Desert Duathlon Race Report

I stand by the start line watching the pros getting ready to start. I like to look at the pros. The men are kind of pretty in their skin tight clothes with their perfect muscled bodies. The airhorn goes off and they dash away.

This race is fun in a hellish sort of way. It’s set in McDowell Mountain Park, which is lush Sonoran desert with a LOT of hills. The race site this year was at the competitive tracks, which are popular with trail runners and mountain bikers. The trails were specially designed to test your skills in these activities and they do. While not technically difficult, they are challenging and some spots scare the bejesus out of me if I am mountain biking. There are loop de loops, hairpin turns, steep drops off, rocks and LOTS of climbing. Running them isn’t a piece of cake, either.

The age groupers are next. In addition to pros, this race attracts athletically gifted age groupers. I am not in this category. The men go first so they supposedly won’t run down the women. Finally, I am off.

The first run goes up a hill on the road and then to a relentless series of hills. The day is cloudy and cool with a layer of white fog hugging the distant mountains. You are surrounded by desert populated with Palo Verde tree, teddy bear cholla cactus and various bushes. I struggle to run hard. The terrain demands a lot of my legs. The ground is sandy and rocky and the trail goes gradually uphill for the first half with constant ups and downs. Supposedly, the theory is that you don’t go all out on the first run of a duathlon, but it wasn’t working out that way. My heart rate was higher than I planned, but I wasn’t about to slow down.

As I was running, I was thinking about transition. I had to get through it without getting a lot of mud on my bike shoes. If I got too much mud on the cleat, I couldn’t clip into the pedal. This might be tricky. I had noticed the amount of mud surrounding my bike prior to starting the race. The mud has a sticky, greasy composition. Once it attaches itself to something, it clings like cement.

I finished the run and ran into transition. Most of the bikes were already gone, of course, so at least I had a little dry ground to work with. I usually end up riding mostly by myself towards the second half of the bike ride and also running by myself the second run. Everyone else finished early. I had a good half an hour after they are done to contemplate my athletic inadequacies while I was racing. I got on my bike shoes and negotiated the bumpy carpet to the road. I couldn’t clip in to my pedals at first, but I knocked mud off of my shoes until I could.

The road bike loop is a lot of hills, like the runs. The bike route descends to the park entrance, turns left onto a highway, then turns around and heads back to the park. It then ascends to the north end of the park and turns around again. The park road has a rough surface and sucks the energy out of you. The road entices you with false flats and climbs that seem like they should be easier, but they aren’t.

The first part of the bike course is not too bad. The rain was holding off and I was still warm. I got passed on a hill by someone who was 64. She must have been really fast, at least that’s what I told myself. All of the pros and the fast age groupers were gone. I turned around and headed back to the park.

The climb to the park entrance is where all the fun begins. It’s a long, slow slog up a hill. I didn’t mind it today as much as I had in the past. I went by mile marker twelve. Really? Is that all? This ride was not going very fast. By now the bike course was really deserted, with only a few stragglers. I was hoping that I wouldn’t be doing the last run by myself.

I finally got to the top of the hill and then went thankfully downhill. I hit the final turn around. Then the ride started to get ugly. I had to climb yet another hill. I wasn’t making much progress and this was turning into one of my slowest bikes I had ever done in this race. The wind started to pick up and it was raining. My thighs felt like someone was whacking them with an iron rod. It was definitely a low point in this race. Last year this point was at the beginning of the race and uncomfortable, but not as difficult as it felt now.

I finally got to the end and went into transition. There wasn’t enough room to re-rack my bike and I had to push one over to get mine racked. I almost fell over and banged my shin on the teeth of the bike gear. I changed shoes and hit the second run.

My legs felt like lead and it was hard to run. This trail was harder than the first, with steeper ups and downs. I passed someone I knew, then another. There weren’t many people on the course and everyone seemed to be struggling. I didn’t have much speed left in my legs. Then it started to rain again. Super. At least my multiple layers of clothing were keeping me warm.

I finally saw the finish line and tried to speed up, but couldn’t. My final time was 2:43. It was one of those races I thought I survived, but did not conquer. Trying my best and finishing it should have been enough, but it wasn’t. I liked the challenge of pitting myself against the terrain, but it was the king and not me. It was so pretty and so mean.

IT’S WAR OUT THERE: BIKE RIDING RANT

I feel like every time I ride my bike on the streets, it’s a war between me and the cars. People either don’t want to yield to bikes or aren’t paying enough attention to bother to look if I am there. I have to always assume that a driver is going to act like an idiot, because if I don’t, I could get hurt.

WHAT DRIVES ME CRAZY:

1. The rolling stop. Are you going to run me over or not? Sometimes it’s a game of chicken to see who stops first. It pisses me off. I have learned to veer away from the car if I am not sure they are going to stop.

2. Failing to yield to me in a crosswalk when I have the "walk" sign. I have the right a way. Stop already. I know you have more important things to do than slow down for a mere bike rider, but I can sue your ass if you run over me.

3. Cutting me off. Drivers assume they can turn right in front of me without my body doing too much damage when it bounces off of their car, but it’s a dangerous gamble. I might get blood on your pretty clean car.

4. Honking and swearing at me for no apparent reason. If you are having a bad day, why don’t you go to a therapist or something. Don’t take it out on me.

5. Not giving me the legally required three feet of space. You don’t have to run me off the road. Really.

　
If I am not contending with idiot drivers, then I have to deal with bad street design. It’s obvious some intersections weren’t designed for anyone not in a car.

1. Intersections where I have to push the walk button in order to get across and the walk button is located in a weedy patch of gravel that I have to drag my bike over to get to. Some cities have the walk button right by the curb. Why can’t every city do that?

2. Intersections where you have to guess whether you have enough time to get through the intersection on a green light. Kudos to Phoenix for putting in countdown numbers for the light change. I wish this was everywhere.

3. Intersections that don’t have a right turn lane, but the drivers make an illegal one in the dirt on the side of the road. In one instance, I couldn’t even cross the road on the green light because cars wouldn’t yield to let me through.

4. Intersections where there is no crosswalk on the right side, so you either have to wait in the lane going straight and hope a car triggers the light or you have to cross the intersection in three places to get back to the right hand side of the road.

I don’t know if drivers are worse in big cities, but it seems like drivers in Phoenix have a need to go ten miles over the speed limit and have to be somewhere ten minutes ago. If I get a polite driver that lets me go through an four-way stop intersection, I get confused. I know some drivers hate cyclists. Some cyclists run through red lights, don’t stop at stop signs and generally act like traffic laws don’t apply to them. I think they are the exception and besides, they don’t kill anyone other than themselves if they make a mistake.

Sometimes I have a fantasy that all the cars are off the road and I can ride my bike without fearing for my life. Riding a quiet street is a relief because it restores my inner peace and I can relax. The war is over, at least for a little while. I try to ride on streets with low traffic, but you can’t totally avoid busy intersections. It helps to ride with people so that drivers are more likely to see you, but that isn’t always possible.

So, unless I want to ride on a trainer indoors all the time, which I don’t, I have to gird my loins and do battle with the metal enemies. Victory is getting home safely.

Turning Eighteen

Eighteen is a crossroads. It’s a time to grow up, to fly or fail on your own and to become your own person. This age seems like a beginning because at eighteen your whole life is ahead of you. You have yet to experience a lot of the amazing highs and lows of life. You get discover who you are and learn new things about the world in a new environment. You get to discover first love, if you haven’t already. You might go to college and study new subjects, meet new people and learn exciting new ideas that expand your mind.

My daughter Melissa turned eighteen in January. I don’t think a teenager magically turns into an adult at eighteen because everyone is different, with different life experiences and some teenagers are more mature than others. Technically, my daughter is an adult and is able to vote, sign legal documents and make loans. I think Melissa is fairly mature and smart, but she doesn’t have a lot of life experiences because she hasn’t been out in the world on her own. Most teenagers don’t at that age. I was fairly immature at that age myself and it took me years to learn what I probably should have known at a lot earlier age.

So eighteen is also an end because even though I will always be a parent, I feel like however good or bad parent I was, most of my job is done. I will still provide guidance, but I can’t make decisions for her anymore. She has to make her own mistakes. I feel a sense of relief and also fear. I won’t be around to protect her. I will have no control over what might happen to her.

I was never one of those gung ho mothers. It took me a long time to decide to have a child and by then it was almost too late. I haven’t been exposed to babies when I was a child, since I was the youngest and I felt kind of lost as a new parent. I found out that babies are pretty amazing and that they soak up knowledge at an astounding rate. But it is a relief when they are potty trained. Taking care of a child can be pretty boring, but then it’s delightful when they first learn to walk or have other milestones. Even at an early age, they seem like extraordinarily complex creatures. Their moods change instantly and sometimes figuring out what they want is impossible.

But I am ready to have less responsibility in my life for other people. For a while I was a wife, a mother and my mother’s caretaker when she had Alzheimers. I am no longer a wife and my mother has passed away. Living without a husband, I have gotten used to doing whatever I felt like, except I still had to take care of my daughter. She is fairly low maintenance and keeps out of trouble, but I still feel a little constricted. My ex-husband got to move away and re-marry and do whatever he wanted and I want some of that freedom. I want to come and go as I please, cook whenever and whatever I want, and not have to clean up after anyone but myself. I am ready to let her go.

My daughter has always surprised me. Because of her I have had experiences I would not have had otherwise. For a while she was into pets and begged for a dog. I had no desire to have another child who wasn’t potty trained, so I didn’t give in. She tried fish, which all died. She managed to starve a goldfish to death, which is still shocking to me. Then she tried parakeets, which are hardy pets that like people. They have never been to a vet and are thriving after ten years. Of course they shed feathers like crazy and poop prodigiously. I would have never thought to have birds if she wasn’t around.

She also is a member of her speech and debate team in high school. This is an activity I wouldn’t have pursued in my wildest dreams. It would have terrified me and I would have avoided it like the plague. Most people don’t like the idea of getting up in front of people and performing a memorized speech, but she does it, is good at it and likes it. I have judged in some speech tournaments and I am amazed at what some of these kids can do in their creativity and acting skills. Participating in speech seems to give her self confidence and improves research and writing skills. I admire that she acquired such self confidence, since it is not an easy attribute to have.

Another world she inhabits is anime. I think it’s part of her creative side. The people that follow it are in their own world and are obsessed with it. I don’t understand it and I can’t explain it. In pursuing this interest, she sews costumes. I know nothing of using a sewing machine, so she learned it on her own. My mother hated sewing and so do I, so I don’t know where she picked up the interest and the aptitude for it. It must be a recessive gene. She goes to conventions with her friends and they dress up like characters in anime stories. I find it baffling. It’s another thing I wouldn’t have had contact with if she hadn’t been around. Still it is part of her life and she has a whole circle of weird people who enjoy it with her.

Being a teenager, my daughter had her "moods". She gets crabby for no apparent reason and sometimes tells me when I say something that "I DON"T CARE". Sometimes, she isn’t fun to be around and she takes me for granted, assuming I will always be around to help or do things for her. She thinks I am hopelessly out of date with technology. She wants desperately to get out of high school and go somewhere far away from Arizona. Teenagers like to distance themselves from their parents and she is no exception.

I am hoping her transition into adulthood isn’t too difficult, because it’s hard and I can’t do it for her. She seems fairly independent, and I have faith that she can do it. I think the whole college thing will be a piece of cake for her and maybe she will get a job someday, hopefully soon.

I am looking forward to being an empty nester with excitement and trepidation. Excitement because of what might be in store with me and her; and trepidation because I might worry about her and because I might not like living totally alone. I am sure I will miss her. Although I will never again experience a first love, like her, it’s also my chance to discover who I am and learn new things about the world in a new environment. I could even go to college and study new subjects, meet new people and learn exciting new ideas. You don’t have to be eighteen to do that.

Facebook Rant

I love Facebook. Where else would you communicate with people you barely know, don’t know at all or haven’t seen in thirty years? I am finding out interesting stuff about these people. Sometimes you find out you have something in common. It’s like eavesdropping. How else would you know how inadequate your life is compared to everyone else by reading about how wonderful their life is? But certain things about Facebook really annoy me.

THE GAMES. I have no interest in playing games. I don’t like card games, board games, video games, nor computer games. I don’t answer game requests no matter how close you are to getting 10,000 points or if you lost your cow in Farmville. JUST LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE. I waste enough of my time on Facebook as it is.

THE LIKES. I don’t mind "liking" a nonprofit or a local business that I really use, but seriously "liking" some corporate entity like stupid Sears or something? I am not doing free advertising for anyone.

"CUT AND PASTE AND REPOST IF YOU AGREE". I am not cutting and pasting and reposting anything even if I do agree. It’s too much work. And it’s stupid. Where does this CUT AND PASTE AND REPOST stuff come from anyway? It’s a little weird.

FRIEND REQUESTS from people that I have absolutely no connection with. I have to wonder about these. Do they really want to be friends or are they just fishing for my information?

Inadvertently getting STATUS UPDATES from people I never want to EVER see again like my ex-husband. Unfortunately he is a contact for people that I actually want contact from. How else would I have learned that he re-married. I immediately blocked that little gem, but the damage was done. For a while he was coming up as a friend suggestion before I learned to block it. Unbelievable.

The constant "improvements". Why the hell do I have to re-do my profile just because some Facebook geek decides that the format isn’t good enough?

Despite all this irritating attributes, I will still keep using it. I don’t really have anyone to talk to at home except my daughter who sometimes isn’t in the mood to hear my comments and tells me she "doesn’t care". I know some people assume that’s it’s a substitute for real interaction, but sometimes it’s all you have. It’s fun to make comments and have other people go off onto tangents. It’s fun to learn that the people you barely knew in high school have the same interests as you. It’s useful for setting up get- togethers, networking or for sharing knowledge. But I will still bitch about it. And ignore Farmville.

2010: BLECH! Or Maybe MEH.

I can’t say that 2010 was a great year or a terrible year. It was kind of year where nothing major happened, good or bad. At least nothing really emotionally wrenching, like my divorce last year in 2009. The year was just a series of crappy little incidents. It was a re-building year for me, only I haven’t rebuilt much.

This was a year of large, expensive items breaking down. In January my dryer died. I hate it when appliances die. It’s like the universe is out of whack. Things are supposed to last forever. My car also had to have a starter and struts replaced. Who would have thought a nine year old car with 90,000 miles on it would wear out? The computer crashed twice and my kitchen faucet had to be replaced. My pool skimmer is not moving anymore, but I am ignoring that for now.

2010 was also the year I tried camping and racing. This was a mistake. I had an Xterra race in Show Low, which involves a swim, mountain bike, and run off road. Show Low is at 6,000 feet, so you would think that the weather would be cool. Instead, it was in the 90's during the day. Racing and camping do not mix well, especially if your camping neighbors decide that the camping experience includes drinking and talking loudly well into the night. Mountain biking is hard enough, especially since you went over and under logs, negotiate rocks, hoist the bike over a fence twice, all while trying to get enough oxygen at high altitude so that you don’t pass out. I was looking forward to going home after the race for a good night’s sleep, until I found out that I had no air conditioning.

The air conditioning dying in June was the worst malfunction of mechanical things.. Four nights and days of 90 degrees inside the house. I forgot to put a bag of chocolate chips in the refrigerator and they melted into a big lump. My daughter put up bolts of cloth on the windows to futilely try to block out the sun. I was exhausted, because at night, it was difficult trying to sleep in spite of the suffocating heat. Of course, you have to wait around in the hot house for someone to come and fix it.

To top if off the Tempe Town Lake dam burst and the races I had signed up for were canceled. At least I didn’t have to pay to have that fixed. I had been anticipating doing these races all year and my enthusiasm for racing and life in general went downstream like the contents of the Tempe Town Lake into the Salt River.

Then a rat decided to take residence right outside a bedroom window. I discovered this when it reached 114 degrees out. I guess his hidey hole was too hot, so he decided to take a nap right outside the window on the ledge. He laid down on the window sill like he owned it, and would peer at you unconcerned through the window. It was creepy seeing the rat face at night with the sharp, little rat teeth.

He was a roof rat, with an almost cute face and big ears, but the tail is monstrously long and he has powerful back legs for climbing up the walls so that he can chew through your electrical wires. Everyone said he was bad news and would re-produce prodigiously, so he had to go. I set a rat trap on the window sill and baited it with peanut butter and rat poison. He didn’t eat the rat poison, so I was stuck with dealing with a live rat. I had to let him die in an unpleasant, slow manner. I felt really guilty that I couldn’t kill him quickly.

Somehow, I muddled through all of this and I managed to retain my sanity. I guess I should be happy I have a roof over my head that is thankfully fairly new. I can deal with things breaking down, but I am still not used to doing it alone. Having a spouse around to handle things kind of insulated me from reality. I would rather not have to have things break down at all, but the universe doesn’t work that way. Everything goes to hell eventually and has to be replaced, sometimes at the worst possible time. At some point, I will have more confidence that I can handle mechanical problems by myself and life is certainly giving me enough chances to practice dealing with them.

So in 2011, I am going to be happy everyday that something doesn’t go wrong. Maybe, I can get to the point where I can just get something fixed without a lot of anxiety and dread. And if another rat shows up, I’ll dispatch him quickly by drowning him in the pool.

How Did I Get To Be This OLD?

When I see older people who are hobbling around with a cane or in a wheelchair, I always swear that I will never get to that point. I would not like being unable to move around freely, in fact it would be like death to me. I wonder how they got in that condition. Was it disease, bad luck or that they just didn’t take care of themselves earlier in their life? Sometimes your health goes to hell despite all your best efforts. Sometimes you can limit the damage with good eating habits and exercise. You like to assume that you have some control over how you age so that you don’t end up looking at yourself in the mirror and wondering what the hell happened to me? It gives you a measure of sanity, even if it is an illusion.

Time snuck up on me when I was trying to ignore it. I am now fifty-six, which seems kind of old, but not real old. I assumed I would always be married, would never move again, would never get seriously ill and I would always be continent. The first two are wrong assumptions, but so far I am not sick nor wear diapers. My face and some body parts seem a little more saggy than they used to be.

I had a child late in life, but now she’s graduating high school in a semester, so babyhood is far behind me. I will be an empty nester soon. I have lived longer than my older sister and in about three years, I will have lived longer than my father. It kind of sucks to outlast your parents, which is natural and your sibling, which is not. I don’t have much other family, only have one aunt and uncle at opposite ends of the country. I envy people who still have their parents around.

I also envy the energy, optimism and prettiness of youth, but I wouldn’t want to go back there. I learned life lessons from painful experiences that I wouldn’t want to re-live. How to deal with an alcoholic, how to deal with a parent with Alzheimers, how to deal with a family member’s terminal cancer. These experiences that teaches you about yourself and others, but they are damned painful lessons. When you are young, you assume you and your family member will never die, nothing will ever go wrong, no one will betray you and nothing really bad will happen to you. Life has other ideas. With age, you learn how to deal with the bad stuff. You make peace with yourself, but you get a little sad and cynical.

I wouldn’t mind having a younger body. After I run a hard race or a triathlon, I am deeply exhausted and it takes me a long time to recover. Most people my age don’t bother to race hard or even to exercise, but I like getting painfully out of breath and making my muscles hurt. I feel like I am defying time. It’s kind of life affirming to move hard and fast, and I get a smug sense of satisfaction when I can run faster than someone in their twenties.

I can’t train as hard as a younger person. I probably am not as fast as I would have been even ten years ago, if I had been in the shape I am in now. I have to work harder just to be slower than someone younger than me, but I am still faster than I ever was in my life. Age doesn’t stop you from improving, if you work at it. It also doesn’t stop you from doing remarkable things. The recent broadcast of Ironman Hawaii had an eighty year old competitor who intended to keep at it until he could no longer do it, like say age 120. He wasn’t fast, but he was tough. I hope to be that physically tough when I am that age.

It takes more work to maintain the body when I am older. I need more medication, more yearly medical tests, more doctor visits. Colonoscopys are not fun. Neither are mamograms. I could never figure out why a round body part has to be squashed flat in order make a film of it. I can’t eat as much as when I was young, nor can I eat food like cheese without dire consequences. My digestive system starting going down hill in my thirties. My thyroid started going downhill in my forties. Who knows what this decade will bring. Besides menopause, that is, which is bad enough on its own. Who knew that the lack of hormones could make you lose sleep, make you mentally deficient and REALLY irritable? It’s like reverse adolescence, only I am going deteriorating, not growing up.

So I am hoping that my body will age slowly and my mind even slower. I don’t want to become rigid in my thinking and never take risks, anymore than I want to be in a wheel chair. Assuming that dementia doesn’t overtake me, I want to keep learning about the world and myself. I want to keep stepping into the uncomfortable areas of my mind. And I want to keep trying to outrun twenty year olds.

Does Pain Change Your Brain?

Chronic stress can effect your brain. It affects the amygdala, which regulates fear and emotion. The cells actually grow larger. The opposite effect is in the hippocampus, which where the cells shrink. The hippocampus helps you remember where you were and what you were doing when something important happened. So with larger cells in the amygdala and smaller cells in the hippocampus, The result may be a generalized anxiety because you don’t have the hippocampus to help you connect it to where you were and what you were doing to make the fear specific. 1

But is pain is a catalyst for change? The human brain is adaptable. When a person is traumatized by an event in their life such as divorce, disease or death, it may move them to make a change in their life. In the face of overwhelming, paralyzing grief, the mind seeks to make something positive out of it in order to relieve the pain. Maybe it’s trying to correct the mismatch of brain cells.

I have found that I had to change the way I viewed the world in order to survive divorce. I was married for 32 years and I was complacent emotionally and financially. I assumed that my husband would be around forever and that he would never cheat or lie. I ignored the frequent trips, the credit card bills that mysteriously grew, and the growing distance between us. I wasn’t happy in my career, but I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t work on my friendships because I had a built in friend, or I thought I did. I had my own interests, but they never seemed to intersect with my husband’s interests.

When my husband dumped me, it was like the earth I was standing on crumbled. The brain cells were really mismatched. I was free-falling with no ground underneath me. I couldn’t eat, sleep or otherwise function. I gradually learned to function on my own, but I had to learn to think differently. Insidiously, through the years of marriage, I equated my spouse’s opinion that I was worthless into my opinion of myself. I couldn’t function thinking that I was worthless, so I had to discard that old notion and form a new opinion of myself.

In order to form a new opinion of myself, I had to do new things, talk or listen to new people and think different thoughts. It’s a long, fumbling process. I would get sucked into the blackness of despair and I would have to pull myself out again. I would feel great one moment, then a negative thought would creep into my mind and I would feel the heavy weight of depression that I would have to fight off again. I guess the brain cells don’t balance out very quickly.

Then there’s the ever present fear. Fear that I couldn’t make on my own, fear that I would will never be happy again, fear that my ex would give me grief, fear that I would never have another deep relationship. The fear can grind you down and make the simplest tasks seem like a big effort. I now have to do everything myself and I don’t always do it well. After a while I began to accept the fact that I just had to do the best I could, even if I sucked at it. I still have to fight my safe keeping side, that doesn’t want me to take any risks or try anything new.

In order to get through all the fear, depression and despair, I learned not to get through it alone. I took support from whomever and whatever I could, whether it was other people, a higher power or books. I now accept that some people lie and cheat and I try to avoid them. I had to toss the thoughts of my inadequacy out of my mind when they come sneaking in. When I thought about how my ex would have thought contemptuously about me, I told him to get out of my head. I have gradually made some peace with my life, even though I am not entirely happy with it. I try seek out opportunity to expand my world physically, mentally and spiritually because I am tired of having a narrow, closed life..
Through the process, my entire perspective has changed. The jolt out of complacency has changed my thought processes somehow. Ever a pessimist, I had to turn into an optimist to a certain extent, so that I wouldn’t lose my mind. Hope keeps you going, despair does not. Pain forced me to be a different person. I don’t know if my brain has different neural pathways now, but my thoughts had better behave themselves, or I will beat them into submission.
. 1. Stress Changes Your Brain, Karen Lurie, http://www.sciencentral.com/