When I first became a runner, my mother bought me reflective bands for my ankles and a blinking light to attach to my running shorts, and warned me to watch out for cars.  When I crashed my bike and broke my wrist, she sewed my race kit back together and warned me to watch out for gravel.  Before I slipped into the water at my first Ironman, she traced a blessing on my forehead and warned me to “be safe.”  When I finished, she cried as she held me, thankful that her once-broken girl had been transformed safely - oh, so safely - into an Ironman.

My mother never warned me to watch out for bombs at the finish line.

***************

By 3:45 pm today, my Facebook news feed was flooded with updates.  This runner was safe, that one had crossed the line and left the area before the explosions, a friend had taken her sister back to the hotel, two spectators were out of the area.  It took several hours to find two friends — one of whom crossed the finish line 30 seconds before the explosion.

Since I began taking sports seriously, I have turned to running when I am sad, angry, and upset.  There is a comfort in the feeling of your own two feet, the pounding of your heart, and the raggedness of your breath.  And so today, several states away and helpless, I went out the door for a run.

I saw more runners than usual this afternoon; runners of all kinds.  A pair of tall, lanky men in USNA athletic shorts passed by, keeping pace with each other and not speaking.  We looked at each other silently.  The younger man’s eyes were shocked.  Another pair, middle-aged women who look like they normally walk.  But today, they were running.  A girl my age — light, straight hair falling from a ponytail.  Each time we passed, I looked at these runners.  They all looked back, silently.

Usually runners say hi.  Or they nod.  Something.  But today, nothing.  Today every eye I met was full of shock, full of horror.  We didn’t have words for what we felt.

I stopped at a crosswalk near the Pentagon.  An Air Force Captain, my age, with a runner’s body underneath his carefully pressed blues, stood next to me.  Without speaking, he turned and held out his hand.  I took it, and we held the handshake until the light changed.  We didn’t have words for what we, as runners, were feeling.  But we needed the solace that someone else knew and understood.

Runners live to run the Boston Marathon.  Every runner on that course toed the line with miles and miles behind them.  Miles of hard work, mornings of getting up early to practice the lonely craft of breath and footfalls, evenings of stretching and tending to tiny hurts that promise to escalate if not tended to.  Every spectator that lined the course stood on the street to cheer themselves hoarse for someone they loved — someone they’d watched dedicate themselves to the training, to the lifestyle, to the dream of “Running the Boston Marathon.”  The 23,000 runners and tens of thousands of spectators were bound together by this dream, each came to the starting line, the edge of the course, willingly, and with love.

There will be other Boston Marathons.  With each marathon, the community of runners will grow, and the community of people who love and support runners will grow.  Eventually the pain will dull and we will feel like we can run and race safely.  But that pain needs time.  And dizzied by the pain, we need to be reminded, breathless as a runner at Mile 26, of how fragile our love is.  

My fingers floated over my iPod, looking for something to accompany me.  And as I ran, as shocked as all of my fellow runners and fellow lovers of runners and fellow human beings, Adam Duritz’s voice floated somewhere behind my feet.  

I am ready — I am ready — I am ready — I am fine.

Yesterday’s Half Full triathlon was possibly the only race in which I’ve ever competed to make the Wall Street Journal.  

Earlier this year (in case you were living under a rock or, like a normal person, try not to care about these things), Lance Armstrong was banned from competing in officially sanctioned events.  Forever.  A lifetime ban for what the US Anti-Doping Agency decided was doping and trafficking in drugs.  This ban has had something of a polarizing effect on the cycling and triathlon communities.  He’s never officially failed a drug test (although testing of frozen samples did reveal possible use of EPO, a banned substance).  Former teammates have testified that he doped.

And there remains the main doubt (at least in my mind): In a sport where all the guys you were beating doped, how were you still winning and not?

Nobody’s saying he isn’t a good athlete.  He’s phenomenal.  He’s absolutely incredibly good, and what’s more, he’s done a world of good for the sport of cycling.  He put cycling on the map and was in a position to put triathlon on the map the same way (though some folks in the community had doubts about bringing an already-celebrity to the sport).

Whether rightly or wrongly accused, the point remains: he has a lifetime ban.  He can’t compete in any events sanctioned by USA Triathlon (or any other governing body affiliated with the US Olympic Committee).  He can show up, he can spectate, he can cheer, but he can’t race.

Unless, of course, the race directors drop their USAT sanctioning.

Which the Half Full race directors did.

What this means is that the race will not be counted in the official athlete ranking, and had the race been used as a qualifier for something else (like Kona), it would not be able to give slots.  Anyone who won this race also wouldn’t be able to use it to apply for their pro card.  Little things, but little things can add up.

But more than that, what example does it set for the sport?  That a lifetime ban doesn’t actually mean that you can’t race anymore?  …That’s the point of it.  It’s supposed to be a punishment.  It’s supposed to take you out of the thing that you love and the publicity and fame surrounding that sport.  It’s supposed to hurt, and it’s supposed to suck.

Instead, the race directors decided that the publicity possible was worth sacrificing the USAT sanctioning.  The benefits of having Lance Armstrong headlining the race, giving a talk the night before in a local hotel’s banquet hall (“Lance Unplugged”), and selling stickers that said “I Raced with Lance” outweighed the benefits of running a USAT sanctioned race and upholding the ban.  For this race in particular, I find it personally tricky.  The race is held to raise money and awareness for the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults, which, oddly enough, could be me the next time I go to the doctor.  So for me to say that a race shouldn’t be allowed to raise more money for this fund…feels weird.  Because I’d like whatever hypothetical cancer with which I could be diagnosed at age 26 to be very, very curable.

But at what cost?  The ruling said he can’t race, but you’re letting him.  Does this mean that next the Ironman World Championships will drop the sanctioning to let him race?  Can the US Olympic Committee itself drop its…own…sanctioning to let him compete in the US Olympic Trials for Triathlon and then let him represent the US in Rio de Janeiro in 2016?  (Reductio ad absurdum, but hang tough, we’re almost there.)  The bottom line is that there’s nothing that prevents any race or any group from letting him compete, nor should there be.  The ban should be enough.  Races should hold themselves to a higher standard, one that says “We may not completely agree with what USAT says, we may think they’re full of sh*t, but we will uphold their policies and uphold the integrity of this sport.”

I raced with Lance.  Lance won.  But the sport lost.

So this is the race I forgot to train for.  I mean, I rode the bike course a few times.  I ran twelve miles once.  Ten miles another time.  I’ve swum….some.  I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t thrilled about this race.  I also wasn’t sure I was going to be proud of how it went down.  But whatever the reason, I showed up on Sunday with the hope that springs eternal: the hope that maybe all the other women in 25-29 age group would decide not to show up.

The weather sucked.  A lot.  It started raining 20 minutes before the race started.  It kept raining for the next three hours.  It was 50 degrees.  Any other questions about “atmospherics?”

Swim: The benefits of (a) a time trial swim start and (b) being late for it seem enough for me to repeat the performance.  

(For those who have never done/seen a time trial start…which was me, until ten hours ago, a time trial start is when everybody lines up OUTSIDE of the water, and enters the water at a predetermined interval (here, two people every five seconds) instead of taking off in massive waves of 50-200 people every 5 or so minutes.  I climbed halfway up the supports of the amphitheater to watch the first people go off in order to learn this new kind of magic.)  

I’m looking around and realizing that nobody had my swim cap color.  I start asking other people, eventually wandering over to the corral where the volunteer checks my cap color against a list and says “oh they just entered.”  I run to the front where they let me into the water.  I slip in, touch my watch, and just like that — a whimper, not a bang — I’m off.  There’s no time to get nervous about starting, no time to tread water and jockey for position.

The first few hundred yards feel too hard.  It shouldn’t be.  The water is warmer than the air (from 46 degrees on land I’m suddenly blanketed in 67.  It’s blissful.) and calm, if murky.  The fronts of my deltoids feel weak and taxed, they’re working too hard, when the effort should be running down my back instead.  But since there was no time to get nervous, my breathing is calm and regular.

One, two, three, breathe right
One, two, three, breathe left
One, two, three, breathe right
One, two, three, life head, check position

After the first turn, something settles in and I find myself swimming exactly like I remember: smooth, steady, powerful.  The wetsuit means I don’t really kick, just pulling myself through the water with regular, steady strokes.  

The swim feels good.

Bike: It’s a long run from the swim exit to transition.  I feel a sort of sinking feeling running up the last hill; the fun, easy part is probably over.  I struggle to pull dry(ish) clothes onto my wet body: arm warmers, jacket, glasses, helmet, socks, shoes.  I grab my gloves and put them in my jacket “just in case.”  Grab the bike and head out.  

One mile into the bike course, the combination of the rain, wind, and my cold, wet, shivery body make the gloves less a “just in case” and more a “now.”  I can’t get them on without two hands, so I pull over, toss them on, and proceed.  Never mind that they’re immediately wet.

Just after mile six, when I crest Mount Albert for the first time and don’t feel too bad, I see two women by the side of the road.  One woman is visibly shaking from the cold and appears to be staring at the rear wheel of her bike in blank confusion.  Effff…. I circle back.  It’s the woman’s first race.  Her friend is similarly experienced.  They’ve managed to assess that her rear wheel is flat.  And that’s it.  So I dismount, shuck my gloves, grab the wheel, change the tube, re-seat the tire, and ride off into the sunset.  (You didn’t know I was nice, did you?)  A hundred feet down the road I realize I left my gloves on the ground.  Son of a…..FUCK.  Circle back.  The woman is now trying to inflate by jamming her CO2 cartridge directly onto the valve head.  Help me, little baby Jesus.  Grab my adapter, get her tire inflated and back on the bike.  Get my gloves.  She thanks me profusely through her chattering teeth.  ”Just how we do!”  I reply.  Depart, feeling somehow like I’ve paid it forward.

Except not really.  The real reason I stopped is because I’d already decided the race wasn’t going anywhere.  I wasn’t going to place, I wasn’t going to podium, I wasn’t trained enough or in the right midset enough to compete — to win.  So I said bag it and stopped to help because I’d decided my race didn’t matter.

The first loop goes all right.  After the first fifteen minutes I’m soaked: socks are wet and freezing, gloves same.  After thirty I can’t feel anything beyond the ball of my foot.  Thankfully that’s the part I need to turn the crank, so I force myself to not think about the cold and not worry about how I’ll run on a pair of ice blocks for feet.  We’ll worry about that when it happens, and not before.  I also notice that while my right hand seems okay…cold, but okay…as the bike goes on my left hand stops wanting to move, and is numb when I ask it to.  Exciting.

There’s a part of the course (Sharp Road) that never fails to make my heart absolutely sing — you make a hard turn into a rural subdivision and when the sun is shining you can’t help but be happy and feel like all is right with the world.  The houses are beautiful, the fields around the houses are beautiful, and there’s a series of small rollers that makes you want to go FAST.  So you do, laying your body flat and stretching forward across the bars, running out of gears way too quickly.  When I reach it this time, I try to get excited because I love this part.  But I can’t.  The descending parts leave me colder than before (more wind, less pedaling), and there’s enough standing water on the road to make me skittish about my aero bars.

I find a guy in an orange (like, deer season orange) jacket on a beautiful Kuota, we pass each other back and forth for several miles.  He can’t climb worth a damn, but I won’t go into my bars when I descend, so I keep passing him on the hills and he keeps angrily passing me going downhill.  I try and make small talk once or twice.  He refuses to respond.  Bummer.

Loop two starts.  I start wondering if I’ll catch Lance when there are three motorcycles and coming towards me I hear the distinctive whump-whump-whump of a disc wheel.  There’s the man himself, decked out in black and yellow Livestrong goodies, charging up the hill on a Trek Speed Concept that my heart flutter, with a black and yellow disc wheel in the back.  There it is.  I’ve seen the man.  I can continue.

Except not.

Half a mile (if that) later, something feels wrong.  I can distinctly feel every revolution of the rear wheel.  Look down.  Flat.  Fuck.  My fingers are frozen and I can barely get the wheel off.  Wrangle it off, fingers covered in grease.  Slip out the old tube, slip the new one in.  Try and seat the tube.  Can’t do it with the wheel vertical, so I sit on the wet grass and lay it across my lap, getting my shorts and legs covered in filthy wheel stains all down my thighs.  Start seating the new tube and the second side of the tire when I realize a pretty crucial problem I dimly remember considering about 11 months ago when I put that tube into the flat kit: the valve stem is too short.  It doesn’t poke through the wheel.  Fuck.  I’m out.  I’m just out.  I’ve now not only wasted time on the flat, now I can’t fix it.  So I start begging from passersby.  Thankfully the second person I ask has a spare and stops, giving it to me.  (Who says paying it forward doesn’t matter?)  I finish, re-wrangle the wheel onto the bike (more grease all over myself), remember to pull on my gloves before leaving this time (although they’re soaked and it’s not like they’re doing much good right now).

Can you tell I’m a little low at this point?  I’ve now lost probably 15 minutes on flat tires, I’m covered in bike grease, I’m cold, I’m soaked, and I can’t imagine running a half marathon after this.  Except I have a good 23 miles to go before I even get to that part.  I do the next 18 miles on autopilot, angry with myself and considering quitting.  Somewhere around mile 50, as I’m miserably descending one of my favorite hills, I force myself to lay flat along the top tube of the bike and pick out why I’m so strongly considering quitting at the end of the bike.

I’m worried about posting a bad time.  

That’s it.  I’m worried about not being competitive anymore, worried about someone looking at my time online and saying “Well, she was pretty good a couple of years ago, but not anymore.”  Which is a #firstworldproblem, a #poorlittlegirlproblem, and a #triathleteproblem rolled all into one.  As soon as I admit this, the choice becomes fairly simple: Go fuck yourself, KonaBound.  You’re going to finish this race if you crawl every step.  You don’t get a bye because your ego might get a boo-boo.  

So I finish the bike with quite possibly the slowest transition ever, because I can’t feel either my feet or my fingers.  Tying shoes with fingers that don’t do what you tell them is a time-consuming task. (I was having trouble with the gross motor skills to unzip my jacket and get my helmet off.  You try loop, swoop, and pull.)

Run: To be totally honest, I don’t remember a lot of the run.  It was two loops.  It had stopped raining.  At 53 degrees and overcast, it was actually perfect long run weather.  The volunteers at almost every corner were high school kids from the county.  I remember being surprised at mile one that I felt fine.  Being surprised at mile six that I felt fine, and being surprised as all hell when I decided to pick up the pace at mile 12.  I remember that my feet in dry shoes recovered more quickly than I thought they would, but that it took until mile five to be able to open my left hand, which was curled semi-permanently around a bike handlebar that was several miles away.

But I remember this distinctly.  At mile 0.5 and 7 (two-loop course), they had set up two rows of yellow signs flanking the path around the lake.  On the signs family and friends had written messages of support to the racers, and the racers had an opportunity to make signs describing for whom (or in memory of whom) they were racing.  As I run through the first time, I can’t catch my breath.  Every sign is a new person, living or dead.  Every sign is a lot of hopes and dreams that racers have put into today.  One sign, in particular, was written for a cancer survivor racing that day.  It said, at the bottom: Pain is what lets you know you are alive.  Pain is surviving.  I couldn’t look at any more signs after that.  I put my eyes down on the center of the path and watched the white flecks in the asphalt go by.  The second time through was the same.  The magnitude of the hope present in the face of a cosmic unfairness like that blows me away.  Especially after 60-some miles under my own power, when all I can taste are ketones.

The finish is quick, painless, uphill, and decidedly anticlimactic.  I’m okay with this.  It’s been a while since I’ve spent so much time alone in my own head with my body working, and I’m eager to put some distance between myself and it.

Finished, I decided not to wait around for the awards.  I don’t know whether or not they went 3-deep (in which case it doesn’t matter) or 5-deep (in which case there’s a 4th place award that’s going begging right now).  But I decided I was cold and tired enough, and wanted a shower badly enough to skip it.  Packed up, drove home, and cleaned everything up.  Took a 40 minute shower, including my favorite fall beer, to get all of the bike grime off of my leg…and the tattoo off of my hand, though the ones on my shoulders and calf seem destined to stay.  I’ve heard you can use alcohol to get temporary tattoos off, but I didn’t want to waste good beer.

Running the numbers:

Swim: 23:48; 13th fastest swim in the race.
Bike: 3:41:25
Run: 1:59:32; 9:04 pace.  Ugh.
Total: 6:13:41
Overall: 92/221
Gender: 15/55
Age Group: 4/7

*“How We Do”  While this race did not give me “that drunk sex feeling,” I wouldn’t have minded I’d been transported to a wild Miami party at any point in those six hours.

You cannot write a poem about triathlon
because a wetsuit is not poetic.
A quarter inch of black neoprene with red or blue accents
to make you look fast
When really to get into it
you coat your ankles with Pam
As if preparing to cook 2.4 miles of scrambled eggs.

And as you struggle into it
this non-poetic wetsuit judges you.
Critical of your every move and curve
When what you need most
Is a kind word and a slap on the ass.

A marathon begins
With a gun and a rush of legs, a churning tide of motion through the first hundred yards
A fluid sort of rush.
But not this swim
You do not begin a marathon getting kicked in the face,
Goggle stuck into an eye socket.

(I wrote these in about 2008, found them again recently.  Apparently I thought myself quite the modern poet.)

You cannot write a poem about training.

Because there are no words for endless laps.
They have not made a turn of phrase
for the way the water slides
over your skin
Like pulling on a silk summer dress.
A quick caress as you are motionless
Propelled and waiting to propel again.

You cannot write a poem about training.

Because “10:00 warm up, 6 x 6:00, race effort, full recovery, 15:00 cool down”
Does not fit into iambic pentameter
Nor is a hill workout
A haiku.
It is sweat on a bicycle under the mid-Saturday sun.
The stretch of an arm, reaching fluidly for the water bottle,
is poetic.
But not the straining gasp—wheels, legs tearing—to crest a hill.

You cannot write a poem about training.

Because the bricks in poems are metaphorical.
Weights we attach to ourselves, our souls, each other.
But bricks—these bricks—these bike-then-run monstrosities
Have now become my legs.  
Thighs like cinder blocks
Are not the stuff of poems.

(I wrote these in about 2008, found them again recently.  Apparently I thought myself quite the modern poet.)

I keep promising myself I’ll come back to this.  ”This” being the blog, training, and racing. I’ve been finding a lot of excuses over the past month, excuses not to train and not to write about it.  (Go figure.)

But today was the Annapolis Ten Miler, into which I made my way only because of a friend’s transferred registration*.  It’s a popular local race with an unforgiving elevation profile and a brutal schedule (late summer in MD).  Since January, I’ve run more than ten miles exactly twice.  I also rode 40 miles yesterday and spent three hours in the emergency room with a friend.  Suffice it to say, I made some choices that did not adequately prepare me for this race.  That said, I went into it with pretty low expectations (9:00 pace), and decided to just ride it out and use the race as a springboard back into real training.

After four hours of sleep (see: ER visit) and a “statistically significant” amount of coffee, I was ready to head out, despite forgetting a jacket.  There was lightning and some rain during the drive to Annapolis, but it seemed to be getting lighter as we parked and walked to packet pickup.  At 0625, with packet in hand, there was nothing to do before the race except stand in the (very short) line for the ladies room (see: coffee) and get pre-race work on my IT band because, well, the therapists were there and not busy.  (The IT band has been complaining of late.  I have not been doing it any favors by not stretching or rolling.)  

While we were all safe, huddled under the concrete roof of the pavilions surrounding Navy-Marine Corps Stadium, the rain intensified outside, complete with frequent lightning and thunder.  Nobody’s quite sure what the rules are (are there rules?) for running races and lightning.  It seems, however, that the rules are “as long as nobody’s getting hit by lightning, go for it.”  So, with the Annapolis, MD, “Incident Command Center” bus/van on the scene, we lined up.  Just as we started queuing, the rain ended and we started off with blue skies in the west.  

That lasted approximately 500 feet.

By the time we had run out of the stadium parking lot, it was raining again.  By the time we were through the first two turns, it was really raining.  By the Mile 1 marker, it was pouring, complete with wind and lightning, and the streets were flooded.  Soaked, with feet squishing at every step, we continued on.  My legs were pretty tight for the first three miles or so, a reminder of Saturday morning’s 40 mile ride (which doesn’t sound like much, I know, but believe me, it’s significant progress).

Somewhere around mile 3.5, I spot the first port-a-john on the course, and silently rejoice, trading four minutes of running time for the chance to take care of (again) that coffee, which I also stupidly drank on an empty stomach.  Immediately after, the hills start and I breathe a little bit of relief that I took care of things before the hills.  

You cross the “Scenic Severn River Bridge” at Mile 4 and again at Mile 8.5.  Maybe the bridge itself is more scenic from the car, maybe it’s more scenic from a distance (it is), or maybe the “scenic part” is the view of the Naval Academy from the bridge.  Whatever it was, the scenic vista before me on both occasions was a neon mass of some 4,000 runners pounding pale, wet concrete into submission, looking like they’d just been drowned in the river below.

The bridge is the first of a series of hills that occupy miles 4-9 of the course.  The hills aren’t particularly tall, nor are they particularly steep.  But for five miles, you are either going up or you are going down.  And since that entire part is out-and-back, everything down must later be an up.  Here, thankfully, I’m able to just cruise.  I don’t find hills particularly difficult — I don’t like them any more than anyone else, I just pass far more people on the hills than I do on the flats, and I’m rarely passed on hills.  I’m able to pick up the pace as we run through cool, grey Miles 4 and 5.  Just before Mile 6, the sun breaks out and it threatens to turn famously hot and humid.  Thankfully, however, everything stays moderate: moderate sunshine, moderate humidity, moderate temperature, moderate clouds and intermittent rain.  

By the Mile 9 sign, I’m admittedly done cruising and ready to be about done.  Mile 10 seems to take forever, a slow crawl uphill that shows every sign of being over right away — seriously.  It looks like the finish line itself is right beyond every corner.  Except every corner is just another street clogged with runners.  There’s a stretch across a grassy field that, in light of the rain, seems destined to make someone eat it and break a wrist, but the only person I watched wipe out was a spectator holding a giant Ryan Lochte sign.  Karma at work.  Finally we turn up the road to the stadium and the day seems to be over, minus one last uphill.

Uphill over and across the line, still soaking wet.  My stomach, unhappy from the overdose of caffeine and lack of food, shows little interest in watermelon, beer, bananas, or cinnamon raisin bagels.  Back into the car for the drive back to DC.  A shower and brunch later, I am somewhat back to normal.  (Although my stomach doesn’t want to see coffee for another month…or tomorrow morning.)

Many thanks to the support crew (whose photographs of me overtly non-plussed and then overtly making rude hand gestures may or may not make it onto the internet) and to the slot donor.*

*The friend whose registration I received had a race of her own today — where she BQ’ed. Congrats, M!