyone Michel Gondry buy buy buy!

Decision, Tragedy & a Stupid/Great Run

What a weekend for training.

Thursday.
I made the decision to go full Ironman, and not a half.
I'm not really sure why, but I think its a combination of Danielle (the one that got me into this mess) pointing out that I'd be training alongside those doing the full, and remembering that at the end of my last race I felt disappointed, knowing I could have trained and raced harder/longer.
That's sort of depressing sounding and I hope doesn't say too much about me.
But.
I just feel like doing the half would hang over my head for the 8 months of training, knowing that I was selling myself and what I know I can do short.

Saturday.
MY BIKE GOT STOLEN OUT OF MY GARAGE.

My lovely Surly Steamroller that made me realize what biking could be, and quite literally were the wheels that got me in motion to make my entire life more what I wanted it to be - moving to a neighborhood I love, biking instead of driving, starting work on some scripts and editing, eating the way I want, gardening a bit, changing routines to habits I am more comfortable with for myself and the environment. The bike was the machine that I could feel myself being a part of, and something about that was the visceral realization I needed that life is easily lived the way you want it, and that its just a small hump to get over to make it that way.
And now its gone.

We have renter's insurance, but there's a $500 deductible, so the silver lining of using the coverage to buy a good tri bike is considerably tarnished.
Sigh.

Sunday.
Since the pool was closed and I DONT HAVE A BIKE ANYMORE, I went for a run.
and you know what?
JUST UNDER FOUR MILES!!! Route:

Small potatoes that will be down the line, but for not having run, for real, in years, I was really pleased.
Except for three things.
1. I put arch supports, needlessly, into my running shoes. I don't really have problems with my running shoes. But I put them in anyway. And got blisters on the entirety of the arches of both feet. It took three days for it to heal, and tonight will be my first run since Sunday.
2. A bird crapped on me on the run.
3. I rubbed my arm on the grass to get the bird poo off, and got hives up and down my entire left arm.


Well.
At least I ran.
BIIIIIIKEEEEE :( :( :( :(