Baileys

Once in a while I get inspired to write a poem. While going through the kitchen, the absurdity of having this bottle around for so long summed up what I was going through emotionally in preparation to move out of my house of nineteen years:

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     Baileys, the Original Irish Cream.


    “Baileys is a natural marriage of fresh Irish cream, Irish whiskey and the finest of spirits-blended to perfection.”, the label read.

     Once a brown shiny new bottle, now dulled with a layer of grease.

     It sat above the ancient stove twelve years.


     I am moving. I have no use for it. It needed to be gone. The bottle could be recycled.

     My own marriage had fallen apart, with no blend of perfection.

     Was the beverage drinkable?

     It was never consumed because my husband was an alcoholic. A gift from a business associate who didn’t know. I didn’t drink it because “cream” and “whiskey” together didn’t entice me.

     “Best taste before December “00. “ Eons ago. My daughter was only seven. I thought I would be married forever. Life was easy.

     What would happen to “fresh” Irish cream after twelve years?

     A toxic soup? I hesitated to open it. Maybe it would emit foul, poisonous fumes.

     I unscrewed the cap. A hint of whiskey smell. No foul vapors. No explosion.

     I tried to pour it. A little brown liquid came out, then nothing. Plugged solid.

     Baileys Irish Cream had become Baileys Irish paste, a transformation into a squishy solid white cheese.

     Neglect had ruined it.

     Why did I keep it for so long?

Mountain Man Race Report



No race pictures of me because they were hideous

 After suffering for weeks in 110 plus degree weather, I didn’t care that I didn’t have enough air to breathe in this race. It takes place at Upper Lake Mary near Flagstaff at an elevation of 7,000 feet. As I was driving, a downpour lowered the air temperature from 81 to 59 degrees. When I got out of the air the rain cooled pine-scented air was wonderful.
I don’t react well to altitude. I sometimes get splitting headaches and I can’t sleep at night. Most commonly, I just get lethargic. The tiredness hit me when I got to my hotel room. I took a nap, but I didn’t want to move.

Downtown Flagstaff awaited, though. I always have to see the spectacle of weirdos, musicians, students and freaks that gather there.

Wheeler Park is the epicenter of people watching. A concert is always going on in the summer on Saturday nights. This is what attracted the entertaining mix of denizens. A young girl was singing. She had a strong voice and her version of Disney pop songs was good, but I thought her rendition of the Etta James “At Last” lacked depth.

As I was listening to her, a man with a giant tractor tire and hula hoops showed up. According to the drunk man talking to him, I think he had some show with the hula hoops . He opened a violin case and took out a pair of saws to play. He was waiting until the concert was over. In the meantime he let kids and adults play with the hula hoops. Five people with varying abilities attempted to master the skill of twirling the hoops.

I looked over the crowd and saw a women holding up a bunny. It was to give the animal a better view, but the creature didn’t look like it wanted to be there. She held it like a baby and walked off with another one in a stroller.

I watched the show of old people, young people, hippies and tourists for a while, then left.

I didn’t sleep well. I kept waking up every three hours.

The next morning, on the drive to Lake Mary, at a hideous hour of the morning, The moon, Jupiter and Venus were in formation, plus a bright orange star. I saw a bright shooting star in the dark sky. I hoped it was a good omen.

I set up and did a warm up run so I wouldn’t be so nervous starting the swim. I saw my coach on the way out. I still felt like I couldn’t breath. I was too tired to move in the thin air. I had to get motivated to race somehow.

On the way from transition to the swim start I talked to people I knew. I went down the pier and got into the water.

The water was warmer than the air and a mist was over the surface and was almost completely opaque and was brown on the surface, but white underwater. I felt a general all over chest tightness, but no panic. High altitude swimming is tricky and kind of scary. It’s a fine balance to avoid the feeling of suffocation and going fast enough to actually move.

I couldn’t get into a rhythm until after the last turn. I would swim a little, get out of breath and have to stop and rest. My form felt bad . I didn’t have any buoys to count off to distract me from the distance. I finally slowed down a little more near the end and swam steadily without resting so much. It felt like a mediocre swim, but I was surprised to see my watch only read forty one minutes, which was flying for me. It seemed a lot longer than that. It didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere on the swim.

As usual, I was mostly alone on the bike course. It’s easier to get oxygen, but not enough that climbing steep hills isn’t difficult. The ride goes by the lake, past fields of sunflowers and pine trees. It felt deliciously cool at the start. It felt slow on the way out because of humongous climb. I always forget that the way out is usually longer than coming back and I think my ride really sucks. The rest of the field is returning already and this makes me feel even more slow. This time it was ten minutes slower going out. I averaged 14 mph going out, maybe 18 mph coming back.

I kept myself fed, which is a balancing act to try to stay upright on the bike while stuffing chewy food in my mouth. I wasn’t hungry and it was difficult to eat because of the gummy texture. I needed it, though, to fuel the run. It felt like it was getting hot by then, the sun searing through the clouds. . I didn’t feel wiped out after the bike like I usually am, a feeling that isn’t helpful when a 10k run awaits . Total bike time was 1:31:15.

The first mile of the run always is harder than it would appear to be. It looks downhill, but it doesn’t feel that way. By the time my legs got used to running after the hilly bike, the hill was looming. This hill is BIG with over a mile to climb. It’s steep and difficult to run up at 7,000 feet. The weak merely walk up it. I got up the hill entirely running, but it hurt with a dull, heavy pain. The fun part was running down the hill. I was happy. Gravity was my friend because it was free speed. At the bottom, though, the elation went away and I felt tired. I tried not to think how far away the finish line was. The last two miles seemed forever. I looked at the cheery, yellow masses of sunflowers for distraction. Pretty flowers chase away the pain. Final run time was 66:36, which was my best for this race.

Total race time was 3:29, a time that might be very slow to some people, but I didn’t care. I usually beat myself up because I can’t be fast in this race with its thin air and the hilly terrain. I decided to accept it as it is-a brutally difficult event that fights with me every mile and finds every weakness. It abuses my body, but I don’t let it punish my mind

Reunion



Wabash River

 Some people might wonder why anyone would want to go to any of their high school class reunions, let alone the fortieth one. Especially if you hated high school and just wanted to get the hell out as fast as possible. My daughter was baffled as to why I would even consider going.


My high school is in West Lafayette, Indiana. Growing up, I developed a distaste for Indiana and for any location in the Midwest. A muddy, wide Wabash River separates it from Lafayette on the other side. Nothing exciting ever happened there. The visual monotony of flat green corn and soy bean fields with an occasional pig farm thrown in ground me down with its tedium. In the winter, the sun never broke through the clouds and the buildings were ugly and gray to match. Midwest steamy summers were enervating.

Even years later, I longed for anything to break the horizon when I traveled there. I am spoiled by the beauty of open skies and mountains of the southwest, unlike that of the Midwest where the horizon closed in. I got excited when I first saw windmills outside of Lafayette that are similar to the ones in Palm Springs, California. It was something vertical to look at besides dried up corn. I missed them as I traveled north on I-65, a highway that put me in a bored daze.



Remodel Interior of W. Lafayette H.S.

 West Lafayette is the home of Purdue University. It is known for it’s engineering school, of which I had absolutely no interest in as a student, and its utilitarian brick buildings are utterly devoid of charm. My father was a chemistry professor there. Many of my high school classmates were children of Purdue professors or of doctors. This created a very smart populace of students. Someone was always smarter than me or had perfect SAT’s. One guy in our class was doing college graduate work in math. I felt a lot of pressure to get good grades. The smart people were also over-achievers, excelling school and in numerous school activities like track, debate, drama and the National Honor Society. I was in band and studied ballet-not exactly impressive. I was a decent student, but not at the top of the class. High school was where I realized I was merely average.


In high school everyone had their cliques. The jocks, the cheerleaders, the druggies, the smart people would associate only with each other. I didn’t fit into these cliques or have a social network. I hung out with some nice people, but I wasn’t very close with anyone. I didn’t go to the prom. I wanted out as soon as possible. I found the atmosphere was stifling and lonely. I didn’t feel emotionally invested or involved in school.

When I went to high school from 1968-1972, it was the era of social upheaval-the Civil Rights Act, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and Watergate. Even in conservative Indiana, in an mostly all white high school, it affected the students. Liberal ideas snuck into the populace. Short skirts and bell bottom jeans were in. Guys had longer hair and sideburns. Some people started an alternative creative writing publication to the school newspaper. My high school class valedictorian upset people with his speech expressing his leftist political views regarding the Vietnam War.

Now it is the time of the internet and social media. I was leery of “friending” some of these classmates on Facebook, assuming that they would be the same people, but it turned out to be beneficial. I found out other people had gone through a divorce and understood how I felt. Other people had parents with Alzheimer’s. Some shared my interests in birding and mountain biking. I found my ironman sherpa through Facebook to help me carry my stuff after the race. What happened decades ago didn’t matter.

Despite my negative high school experience, I found out that reunions were still fun. I may not have had many fond memories to share, but my classmates are interesting people to talk to. The social strata disappeared and appearances mattered less. It also re-affirmed acceptance. No one judged me or made fun of me because I was different or unpopular like they did in high school. We had all grown up and weren’t the horrible teenagers that we had been.

It no longer mattered what group I was in or who I had hung around with. The jocks talked to everyone, not just other jocks. The former druggies were off drugs-at least the ones that showed up and the cheerleaders had multiple kids. Our parents are aging along with us, some of us got divorced, we had children and some had grandchildren. We shared the same joy and trauma of life and were different people now.

Part of the draw of a reunion is the need to connect with the past. Whether people loved or hated high school, it was part of who we are. We look where we have been to see where we have gone and were curious as to what had happened to classmates we had known. I don’t know how many people as teenagers expected their lives to be as they are now or how they felt about it.

Some people had impressive lives as doctors, lawyers, professors and even an women airline pilot and a tugboat captain. Most had an air of confidence and were at ease with themselves. I don’t know if I had the same air, but I could fake it. I don’t know what their lives are actually like under the surface.



Sculpture that used to be inside the entrance.

 We toured the high school and most of it was unrecognizable. Additions and reorganization of the building made it much different than when I had gone there. I was a little surprised that I didn’t have much sense of deja vu or a feeling that I had spent a lot of time in the place. I felt indifferent and certainly not nostalgic. It was a mere structure that didn’t trigger any memories.

Some things changed in town and some had stayed the same. The familiarity both attracted and repulsed me. A drive-in that had been around since the Fifties didn’t have food that is as good as in the past. A new pedestrian bridge in Lafayette over the Wabash made crossing the river a lot more pleasant. An old ice cream place from my childhood still had good ice cream. I wanted to love or at least like the town that I grew up in, but couldn’t. It didn’t fit me.

While I was there, I visited my parents’ grave. The cemetery is on a wooded hill, surrounded by busy streets. The mature trees shield visitors from the traffic. I took pictures and wished I had something to leave on the graves. I was sad to be there. Another part of my past was gone. They should have had better deaths. My father died of cancer in his sixties, my mother of Alzheimers in her eighties.

In a place that I had inhabited for many years, time had flowed on relentlessly like the brown water of the Wabash River. I was in awe of its power. Forty years had flashed by. Some people had aged and changed in appearance. Others looked much the same as in high school, just with gray hair. I think we all had some scars we weren’t showing.

Feeling Good?

Once in a while I read self-help books. This is a by-product of the low self-esteem caused by the trauma of divorce. I grasp at anything that would help me feel better. Most of the time the books have some suggestion that I can use in limited amounts. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, for example, talks about living in the moment and not dwelling in the past or worrying about the future. This is a difficult concept to practice. My attempts at meditation make me twitchy and restless. It’s not always easy to follow when random thoughts bombard my mind late at night. Is the pool filter that starts to run at four a.m. going to blow up? Did I forget to pay a bill? Am I going to be homeless someday because my daughter insists on going to an incredibly expensive college?


Feeling Good by David Burns is one of the best books that I have read. It discusses that crap that you tell yourself that you are convinced must be absolutely true. It makes you depressed. Therapists call it cognitive distortions. I always thought that what I tell myself was true. That it is not is quite a different perspective. I think the author really nails the stupidity of what people tell themselves.

A number of types of cognitive distortion exist, but one in particular that I am guilty of is overgeneralization. If something happens, then it will always happen. If someone dumps me, then I will always be alone. If I am unhappy now, then I will always be unhappy. This kind of assumption feeds a feeling of hopelessness.

If I couldn’t do something in the past, then I won’t be able to do it in the future. The past doesn’t dictate the present or the future-- or at least I try to convince myself of that.

Another overgeneralization is thinking everyone else is better than me. They are more together, more loved, more talented, work harder, have more friends. This is not true and only a delusion in my mind because people are never what they appear to be. The thought pops up automatically, like an evil mind visitor. I wonder if I am the only one that thinks this way. This kind of thinking is rampant in competition like racing. If someone is faster than me, then they are better than me as a person. Since I am slow in racing, then I must be a bad person.

Results don’t dictate who I am, or least I try to tell myself that.

The prime example of this is swimming. I am always last. I can train all I want and take lessons, but I will never be fast or even average. The only people slower than me are beginners who surpass me in a couple of months or really old people who flail around the lanes with bizarre arm strokes. Even some of them are swim faster than I do. I want to be average or at least not on the bottom of the curve. I beat myself up for being so bad, but it doesn’t get me anywhere.

Maybe if I stop being negative, I would swim better or at least feel better about it.

Positivity is an alien thought that doesn’t come naturally for me. I am never an optimist. People are supposed to have an optimist bias and expect that things will turn out better than they actually do. People underestimate the chances of death, divorce and general disaster. Some theorize that we are born this way. Not me. I always tend to expect the worst, and to keep my sanity, I try to block this expectation. This is the cognitive distortion of Mental Filter that a person filters out positive aspects of a situation and only sees negative ones.

If a person didn’t underestimate the chances of bad thing happening, they would lose their minds. Life would become darker and much more anxiety provoking than it already is. It’s bad enough dealing with daily events. Positive thoughts are a self-defense mechanism. The future can’t be predicted anyway. If I think the best will happen and the worst does, at least I am not worrying about it until the catastrophe occurs.

Too bad I don’t actually do this.

If I am doing an Ironman, I am already setting up what bad things will happen before they even do. I will miss the swim cut off, or if I don’t, I will get a flat tire on the bike course and miss the bike cut. If the water is cold I will end up in the medical tent for hypothermia. It has happened before, so it will happen again.

It is hard to understand why these habitual negative thoughts occur. Fear is a good base to launch them. They worm their way into my brain and stay there. Maybe it is something that started in childhood when a parent berated me for some forgotten misbehavior? The mind persistently plays the same thing over and over. Most people don’t even question what they tell themselves. The voice that berates me isn’t challenged. It tells I suck and I agree.

Feeling Good suggests that the answer to the depression and low self-esteem that this self-talk causes is to have a person write down what they are saying to themselves and make rational arguments against the negative perceptions. Writing them down makes you more aware of what is swirling around in your head. If I get lost, which I frequently do and tell myself that I am incompetent because I can’t read a map and don’t have a GPS, then I write this thought down. I always manage to find my way eventually, so I must have some competence as a human being. Maybe.

I am intrigued by the suggestion that what I tell myself might not be true, This could possibly be an entirely new way of thinking-- new neural pathways instead of the old rutted ones. I am tired of my old thoughts, but they will try to persist, like my slow swimming. Even slow swimmers get somewhere eventually.

I Pulled the Trigger

I thought long and hard about this race, but in the end I lost my common sense and registered for the race that is on September 22, 2013. The biggest problem is the six thousand foot altitude. I have never done any race longer than an olympic at this altitude and I am not sure how it will affect me.

The biggest challenge at altitude will be the swim. When I bike and run, I can just breath harder It's more difficult to get enough oxygen when I have to exhale under water.  I have had swims in other high altitude races where I try to speed up and a vise tightens around my chest, making me feel panicky. Sometimes this happens right at the start of the swim. It requires a firm mental grip on my fear and swimming even slower than my normal piddling speed.

The website lists the average water temperature in September as 65-68. I doubt this range because it is a cold mountain lake and the air temperature is 38-68 degrees. So I could  face a swim in cold water, which I hate, as well as altitude. My worst swim ever was at Ironman Arizona in sixty degree water. I thought I would drown and I started shivering before the halfway point.

But the water will also be very clear, conditions that I don't experience most of the time. It could be extraordinary water to swim in.

The bike will also be challenging with a 5200 foot elevation gain. But this is also what intrigues me. Can I finish it within the bike cut off? It's not even a question of doing well, but a matter of survival. Will it be like when I did Ironman Canada, with the exhilaration of finding out that I did what I thought was near impossible? I miss that feeling. It's like an addiction and I need a fix.

Despite the daunting difficulties of this event, I signed up anyway. I can accept the possibility of failure if the risk is worth it. I may not finish the swim or I may miss the bike cut off, but I will fight as hard as I can. Sometimes you have to say "what the hell" and take a leap of faith.

Wildflower Race Report

I picked this race because I thought a challenging event would motivate me to train harder. I was scared enough to do so because it is insanely difficult. In fear of the bike course, I sought out hills instead of avoiding them . Trail running on a long two hour run became doable because the half marathon is sixty percent hilly trails and I didn’t want to suffer. Or I thought I would suffer less if I trained on trails. I was wrong.

The long course is a 1.2 mile swim in Lake San Antonio, a fifty six mile bike around the lake and a 13.1 mile run. Wildflower is in its thirtieth year and attracts professional athletes from all over the world. They race it like the hills don’t exist. The rest of us mere mortals take a lot longer than four hours to complete the course.

Just getting to the site was a tedious ordeal. It’s six hundred miles from my house. I broke up the drive to two days. This
 long trip gave me a lot of time to contemplate California. California has a huge population but has large desolate areas. The Mohave Desert is dotted with towns like Indio and Desert Center, which made me wonder why anyone would want to live in these sun-blasted places. Desert Center greets the denizens of the highway with dead palm trees that look like ruined columns. Why don’t they ever cut them down? They have been standing for as long as I could remember and are markers of a sad, pathetic looking place.

The freeways seem endless in the Los Angeles area, and seem to start around a hundred miles from the west coast. I stopped in Pasadena for the night in a less tony area of town. I walked around the neighborhood and every block seemed to have a cage of parakeets.

The next day, I drove to Paso Robles. Instead of empty stretches of desert, it was farmland or vineyards. I passed through Lost Hills. The town should probably stay that way. A field of oil derricks graces the area and it is more like a truck stop than anything else.

Despite my long drive up, I decided to check out the bike course the same day. It’s a rural area with winding two lane roads, grassy hills and oak trees. The terror creeped in when I saw the endless rolling landscape. The route is infamous for an incline called the “Nasty Grade” at mile forty. It is three miles up a six percent grade, which means a long, slow, painful climb on a bike. To top it off, the rest of the ride is steep rollers, which would not feel good after a strenuous uphill ride. I was in for an ugly ride and I hoped I would be able to finish it in time.

The next day, I drove to the campground. I sought the Lupine Meadows area, which would be less populated by noisy college students. People just set up anywhere and I picked a spot with a picnic table. Some oak trees provided shade, but most areas were hot and dusty. It gets cold at night, but very warm during the day. I was not feeling good about the camping thing and wished I had stayed at the hotel. This was not fun. I had hoped to find some people that I knew, but I had no cell phone reception to call or text.

I went to another area in the park to pick up my packet and to get some food. I ran into the people that I was looking for. At least I wasn’t totally alone here. We went swimming, then I left. Before I went down the road, I decided to check for my car key. I couldn’t find it after searching my bag. I looked around the areas that I had been at, but didn’t find it. I checked lost and found and no one had turned it in. I was getting panicky. I had no spare and no way to get into my car.

I went to race headquarters since they had a land line phone, to call my motor club service,. A truck would have to come down to the campground. I had to wait by the road for over an hour instead of relaxing before the race. I watched cars go by and wondered if the truck would even show up. Finally, the guy came and opened my car. It didn’t solve the ultimate problem of not having a key, but at least I could set up my tent. I was utterly frazzled, but I came here to do the race and I was going to do it.

The tent set up was difficult because the wind kept blowing it around. I staked one corner and the rest of the tent blew into the car. I lassoed the tent, pounded stakes down while cussing a lot. The sun was going down and I wanted to get it done before it was dark. I threw a suitcase inside to hold the tent down. Luckily, I had practiced putting the tent up beforehand, otherwise it would have taken much longer to do. The charm of camping was elusive to me.

I rushed back down the race headquarter area to get some dinner before the shuttles stopped running. I wasn’t hungry, but I would feel much worse if I didn’t eat anything because I was tired and stressed and I needed the energy. I tried to relax and not dwell on my predicament. If I didn’t find the key, I would have to have the car towed to a locksmith. I needed all my energy for the race and stress would drain it.

I didn’t sleep well, with people coming in and the water trucks going down the road at regular intervals. It was cold, but I managed to stay warm under my sleeping bags. I heard some coyotes, which I appreciated more than the people noise.

When I got up, it was cold enough to have frost on the car. It took me a while to get going. I got down to big transition area and set up my stuff. About two thousand people were doing the race. I started at 9:10. At least it was warmer by then.

I didn’t enjoy the crowded swim. I stayed off to the left because I knew the waves of people behind me would overtake me. A stream of swimmers passed by me, churning up the water. Total time was 54:54, which was my best ever time for this distance. But it didn’t feel like a great swim and seemed go on forever. I was glad to get it over with.

The bike start was crowded with mountain bikers from another race that were all bunched up. Almost right away, I had to climb a short steep hill, the first of many. I didn’t think it was all that bad.

The road left the park and turned north. The wind was rudely blowing out of the north, adding to the difficulty of climbing the terrain and I didn’t make good time .

I tried to make up time on the easier northern section of the route that wound east. I passed a fair amount of people. Some sections that looked bad from the car yesterday weren’t all that bad to ride. I eased off when I knew I was getting close to Nasty Grade. The ordeal was coming . It was hotter now.

Nasty Grade was a long painful grind. It’s not that many miles, but it seemed to last forever. I passed more people. It teased riders. When it looks like it ended, it turned and climbed some more. A person dressed as the Energizer Bunny was supposed to be at the top, but wasn’t. Instead, a guy announced that we were at the summit. The ride down was fun, but when I got to the hills again, all my energy was gone. It was miserable climbing again when I wanted it to stop. The lack of sleep, the stress of losing my car key and the heat had finally gotten to me. I wondered how the hell I was going to run. Final time was 4:05:30. At least I beat the cut off by half an hour. This bike course was body crushing and relentless.

I had hoped to have an halfway decent run, but by this time it was getting really hot and I felt bad. At times it was a deep down scary bad. I said to myself that this isn’t good. I started out feeling okay, then felt dramatically worse. I have had heat exhaustion before but this was different, a nasty intense fatigue coupled with anxiety and dehydration. Just when I thought I couldn’t feel any more miserable, another hill loomed. I craved ice and they had none. I ended up walking most of the hills. I went through the hoses that the volunteers had and poured water on myself. It was hard to imagine getting through this ordeal. I was worried about getting the car towed afterwards. It was like an ironman death march where I move feebly ahead, hoping to finish before my body gives out. Quitting wasn’t an option.

Between mile eight and nine I saw a guy ahead that strangely was all one flesh color. Did he have on a leotard? Then I saw he was NAKED. This race has been known to have instances of co-ed nudity, but I had never heard of guys doing this. He offered a hug, but I said “um, no”. I high fived instead. I smiled.

The run cruelly goes down hill for a mile, then uphill the same mile. I kept looking for the reputed cheering crowds at mile ten, but I didn’t see that many people. Maybe, they were off drinking somewhere. Going back up the hill was the worst part of the run to me. I was spent, but I had to keep moving.

The end is after a steep downhill. I actually cracked a smile at the finish line. Final time was 2:57, which sucked, but it wasn’t a surprise. I had a feeling that the run would be very difficult, but the level of misery was unexpected.

I am not sure what to think about this event. At least I can say I finished a very tough race. I wasn’t entirely sure that it was possible to do so. It was interesting, but I didn’t feel like I conquered it. I expected to do it in about eight hours. Anything less would have been miraculous. It definitely ranked just behind my ironman races in difficulty and way more difficult than any half ironmans I have done, including Oceanside. At least now when I feel bad during a triathlon run, I can think to myself that’s “it not Wildflower.”

The finish line wasn’t the end of the ordeal. Now I had to figure out how to leave. I cooled down with some ice from the medical tent and the cold towel that they gave me. I ate what I could because I wouldn’t have time for dinner. A call to my motor club was not helpful. Thank you Allstate for leaving me to fend for myself. The operator kept asking for the address like I was at a business. It’s a freaking park and I am at a campground. A race volunteer suggested a towing company who suggested a locksmith. Getting the car to the locksmith required a tow to Salinas.

Where the hell was Salinas? Wasn’t this town a setting for a John Steinbeck novel? I found out it was seventy five miles north and the only place that I could get a locksmith on Sunday. It doesn’t pay to have car problems in the middle of nowhere. The absurdity boggled my mind. I threw my camping stuff in the car and the tow truck took me to this town. He was kind of chatty, telling me about the weird accidents and creepy people he sees at night. I was beyond tired. He dropped me and the car at a Motel 6 after I gave him $300. This trip was getting better and better.

I have never stayed at a Motel 6, but I found out I don’t get a lot of amenities for $50 per night. The room had no coffee pot nor hair dryer. My hair was not going to look stylish, but at least I could clean thirty six hours of dirt and sweat off of myself and sleep in a real bed. My dinner that night was pre-packaged tuna on a stale bagel. Of course it was 10:30 p.m. by this time, so I couldn’t eat much anyway. I prayed that the locksmith would actually show when I called him tomorrow. This was not where I wanted to be stranded.

A Denny’s was luckily next door so that I didn’t have to rely on peanut butter and another stale bagel with no coffee for breakfast. The motel was in a part of town that had the Monterey Pasta Factory and a Farm Products Processing Plant nearby. The pasta plant was spewing water(I hope) into the air and I didn’t want to think what the Processing Plant was emitting. It smelled vaguely like cow poo, like the odor of a dairy farm when the wind blows the wrong direction.

The locksmith finally showed up and liberated me from this hell hole. For lack of a little piece of metal, I had to pay an extra $600 for the tow, the locksmith, the room that I couldn’t stay in and the room that I was forced to use. This was the trip from hell to the race of the damned. But I can say I survived this ordeal. The hills and the heat didn’t stop me. Plus, I got to see Naked Dude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marquee Olympic Race Report

This event was my twenty-seventh time venturing into the murky waters of Tempe Town Lake. It would have been twenty-eight, but last year’s Marquee swim was cancelled, due to heavy rain that might have increased the bacteria count. I have a love-hate relationship with this race site. After racing triathlons at this place so many times, I am kind of bored with it. But the site is flat and fast and it’s an easy drive to get to.


The walled in lake makes me anxious. It has no friendly gradual drop-offs that would help me feel safe. I have had many a panic attack in this water. The walls imprison me, their weight closing in in a menacing manner. It’s hard to sight the buoys that guide the swimmers through the bridges in the swim in the glare of the sun. The algae content of the water varies, but it always ends up in my nose and sometimes on my face.
I always have the illusion that THIS time the swim will go well. Most of the time it’s tolerable, but not enjoyable. Sometimes it’s an ordeal that takes every ounce of determination I have not to quit. I think that I will go hard and fast, but I get tired, I have to rest and it is more survival than racing. It doesn’t help that I am a slower swimmer than the rest of the world. This can be an advantage and disadvantage. I don’t get hit because I am not near anyone, but I don’t have anyone to draft off of to help me go faster.
I got down to the race site early, so I had time to wait around. I set up my transition gear and talked to people. By doing these races for a number of years, I know a fair number of people that are involved with them. I warmed up, but had to wait thirty minutes from transition closing to start, so it was kind of useless. The water temperature had gone down to sixty four degrees from when I had swam in it a few days prior. I jumped in and it was cold.

In the fifteen kilometer swim I had trouble sighting on the way out. I couldn’t see the buoys very well and at one point I was sighting off the wrong buoy and went off course. The buoys don’t seem like they were in a straight line, but Tempe Town Lake isn’t either. It’s tricky swimming under the bridges because I can’t see where to swim. Coming back, I got into a flow and swam faster. I saw a first time racer swimming back stroke in front of me. A newbie having a hard time, who was going faster than me was not an ego boost. The way back seemed long somehow, but it was easier to sight the buoys.

I fell on the stairs getting out . It was hard to walk on rubbery legs after being horizontal for forty-five minutes.

In transition, I fumbled with my arm warmers and my socks because I still felt cold. I tore a hole in one sock. I had dead grass from the lawn all over everything.

Out on the twenty-five mile bike course, the way north seemed strangely fast because of a possible tail wind that pushed me along. My heart rate was in zone three in the low 140's, which wasn’t high for me, but it seemed like the right pace because it was painful. The route goes out the Beeline Highway to Gilbert Road, which was right by a garbage dump, then comes back. The wind was blowing the right direction and I couldn’t smell the dump. Coming back, it seemed like more effort than usual, so maybe it was a tail wind that was now a head wind. I tried to keep eating and drinking even though I didn’t want to, on the theory that maybe the run wouldn’t suck so bad if I did because I would have more energy. I didn’t stop at the aid stations, but I saw someone I knew at one of them, which gave me a mental boost.

The second transition time was also long, mostly because I had to pee, forcing me to squeeze through the fence to get to a porta-potty. This is always an issue with longer races. The porta potties are never in a convenient spot and my pre-race planning always includes how to get to them without affecting my bike and run splits with the extra time. Sometimes this involves crawling under fences.

I had a goal on the 10k run to try to break a ten minute per mile pace. I could do this easily in a stand alone run, but swimming and biking tires my legs. Goals are a mental exercise that can help me test my limits; a game to see if the mind or the body will win. At this point in the race, my legs ached badly and I wondered if it was possible to force myself to do this pace each mile for 6.2 miles. I faltered on some of them; others went better. Struggling this way broke up the monotony of the route. My Garmin GPS helped because I could see when I was slowing down. I got hot and had to pour water on myself. I started out with my heart rate in the 150's and built it up to the 160's. I increased my pace the last two miles with the last mile being the fastest. Unfortunately, I missed the finishing chute the first time and had to go back. I hoped no one noticed. All the blood was in my legs, not my brain and it was hard to think.

The total time was three hours, thirty-one minutes, which wasn’t stellar compared to the rest of racers, but it was my second fastest olympic triathlon run. I like seeing how hard I can push myself in a race, but I always make the mistake of comparing my slower time to others, which makes me feel inadequate. My mind tells me that I suck even if I did the best I could. It likes to do this and I don’t know why. The inner doubts are hard to vanquish and seem to defy any positive mental self talk. I ignore them and move on.