Category Archives: Triathlon

by | 19 October 2011 · 5:12 pm

Transition

I live with a triathlete. Every other year, he loses his mind completely and does an Ironman, which means my life is disrupted like whoa while he gets up early to swim, comes home late after having gone for a run, and spends every weekend RUINING MY LIFE with long runs and bike rides. He also stops drinking for a time and then I look like an alcoholic because I have to pick up the slack. If I don’t, Jim Koch from the Boston Beer Company will call me up on the phone and ask me what’s wrong because the stock has taken a dive.

The house is filled with things like HammerGel and HEED (the smell of which makes me gag). There is a lot of ibuprofen happening, and the sleeping, MY GOD, the sleeping. During training, Freddie can sleep on command. Not to mention the piles of stanky workout gear that hang out in the basement until I have a big enough pile to justify a wash load. On crappy weather days, the sound of old-school Mission:Impossible blares out from the dog’s room where the bike trainer is set up as he rides rides rides to nowhere. On good days, he’s out on the roads battling against the asshole drivers of suburban New Jersey and I worry.

Such is the life of an Iron Wife. I don’t complain too much because the rewards are pretty great, actually. I get to go to interesting places (Panama City Beach, FL; Lake Placid, NY; Coeur d’Alene, ID), meet interesting people, and watch people achieve things they never thought possible. I have a big voice and a cowbell, and I put them both to good use over the course of an Ironman day, cheering not only for Freddie but for everyone who goes by. Especially the folks who look like they need it.

I never really felt the urge to join them until just recently. Sure, I’ve watched the television coverage of the Ironman World Championships, and I have my favorite athletes to watch. The stories are inspiring – be it the guy who totaled his bike with nine miles to go so he WALKED IT IN and then ran a marathon or the Hoyts or John Blais or any of the other thousands of stories that get up at an ungodly hour to do amazing things on race day. Now? Now is a different story.

I will be forty years old in three and a half years. That is laughable, but there it is. Math doesn’t lie. Forty feels like way more of a milestone than thirty did. I think it’s because my generation has this prolonged adolescence thing going on and we’re not really asked to be “adults” until a lot later in life. We graduate from college later (if we ever do), we move away from home later, we get married later, we have kids later. We do everything later, because we are slackers. And that’s fine.

But… 40. Whoa.

So here’s the idea. The idea is to complete an Ironman someway, somehow, before I turn 40. I have all the tools I need. I have all the advice and coaching I might need easily available to me. I have all the support, I know WHAT to do, I know HOW to do it, I just need to… GO DO IT.

There have always been excuses. I got pregnant literally three weeks to the day after Freddie finished his first Ironman. So there was that handy excuse, then there was a baby, then we got a puppy, then I’m tired, then… then… then… more excuses. Well, I have RUN OUT OF EXCUSES. You’d think that a gifted storyteller such as myself would be able to invent ever more reasons why not, but you’d be wrong. There ARE no more reasons why not.

Oh, wait – I have shinsplints. That excuse will take me through to January 1, 2012, which is when The Plan begins. I have been doing my research and I have come up with a fairly workable plan, I think. If The Plan works (and I put in the work), then I am looking at Ironman Florida or Ironman Arizona in 2013. I think that’s an attainable goal.

Thus the title: transition. I hope that this marks the beginning of not only a new chapter in my life but a whole new goddamn book. No excuses. Just Do It. No Day But Today.

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Filed under Me Me Me, Triathlon

by | 30 July 2007 · 10:34 am

Lake Placid

We arrived in Lake Placid on Wednesday night. The skies were clear and it was a bit colder than we had anticipated, but it didn’t seem unmanageable. We found a place to have dinner where we could eat outside (and thus avoid trying to get our ginormous stroller out of everyone’s way). Then we walked through the town and down to the speed skating rink where all of the triathlon hoopla would be taking place.

Thursday morning was registration:

registration.JPG

And name check:
name-check.JPG

Then it rained, and we spent the remainder of the day hanging out in the hotel with a very upset and snot-filled Jillian.

Friday morning, we went down to the town again, hoping it wouldn’t rain. The transition area was set up:
empty-transition.JPG

But then it rained again, some more, so we spent the remainder of the morning in the hotel with an exhausted, pissed-off, snotty-faced baby. Freddie wanted to drive the bike course to get a sense of where he’d be going, so we spent the afternoon doing that, then we headed out to the Horse Show Grounds for the Welcome Dinner. This is always a fun event, with hundreds of hungry, skinny people chowing down and talking about the races they’ve done. They always have first-time Ironman people stand up and get applause, which is inspiring. Not inspiring enough to push me to want to do it, but it’s a nice thing to watch.

Jillian enjoyed it:

jillian-at-dinner.JPG

On the way back to the hotel, we saw this:

iron-house.JPG

Saturday was meant to be a “relaxation” day, but since it had finally MY GOD stopped raining, we wandered down to the town to give ourselves something to do and to also do a little shopping. I had to get my Harry Potter book, after all. There was a gang of little kids squirming in line and I was right there with them, fidgeting and trying my best to be patient! Then I got my hands on it and started jumping up and down with glee. I’m a hard-core dork.

The rest of Saturday was spent reading (me), watching the weather channel (Freddie) and making snot (Jillian). We went out for a pasta dinner, then we all hit the sack early. I even managed to fall asleep and not lock myself in the bathroom to read all night.

Sunday morning started VERY EARLY. We set the alarm clock and both of our cell phones to go off at 4 o’clock. Nobody was really happy with that, and even Jillian woke up and looked at us all “you people are idiots.”

No, Jilly, that’s just Daddy.

We loaded up the stroller and started moseying down to the lake. It wasn’t even light out yet, but there were clumps of sleepy-looking people headed our way as well. The one bagel place in town was crowded as hell, but I got myself something to eat and we were ready to start the day.

Like I said, Jillian was not pleased about being up so early, so she decided to call her Nana:

calling-nana.JPG

We got Freddie dressed in his wetsuit:

before-the-swim.JPG

… and that was pretty much it until about fourteen hours later when we saw him come around the speedskating oval to the finish line:

the-end.JPG

In between, Jillian and I cheered for him as he came jogging out of the swim area, then we headed back to the hotel for a much-needed nap. Well, I was hoping she’d nap so I could read, but she had other plans at first. There was some yelling and some Drama-Queening, but when I picked her up, she barfed all over us both, so then we needed baths.

The barfing seemed to be a good thing, though, because right after I bathed her, I put her back in the pack & play so I could shower and she was asleep by the time I was done. I got a good three hours of reading in while she napped, then we loaded ourselves back up and headed back to town.

We missed him coming in on the bike because I was changing the kid’s diaper. I put of changing it as long as I could, knowing full well that as soon as I did, he’d ride right past us. Which is exactly what happened. Oh well. After that, we made our way to the finish line and prepared to hang out.

For four hours.

After a long fight, Jilly fell asleep in the stroller and then Freddie finished his race. Our weary family trudged back to the hotel where we all showered and fell asleep almost instantly.

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by | 13 July 2007 · 9:51 am

It’s Friday, you know what that means!

It means an unordered list of things that may or may not be related to one another and may or may not have any relevance to anything at all! YAAAY!

1. I got my nails done on Tuesday. The mommy group went out en masse and got a discount at a nail place. Yay, sorta. Every time I’m getting my feet scrubbed and sanded down, I wonder to myself why I don’t do it more often. But that feeling fades almost as quickly as my feet return to their natural, hoof-like state. I hate spending money on beauty-type things like hair and nails. It shows, unfortunately, so perhaps I should get over myself and get my nails done more often.

2. The only thing I’m pissed about is the nail polish on my fingernails peeled off already. I suppose it’s because I wash my hands about 234 times a day, and my fingernails have never been very strong.

3. Is it just me, or does the Today Show suck? Did it always suck, or is it just the first hour that’s good and the rest of it sucks? It’s so, I don’t know, fluffy, that I’m not sure I’m getting any smarter by watching it. Yesterday they spent a good 40 minutes total on the Miss New Jersey non-scandal. This is news? FOR REAL? Isn’t there a war or something going on someplace?

4. The Mets have let Julio Franco go free. The guy is a thousand years old, but I’m sort of sad, since I watched Julio wreck the place in Cleveland through the 80’s and it would be sort of cute for him to still be playing when he’s 50. That dude that they called up instead, Lastings Milledge, seems like a real dick. I don’t think I like him.

5. I’m going to NYC tonight to see a whole gang of my Imaginary Internet Friends. I cannot wait, because it is going to be Super Fun! Of course, I’m getting old and decrepit so I’ll probably be on the train home by 10PM. Hee.

6. We leave for Lake Placid on Wednesday. We will have three days to fart around the Lake Placid area (including time for me to get my Harry Potter book on Saturday morning as the bookstore opens), then the race is on Sunday, and we return on Monday. It will be fun and exhausting so we’ll spend the week afterwards shoveling out the house in preparation for Jillian’s birthday party! WHEEE!

7. I have yet to replant my peppers and tomatoes. Perhaps I really will do that tomorrow, since I will be baby-free for much of the day. Freddie’s family is celebrating his stepfather’s 70th birthday, so he’ll be down there doing that. I will have some free time! Which I will probably waste on the Internet!

8. I made a banana cake yesterday that turned out surprisingly well. I have a tendency to make banana-related things that are goopy in the middle, but this cake held up pretty well. The middle is a bit sticky but it’s not completely raw, as my things occasionally are. The batter was SO good I wanted to eat it all. I suppose if I used Egg Beaters instead of actual eggs, I could make the raw batter work. Hmm.

9. The Jillian is starting that whole “cruising” thing. While I’m not happy about her picking up gay men in bars, the almost-walking part is really coming along. She pulls herself up to standing whilst holding on to the couch and moves from there to an ottoman. Or to the TV stand, where she tries to smack the TV or open the CD player. Great. I’m going to have to lock everything up now, but you can’t change the channel on the TV if the doors on the TV stand are closed because that’s where the cable box lives. Sigh. Her newfound mobility is going to kill us all – she tried to take the carbon monoxide detector out of the wall twice yesterday.

10. I am still working on my sweater. The knitting actually goes pretty quickly if I sit down and do it but I don’t really have much time to just sit and knit. But I’m 95% done with the back, so all that’s left is sleeves and hood. I’m thinking about cheating totally and making the sleeves and hood single colors instead of stripes. I’m sure it would be fine, since there are three colors in the stripe pattern and I can use one for each remaining piece. But that feels kind of like a cop-out, so I’m kind of undecided.

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Filed under Baseball, Friends, Jillian, Knitting, Me Me Me, Stuff, Triathlon

by | 4 June 2007 · 3:27 pm

Race weekend

Yesterday was the inaugural Black Bear Half-Iron Triathlon in the lovely Beltzville State Park which is situated in the Poconos. For you city people, that means it is roughly 90 miles from EVERYTHING.

We packed up the truck and the kid Saturday morning and headed west. The drive there took a bit longer than we had anticipated because Google Maps gave us crappy directions. I thought that was strictly a Mapquest thing, but no – Google Maps omitted the very important part where we were supposed to get on the PA Turnpike. Since we are modern people, we do not have road maps or anything in the car with us these days. We went about 20 miles past the Turnpike before we thought “hmm. I think we’re missing something.”

We found the park with no trouble after that, and Freddie got all checked in and stuff. The pre-race meeting happened and just in time, too. The super-hot, humid day was rapidly turning into a thunderstorm. We headed out of the park just as the rain hit.

Since Freddie would rather chew off his own head than let me drive, I am the principal navigator in our house. He has a degree in Geography and insists he’s good with directions, but he is also A Man, which means actually getting the directions is sort of the problem. He loves to print out maps and stuff, but his innate sense of direction is sometimes a little… off.

I, on the other hand, have a fairly good sense of direction even if I have an aversion to printing out sixteen maps and fourteen sets of directions. This is why, when we left the park to go find our hotel, we drove 20 miles in the wrong direction. I cannot read. Where the directions say “Turn RIGHT” I say “Turn LEFT!” And, of course, I am never, ever wrong, so I should never, ever be questioned. We turned left. As we drove and the road we were looking to turn on never materialized, I thought I would consult the directions again just to make sure.

Oops.

We turned around.

Eventually, we found our hotel. We checked in and decided to go to the Damon’s that was right there for dinner. Jillian loves restaurants because there are so many people to smile at and look at! So many people to be impressed with her roaring! She roared and smiled and stared at the giant-screen TVs while we ate. At one point, she reached over to my plate with her impossibly long arms (sorry, kid) and grabbed my steak knife. I never knew my reflexes were so fast!

After dinner, I bathed the baby and wiped peas off of me. Jillian went down fighting into the pack & play and I went out in search of a supermarket so we didn’t have to try to find bagels in the Ass End of Pennsylvania at 5 AM the next morning.

Our very very VERY long day started at 4AM with an exceptionally chirpy wake-up call. I hate wake-up calls. Too damn cheerful. Once that phone rang, Jillian was awake which means I had to be as well.

We packed the truck up once again and headed down the mountain to the park. While Freddie was unloading his bike and stuff, I loaded up the stroller with The Jillian and enough gear to open a preschool for the day. I tend to overpack when travelling with the baby and let’s just be glad I did because we had a very long day.

By 6:30, Freddie was all settled and ready to go. We wandered down to the beach and chatted with other athletes and their families. Everyone checks out everyone else’s strollers in a situation like this and we were one of about six Ironman strollers that I saw. That stroller is the reason why we had Jillian in the first place, after all!

Our friend Ginny showed up to hang out with us and to cheer Freddie on. We cheered as he took off on the swim and when he came out of the water, then we went to find a shady spot to park ourselves for the day.

Good thing Ginny was there because if she hadn’t been, I don’t know how I would ever have been able to go to the bathroom. I supposed I could have loaded up the stroller and parked it outside while I went pee as fast as possible, but that would have been a pain in my ass. So it was nice to be able to leave Jillian where she was while I navigated the restrooms in the park.

We saw lots of other babies and lots of dogs, including one huge bulldog who came over, plopped himself down on the blanket next to Jillian and proceeded to lick all of her toys. Most of the other babies we saw were acting all normal – sleeping and everything. Not MY baby, oh no. If there are things to look at and shout at, well, that’s Jillian’s purpose in life. Naptime came and went and came and went and she was still going strong. Eventually, The Whining started, so I knew she was really, really tired. She never whines! She only shouts REALLY LOUD. I put her up on my shoulder and she fell asleep almost instantly. I carefully dumped her into the stroller and she slept for about a half-hour.

She’d been up for about seven hours at this point, which might be a new record for all of us.

We were trying to gauge how long this thing was going to take, but since this race was completely new, nobody had any kind of average time. We knew that the bike course was kind of crazy with the hills, so I figured about five to five-and-a-half hours and then we’d see Freddie. The first guy came in at 4:32, then the second guy five minutes later. The third guy finished about a half-hour after that, so those first two finishers are obviously robots.

5 hours came and went. 5:30 hours came and went. We were around 6 hours and counting when people really started coming through the finish line in significant numbers. Around 6 and a half hours, I saw Freddie come around the bend. I scooped Jillian up and handed her over so he could cross the finish line with her.

She was completely unamused by this turn of events and I kind of don’t blame her. After a 1.2 mile swim, 56 miles of bike, and 13.1 miles running, her Daddy wasn’t exactly smelling fresh and clean. He got across the finish line and handed her back to me.

With the most impeccable timing EVER, the rain started right as Freddie finished the race. We loaded up the stroller with the toys and blankets and water bottles and other junk and headed to the car. Freddie rolled up with his bike and stuff which we manhandled into the back of the truck along with the baby.

I drove a tired and sunburnt baby, a tired and exhausted Daddy and myself home. We had a pretty good day. Jillian was just the most fantastic baby ever. As long as she has something to chew on and people to shout at, she’s the happiest baby in town. I hope she can stand it for Lake Placid next month because that’s a FULL Ironman and will take about 11 hours. Yikes.

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Filed under Freddie, Jillian, Me Me Me, Triathlon