Buddy training

Tip for aspiring triathletes: pick pretty places to train and train with people you like. 

The last few weeks I've been meeting up for brick workouts (a bike loop followed immediately by a run) with my friend Maria. She is a long-time veterinarian who is heading back to school next year, changing gears from small animal practice to lab work and teaching. Her summer and fall athletic events schedule is slightly more ambitious than mine --complete with century bike rides and a possible addition of a 1/2 iron-- but we are fairly well matched in our fitness level at the moment.

We've been meeting up twice a week at Manasquan Reservoir in Howell Township, NJ, which is about 45 minutes away from both our houses. The reservoir is a municipal water source and a 1,200 acre park with a boating, biking, fishing, a wilderness preserve and a well maintained 5 mile perimeter trail that we run on.

I suspect the place is hectic on weekends, but when we come on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, it is pretty peaceful. There is usually a school group or two out to look at the nesting birds and other woodland creatures. In the past two weeks we've seen a gardener snake, a baby turtle, monarch butterflies --including one that lead us in to our running terminus today-- and countless warblers.

Our bike loop is one that Maria has done with her Team in Training group; it is 10 miles of rolling hills on quiet roads that wander through horse country. Even I --so skittish on the bike-- feel peaceful and happy riding here. I find it hard to believe this resource is just a mile off of Rt. 9, a bumpy thoroughfare dense with strip malls, gas stations and roadside billboards advertising the services of slip and fall attorneys.

Working out with Maria ensures I get my bricks in, and chatting with a friend makes everything more fun.

Maria and I will both be at Jersey Shore Triathlon on June 21. Come out and cheer us on!

Navesink-or-swim race report 2014

Diane and I were up at 5 to make coffee then headed off to pick up fellow Jersey Girl Stay Strong Multisport teammate, Patria Sullivan. From there we headed west to Victory Park in Rumson, NJ for the Navesink-or-swim distance festival.

For the uninitiated, the Navesink is a tidal estuary in Monmouth County, New Jersey. I swam in it last week for Red Bank tri and can't say it was the best part of the day. The water was cloudy and black. I got grit in my teeth. On entry we landed in two feet of mud covered by a half foot of water. There were razor clams.

So I didn't go into today's race with high hopes.

But this race was slightly closer to the Oceanic Bridge, where the Navesink meets up with the open ocean, and it was high tide. The starting area at Victory Park was lovely, and after three straight days of rain we got a beautiful clear morning.

Patti, me and Tom. The three Bassman Badasses. :)

It was nice to get to know Patria better on the drive out, and it was an unexpected pleasure to see familiar faces once we arrived. Both my relay teammates from the Bassman 1/2 Iron --Tom and Patti-- were there, even though they had done the Hammonton sprint tri only hours before. Crazy heads.

Usually I'm all signed up for races well in advance. I put them up on my wall calendar and set my training goals, but for Navesink-or-swim I did none of that. As late as yesterday morning I still wasn't sure if I felt like doing it.

But somewhere around midday I finally made up my mind to give it shot, and if I was going to bother getting all the way there to race, I figured I might as well sign up for the longer course (2.4 miles rather than 1.2).

I got to bed late last night, and I didn't sleep well. I kept getting up to look at the clock, thinking "I only have 5 more hours to sleep." Then, "I only have 4 more hours to sleep," and so on. This happens to me from time to time. It used to happen on the nights before I got up at 4:45am for masters swim practice. Now I'm used to that Tues/Thurs routine.

Around 2am I woke up suddenly, startled as if by a dog barking, and I began to feel panicky, thinking I had made a bad decision to race at the last minute. I never like anything last minute. I lay awake trembling then got up. In the dark I fumbled my way over to my desk and found a black Sharpie pen. Then I went into the bathroom, and by the eerie blue glow of the nightlight, I wrote the words "Peace be the journey" on my left arm. After that I just crawled back in bed and went back to sleep.

When I saw the words in the morning I had to laugh. They are a line from a silly B movie about the Jamaican bobsled team. Still, I like the sound of them. "Peace be the journey." Why not?

When we got to Victory Park I got on line for race day registration. Up to this point, 1.2 is the longest distance I'd done in competition (Bassman), but that hadn't taken too much out of me, so I wasn't particularly worried about the distance. I signed up for the 2.4 miler and figured it would take me less than an hour and a half to finish (ultimately I was done in 71 minutes). I quelled my jitters by reminding myself that I do an hour and a half of swim at masters practice three times a week.

Race start was delayed because there were more than 200 people doing day of registration. The short course racers went out first. I hung with my pals until their waves were called.

After Patti and Tom were off on their swims, we had about 25 minutes before they were going to start the long course, so I got in the water just to test out my wetsuit (which I hate, by the way), make sure I had enough rotation in the shoulders, get a feel for the temperature. I don't know that I will ever grow to like swimming in a wetsuit, though I recognize it has a place in the world of endurance racing. I always feel constricted and miserable in the suit, and as I've put on a few pounds since last year, I feel like I'm in a sausage casing. I think I'd like to get a sleeveless suit, try that out, but it'll have to wait til next season (my sport gear budget is straining as it is). Fortunately I don't have anymore races in the suit for this year.

Once my wave was called and the signal was given for us to start, the field was very close together and there was an unusual amount of contact. I am pretty impervious to that for the most part, and it makes drafting easier, but it also slows me down when I'm trying not to swim over people, or smack their feet. My experience in triathlons is that the field usually thins out pretty quickly, but here we seemed to be bunched up until at least the mid-point of the first of the two loops. Even in the second loop I had people bumping into me. I worked on improving my sighting, which felt pretty good, although my stupid suit chafed at my neck and now I have this red raw spot that will take several days to heal.

The conditions were good, the course was reasonably well marked and well staffed with support personnel, temps were fine. There were a few minor surprises like the baby jelly fish (no stingers) that felt like slimy clumps sliding through my fingers, and the fact that the turn around buoy was on a sand bar and it drifted in the current so the rope connecting it to its anchor nearly decapitated me and everyone in front of me as we rounded it. I knew to give it more room on the second pass, which solved the problem.

The only thing I really struggled with was knowing how much gas I needed to leave in the tank for the second loop. It reminded me of how hard it is to judge how much I can push on a bike section of a triathlon and still leave enough power in my legs to post a good time on the run. In the end, I think I may have been too conservative. My finishing time was 1:11:10, which was good enough for second place (out of 9) in my age group, but I got out of the water feeling like I could go again. So I definitely could have gone much harder throughout.

I just need to figure out where I can throttle up. I need to find that sweet spot of a pace that is hard but sustainable for that distance. I'm not going to have much chance to find out anytime soon, though, because my races are all either 500's or 1,500's for the rest of the season. Jersey Shore sprint is the third weekend in June (my next serious race) and the swim portion is only 400. It is known as a very fast course. I'm hoping I won't be in the water even 8 minutes.

Overall, I'd say Navesink was a good race. It was a beautiful day, I had friends around me, I posted a reasonable time even though I think I could have gone harder if I'd known more about that distance and that course.

Heading for the finish. That's me smokin' that beefy dude who had a 10 minute head start! :)

Red Bank - TAKE 2 - 2014

The following is a race report that I wrote up for a my triathlete friend, Kathy, so it's in Triathlese and may seem kind of odd if you don't speak the language, but it's how I've come to think about races in the past year. I like to breakdown what happened, go over it all in my mind, figure out how I want to improve, adjust my plans and move forward. The planning and improving are all part of the fun.

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

So here we were, back at Red Bank sprint tri, where my love of triathlon all began. This year we got sunny skies instead of rain, but faced a swim course that was more convoluted than ever. The quality water was unappealing, but the race organization was light years ahead of Bassman (see previous post's race report for Bassman 1/2 iron). 

This year I was looking to improve my times, but was a bit disappointed when I realized I only beat last year's by 7 seconds. Considering my weight is up a few pounds and I haven't done as much running (or biking, really) as I'd wanted through the winter, I guess this is a reasonable start. But it still makes me grumpy. 

I took about a minute and a half off my bike time, trimmed another minute out of the transitions combined (-:15 for T1, -:45 for T2). Then I added a minute to my swim and a minute to my run. The run minute didn't bother me too much. The extra minute on the swim, however, was perplexing given how much swimming I've been doing to train. 

I looked to see if, overall, everyone's times on the swim were a bit slower this year, as they changed the course, and they were, but I still wasn't satisfied with that effort. I don't know if I was just being complacent or what. I started out strong and was getting a good draft off the three ladies in the front. I kept up with them until the turn (it was an out and back) then the pulled out of drafting distance and I maintained my pace. But I struggled to navigate between swimmers in the wave ahead, especially because a LOT of people were getting way off track due to the sun being directly in our eyes and no one being able to sight the finish very well. 

Even the front runners in the olympic distance (including my teammate) were way off course at the end. I had watched that before getting in the water, and knew to steer to the left, but the support group of kayakers were trying to make a kind of channel to herd everyone to the finish and that meant a narrow area for getting around competitors. I had to sight practically every stroke instead of every three or four. That slowed me down. 

I believe I was putting out good effort, and I was with a group of three women that came in about 30 seconds behind the first three, so we were 4,5 and 6th women out of the water (I was 6th only because we had to all climb up one step ladder to exit). So it was a respectable showing overall, but I swear if I could go out today and do it again I could take a minute or more off that swim. I mean, I'm doing 8:15 consistently in the pool for a 500, so 11:51 in the race was just sort of insanely bad. A race will be slower, but I can do 10's consistently in open water without killing myself (that was my pace for Bassman). So I'm still trying to figure out what the problem was. The little glitches added up, maybe? 

Looking to the season ahead, I realize I've got my work cut out for me, but I won second in my age group, and that is a good place to start the season. (Note: they originally announced me as first in my age group, which is why I'm on #1 rather than #2 in this photo)

Bassman and looking ahead

As Valentine celebrated turning 7, I celebrated by getting rid of my stash of candy, re-downloading my Overeaters Anonymous app that had been culled from my phone in one of my organization frenzies, and renewing my commitment to keep healthy for myself and my family.

It is mid May, as I write this, and I’ve lost 10 pounds. I’m 3 lbs away from “normal” weight, but 10lbs above where I was this time last year. Weight loss maintenance is at least as challenging as weight loss itself. Finding motivation to get back on track when you feel like you’ve screwed up is difficult, but there are bound to be wobbles and beating myself up isn’t going to help.

So I have given myself a pat on the back for at least sticking with the swimming, forgiven myself for not eating better and running, and have acknowledged it was a tough winter, that’s all there is to it. I am back to my more serious workouts and feeling much stronger and happier. I’ve gotten my eating under control (the never ending battle) and started really pushing myself with the swimming and the rest of the training for triathlon season. I remind myself this is a life-long process, and that at least now things like McDonalds or a fridge full of leftovers from take out are just hard to imagine. There’s no lure there anymore. We have a better stocked fridge as a family and we spend more time outdoors than we used to. That feels normal now. Last weekend I did a ½ Ironman relay (Bassman) serving as the swim leg for a team made up of me, my friend Patti from masters swimming on the bike (her strength) and our mutual friend Tom on the run. The race was a disorganized mess, but I felt grateful to participate in it. It felt like an affirmation that I am, in fact, an athlete. I hopped right in the 58 degree water in my new wetsuit and finished 5th out of all the women in the water. Not shabby after a rough winter.

Next Sunday, less than a week from today, I will be back to Red Bank for the triathlon that started it all. I know more now and feel more confident. Sure I’m a bit battle scarred, maybe a little heavier than I'd like, but I feel pretty good. I’m optimistic for the summer ahead. I have many races planned including several that will include new friends of mine made entirely through sport.

The race I am looking forward to most is the Great Six Flags tri on August 31. It will be an olympic distance and I am excited to have my family there, to compete along side my friend Maria, who has become my training buddy, and to get to run through the safari on the run portion. Oh, I hope I see a giraffe!

I have so much to enjoy. I feel blessed. It’s all a work in progress, and some days are so so hard, and sometimes I feel the pull back into the old cycle of self sabotage, but I fight back. I fight hard. I have so much to be grateful for. I can’t let go of that.

When will we ever learn?

The downward slide probably began with my injury and then the deflated feeling that came after NJ State, but worsened during a brutally cold winter. Work stress reached a fever pitch, the battle with my ex over custody of my daughter had grown more intense and vitriolic, and by November I was only running a little, and pounds were slipping back on.  

I did do the Hamilton Hangover 5 Miler on January 1, 2014, and was three minutes slower than the previous year, but still felt grateful to be moving. The winter was one of the worst on record in New Jersey’s history. Mountains of snow, constant snow days, schedules upended at every turn. We got a treadmill and Diane learned to love it, but I just couldn’t get it. I had tried to get back to masters swimming the fall, but chronic pain in my shoulder combined with everything else I had going on, has sidelined me. Still, in January I went back to my masters swimming three days a week. That was about all the exercise I could muster through the worst of the winter. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something.

Diane and I went back to Key West and did the half marathon there in the third week of January. But since I hadn’t trained nearly enough, the half marathon was hell. I got to find out exactly how punishing it is, self sabotaging, really, to complete an event when you are not trained for it. The soles of my feet got blisters. Everything got blisters. It was miserable. The sun and sand were great, but the race didn’t leave me eager to sign up for my next event. It just left me tired.

My running got even more intermittent after that, but I hung on to the swimming. I even signed up for and competed in two masters swim meets, bringing home a couple of medals from one of them.

Work and stress continued to grind me down. I was back up to my old habits, eating chocolate and hoarding sweets in my bedside table drawer. I felt out of control and jittery. Then my pharmacy ran out of one of my medications and gave me an alternative that didn’t work, sending my mood into a tailspin in early March. It got corrected but not before I was completely rattled and off balance.

By Valentine’s birthday in April I had gotten back up to 181lbs. Still 46lbs less than I’d been at my worst, but 20lbs heavier than I’d been at the time of my bike accident.

I realized something had to be done. Here I was, someone who had come through a serious injury and gotten right back into racing only to be felled by a load of heavy day to day stress. It’s not okay to only keep going when it’s a crisis. Day to day is key, and exercise and eating right are what mitigate that. No matter how many times I learn this lesson, it never seems to sink in all the way.

A loss

The day after NJ State, I headed off to Cape Cod with Diane. Vacation = an alternate location, vacation food, more obstacles to prevent me from exercising as much as I need. I tried to keep up my efforts, but the race had been what I’d worked toward, and now, with it behind me, I lost some of my momentum. Still, I saw old friends and they said how great I looked, and this helped me motivate to get out and run. There was a race hangover, there was ice cream I probably shouldn’t have eaten, but I was still moving.

A week into our three week trip, my mom called to tell me my dad had passed away and I needed to drive back from Massachusetts to New York for his memorial service on Long Island. I had been expecting this call.

My dad had suffered from progressive dementia, and had been in nursing care for years. His was a painful, seemingly endless decline that was unbearable to observe and obviously unbearable to endure. In early July he’d gotten pnuemonia and been put on hospice. My siblings had all come in from out of town to see him. We’d sat with him, sung to him, given him as much comfort as we could.

Diane and I had grappled with not going on vacation. Even though we’d paid for our beach rental, we didn’t want to leave my mom to keep vigil on her own. Still she urged us to go. We’d packed clothes for ourselves and Valentine to wear at his funeral and brought them along, just in case we needed them. And now we needed them.  

My dad had been a difficult figure in my life. As the youngest of six children, I think I got a different version of him than the others did. So we all took the loss differently. I think I was maybe the most ambivalent. But I felt surrounded by warmth and happiness as my family gathered to remember him, and was glad to stand up and read a poem from one of his favorite poets --William Carlos Williams-- at his service. It was a pretty day, sunny and cool, and my family seemed to be at its best.

After the funeral we returned to our vacation and didn’t return until the third week of August. By then I’d put on a few pounds and not done all the workouts I’d really needed or wanted to. Still, I did manage to complete two more triathlons (TriRock Asbury Park and Hightstown Tri) in August and September, and a 10 mile run in October.

My family at dad's funeral.

NJ State Triathlon 2013

I drove home from Dr. Flemming’s office in a haze. He had, against all odds, just given me the green light to do the NJ State triathlon. Diane asked me how the appointment went and I told her he’d said I was okay to try it. Instead of looking upset, she smiled and gave me a big thumbs up. I got on Facebook and announced I was going to attempt to complete the race. After weeks of sympathy wishes and encouragement to “take it slow” suddenly it seemed like all of my friends and family were rooting for me. My spirits began to lift like a Macy’s parade balloon.

As my friends began to arrive from out of town the July temperatures in New Jersey climbed sky high. The day before the race, the directors sent out an email to let us know that the temperature of the water in Mercer Lake had risen to nearly 90 degrees. They were adding extra water stations on the course to try to combat heat stroke among participants.

So this was going to be my race. It wasn’t enough to face the injury, I was not going to race through a hot, hellacious gauntlet.

Still, there was no turning back now.

On the morning of July 25, 2013, I got up early, picked up my friend Kathy’s husband, Dave, from their hotel near my house (he, too, was doing the sprint distance; the olympic distance would be held the following day), and we drove to the event together and unloaded our bikes. I found my transition station, set up my stuff in it’s tiny rectangle of space. pulled on my favorite blue 2XU tri suit and my color coded swim cap for my race starting wave, and licked the sweat off my upper lip.

I don’t remember too much about the pre-race participants’ meeting on the shore of the lake, where the race directors went over course instructions and USAT rules, it all went by me. I was thinking about the swim, could I make it? And if I did, would my shoulder be too shot to hold myself up through the bike course riding my old clunker?

One got one lucky break: the 15 mile bike course had been shortened to just over 10 miles due to some unexpected, large-scale construction that the town initiated without warning just before the race. I overheard other participants complaining, but I took it as a good sign, support from the powers beyond. I wouldn’t have to make it as far on the bike.

On the other hand, the air temperature was already close to 85 degrees as people began lining up in the water. I knew it would be close to 90 degrees by the time I got to the run portion of the race. If I got there, which was still an if. I had promised Diane I’d quit if I felt I was closing in on my limits of endurance. I’d never let myself consider being a DNF (did not finish) person before, but for this race, I kept that option open. No one would think less of me if this was one I couldn’t do. No one had even expected me to get this far.

As my wave --the 35-39 year old women-- was called into the water, I could feel sweat pouring down the back of my neck and and the steaming bath water providing not an ounce of relief. The group I was in was very large, certainly the largest I’ve ever started with in a tri, and that was a bit intimidating. But I took up my usual favorite spot, tight to the buoy on the inside. Of course it didn’t make sense to start at the front of the pack given my injury, but habit is habit.

Then my wave was called and I headed off. I told myself to think of just one thing at a time. One stroke, then another stroke. I looked ahead to sight the buoys, tried to avoid getting kicked in the face, thought about making clear clean strokes with good form, which was nearly impossible with my right arm failing to push evenly through the water. But I tried. And then, as in every race, when I hit the middle buoy, my instincts kicked in, the pain faded from my mind, and I picked up the pace. I’m not sure how I did it; I just remember telling myself that my pre-injury strength was still in there somewhere. I just had to be able to access it for 500 meters.

I found a rhythm and pushed. I wanted to show myself I could do it. It felt like a way to prove the whole year had been a success, that I was not the person I had once been, so heavy, so ashamed, so afraid. It was a ratification of the entire voyage to health that I had undertaken.

I was not my best swim, of course, but as I rose out of the water and saw the time clock, I realized I’d made decent time. I later learned I was the sixth woman out of the water in my age group, coming in ahead of more than 30 other swimmers.

I fumbled it into transition, and even a tiny breeze of warm air against my wet skin felt nice. I wasn’t sure if I’d gone too hard in the water. Probably. I thought, by that point, I could make it through the bike, but I might have to quit before the run. The heat was mounting and even the strongest racers were looking like it was a fight to keep hydrated. I put on my socks, shoes, gloves and helmet and made my way to the bike mount area.

I took the bike easy. That was all I could do. The sun just kept climbing. There were no clouds. I noticed the trees were perfectly still. If there had been a slight breeze before, it was gone now. I was going so slow that it seemed everyone was passing me. It was possible, I thought, that I would actually be last to finish the bike course. What did that matter? I asked myself. Many people were not out doing this, and if I was last I was still faster than everyone who was home asleep.

Finally I saw the crowds of cheerers thickening and the transition area came into view. I thought I heard Diane cheering for me and that gave me a lift, and there were race volunteers who were cheering too. They didn’t know about the long pink scar along my shoulder just under my suit, but they cheered anyway, and it made a difference.

I racked my bike, gulped some water, took off my gloves and helmet and wobbled along on jelly legs out to the run course. It wasn’t pretty. The course is a lot hillier than the race coordinators would have you believe. By the first mile marker I was going so slowly you couldn’t really call it a run. I kept telling myself not to walk, just to keep going. Mile two was a death march. I had to take walk breaks, but I told myself anything that wasn’t stopping was still moving forward. Starting mile three I had nothing left. I plunked down one foot, stared at it, noticed my shoe laces, thought about ice water. Saw my other foot land, thought about that one. Waved at a spectator who was asking if I was alright. Did I just give that lady a thumbs up? Seriously?

As the cheers of the crowd grew louder, that old horse heading for the barn feeling began to rise in my chest and I quickened my pace to a trot. There was a bend, a slight decline, a painful incline, Diane’s beautiful face at the top of the rise, and then the long red carpet to the finishing arch emerged into view. I gave every last scrap of strength I had to kick into a proper run across the finish line.

Someone put a medal around my neck. Diane was there with a bottle of water. I stumbled into a cold shower tent and stayed there until I could almost breathe again. Here’s a picture of me having just emerged from the shower:

I’m still kind of amazed that I pulled it off.

Progress and an answer

Eventually I stopped crying about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to do the NJ State triathlon. I’d realized my broken collarbone and subsequent surgery to repair it, had left me unable to swim. I had let the disappointment sink in. But just because of my crazy contrarian streak, I went on the race’s Facebook page and sent a message to the race directors asking them to let me switch my registration from the long course (olympic) to short course (sprint) event. They said it was no problem. They even issued me a partial refund. I should have asked for a full refund and just withdrawn. I knew that. Because I realized the who think was hopeless.

The next day I had another check up and x-ray. Even though I felt lower than I had since the day of the accident, Dr. Flemming said he thought I was making good progress. He said keeping active would encourage faster bone growth, he said race or no race, I needed to keep training. He lifted my arm, palpated the space below the incision where the nerve had been cut and the skin was numb and still is. He opened my arm out to the side, made it into a little wing and flapped it.

“You’re doing well.” He said.

I did not feel well. I felt two hot, wet tears bulge out of my eyes and plop onto to the hem of my shorts.

“Don’t stop.” He said.

He told me to come back in five more days, at which point it would be only five days until the race.

Friends were coming in from out of town. I made them posters. I would stand at the edge of the race and do my best to cheer.

I did a few bike sessions on my trusty mountain bike, with its fat, slow, knobbly tires. I jogged a bit and found a rhythm for swinging my right arm so I could keep it from getting bounced too much. I got in the pool one more time and found a little more rotation in the arm, was able to complete a 500, though barely enduring the pain.

When I got to my next appointment with Dr. Flemming he showed me the latest x-ray and asked me if I was feeling any better.

“A little,” I said. I went on: “My body is improving, but I feel really depressed.”

“Would you feel better if you did the race? Because I am ready to give you the go ahead.

I couldn’t quite believe it. I had been pretty sure if I felt like crap, that meant I wasn’t healing fast enough and that he was going to tell me to the race was a bad idea. But instead he said I could go for it if I wanted. I had to ask him three times to figure out if he was really sure, really meant it, was sure I wasn’t just going to worsen everything. He was sure. In fact, he was pretty adamant that I probably needed to attempt it, otherwise the psychological defeat would be worse than the injury.

When you realize you can't just "bounce back"

I stopped working on this writing project just after I broke my collarbone on June 9, 2013. And now a year has passed. So what happened?

First of all, the injury required a plate and five pins to fix and was a huge mental and physical blow. Coming off some of the best training of my life, I suddenly had 3 weeks of hardly any exercise at all. I was in pain. I could feel my muscles withering. The immediate days after the surgery were unbearably painful and I only survived with Oxycontin, though I fear addiction and tried hard to take only the minimum amount possible.

But even as I lay in bed with an ice pack over my surgery bandages and yellow and red stained pads over all of my left knee, thigh, upper arm and shoulder, some totally irrational back part of my brain I still held out hope that I could compete in the NJ State triathlon that was just 5 weeks away. It cut through the pain and the haze of the oxycontin. I had been looking forward to that race for months. I had been training my ass off, literally. In “tri speak” it was my “A race” the big one that was my major goal for the season (for my life up to this point!).

When I finally got myself to sit up and stare listlessly around the living room, I floated the idea of still competing in the race. Diane was horrified. The whole accident had made her furious at me for being hasty and putting speed above safety. I hadn’t meant to, felt defensive on all fronts and wished for more tenderness, but I could see the anger came from fear of losing me, from a deep place of love. Well, I can see that now, I guess. I’m not sure I really knew that at the time.

Anyway, she and several other friends told me the idea that I could complete NJ State was ludicrous. Furthermore, even if I did somehow manage to finish it, I’d probably injure myself more or slow my healing. It was stupid, ill advised, dangerous, demented and ignorant.

This reaction was both sensible given the circumstances, and painful to hear. I tried to argue, but the pain kept me from saying much. I just moped.

When I went in for my one week check up and follow up x-ray after the surgery, I tentatively broached the topic of completing the race with orthopedic surgeon. I was thoroughly stunned to learn that his view was much less bleak than that of my wife and friends. He said the pain was going to be bad, that the bones would take time to knit beneath the plate, but with the plate in place, I could do what I could handle. It was better to get moving than to sit around. He wouldn’t give me a full clearance on the race without measuring my progress weakly leading up to it. And it was a long shot, but he wasn’t taking the option off the table either.

Diane didn’t believe me when I told her this is what he’d said. She was incredulous. So I dragged her in with me to my two week appointment and she heard for herself. She argued with Dr. Flemming for some time, but did ultimately take in his explanation (complete with latex and plastic model of the human shoulder and scapula). She wasn’t thrilled about the possibility of me racing, but she backed off the notion that restarting my training was a sure fire way to make my injury worse. She respected the doctor’s thoroughness and was reassured that he wasn’t being cavalier and that it was HE and not I who would make the final call.

The idea of the race helped me get over the internal turmoil of injury. Prior to getting hurt I had begun to feel strong, competent, balanced, invincible, unstoppable. Now I felt weak, unstable, timid. I didn’t know if I could make the recovery without getting derailed. I didn’t want to go back to being sedentary. I saw my whole year of effort erased, the comfort eating, the Nutella, the pounds packing back on. The injury forced several weeks of stillness on me, and it’s so easy to let such things snowball. But having this crazy race idea in the back of my mind helped me find a spark of resolve.

I began riding my bike on the bike trainer one week after surgery. It was something I had to prove to myself, partly to fulfill my dad’s “get back up on the horse” advice from childhood, and partly to face down the total fear I had of getting back on the triathlon bike (now in the trainer) with it’s dinged up frame and torn handle bar tape. You can still see the scrape marks and encrusted yellow paint from where the bike ground into the yellow line tape in the center of the road. To this day I am proud that I can get back on that bike and that I did it coming off of surgery. I found a way to sit and hold myself with just my left arm, and that kept pressure of my still aching right shoulder. I did a few more bike rides that week and tried one very ginger mile of running. The running jolted my shoulder no matter how slow I went, and each jolt brought a fresh wave of pain.

Ironically, the easiest sport to restart was the one that got me hurt and that I had always like least: the bike. And at the other end of the spectrum was my favorite sport, the swim, which now seemed to be the most formidable obstacle of them all.

My range of motion in my right arm and shoulder was massively diminished. Beyond the actual broken bone, now protected by the plate and pins, there was wide scale bruising, deep and painful roadrash that would crack or become goopy when I sweat, and extensive nerve and muscle damage. The only thing I could tell myself was that I was strong enough from training that if I absolutely had no other option, I could probably swim the shorter course distance (500 meters - the equivalent of 10 down and back laps in a pool) just with one arm. I could maybe do a modified breaststroke. I could think of something. If worse came to worse, I could just float on my back and kick my way around the course. It’s not a long distance, and I am at home in the water.

But of course, I didn’t want to have to resort to any of those ideas. Meanwhile, my doctor actually didn’t want me to stop using the arm. He encouraged me to get the muscles moving without pushing to the point of further injury. Of course, that begged the question: how the heck could I know if I was passing that point or not since everything was painful? I’d have to differentiate between tolerable pain and intolerable pain. For an athlete, even one who was, until recently, 227 lbs of sedentary flab, it can be hard to determine the subtleties of pain. You run with blisters, you run with GI tract problems, you swim with a stitch in your side, you wake up with achy knees and go for another run anyway. You have to learn to ignore some pain to get stronger. I can only imagine how much harder the problem of knowing when you’ve reached the point of dangerous pain is for elite athletes who are used to pushing far beyond their limits.

I only used the Oxycontin for about three days after surgery, the moved on to a cocktail of Advil, Aleve and Tylenol for another few days, then got it down to just Advil. Still, everything hurt. I struggled with the dual desire to get up before I began gaining weight and feeling sedentary again, and to perfectly lie still in hopes of getting some reprieve from the pain.

As someone who has experienced physical violence in my past, I know all too well how to dissociate and leave my body. I can just float away. And I believe this is partially responsible for my struggle with obesity. Not only did I fulfill the stereotype of eating to push down my emotions, I ate to feel something in my body, to feel my body exist at all. Even as it became larger and larger, more unwieldy, more obvious to others, for years I struggled to feel like I was inside my body at all. Now, for a year I had given myself over to a process of tentatively reentering my body, and suddenly, with all the pain, I wanted very much to leave it again.

That was the hardest part of healing, staying inside myself, and it was probably what I needed most at this point in my journey to health. Somehow I stayed in my body, stayed with the pain, listening, experiencing the gradations, the twinges, the subtle improvements. I felt awful. But I did it.

My first session in the pool, two weeks after surgery, was perhaps my most psychologically defeating half hour of exercise ever. After months of smooth, strong swimming, I found my arm just wouldn’t go. I couldn’t make full rotation, could barely do a doggie paddle without wanting to cry. Here I could feel quite clearly that I was teetering on the edge of increasing my injury, of going too far. I tried swimming freestyle with one arm and it was as untenable as it sounds. At this point I gave up on the idea of participating in the NJ State triathlon. It wasn’t going to work. I went home and cried.

Disaster strikes for real

And then I decide to go out for a bike ride. I was just breaking in my new clipless bike pedals (which is a serious misnomer, since they are the kind of pedals you clip your shoes into). Getting used to them had caused me to topple over a few times the day before, but I had wisely decided to practice clipping and unclipping, slowly, in the park, where I could at least land on soft grass. I got a few minor bruises, but I felt like I was getting the hang of it.

The next day, June 9, I installed my new bike computer, just a small odometer type thing (Cat Eye). I was feeling proud of myself for figuring out how to do it on my own.

I suited up, put on my sunscreen, and decided to head out for a ride. I was a little nervous about the clipless pedals, but I felt like I could handle them. I waited for the right moment to get going, then headed along my usual 15 mile route. I was enjoying the pedals, moving along. I passed another cyclist, and then, after cresting a small hill, I began to have trouble with my gears. I was trying to get the gears to a lower level, with more tension, but that didn’t seem to be working. My gear shifters are on the ends of my aerobars, not in the location of my breaks, and I had to reach forward to get to them. The gears were on too easy of a setting but to fix it I had to keep pedaling, since the gears can’t shift if you don’t pedal. I was pumping my knees up and down furiously. My new computer, flashed 22 mph. I felt panicky. Out of control. The back gear was screwed up. I wasn’t sure why. So I decided I would try the front gear instead to slow things up. Then I pushed the left (front gear) down instead of up, essentially releasing all the tension on the bike chain. I lost control, swerving the handlebars wildly, swinging out into the road, unable to reach for the breaks.

I remember the sight of the yellow center line of the road and the gray asphalt upside down in slow motion. I landed, head first, cracking my helmet nearly in two. My right shoulder came down next, followed by my hip as my limp body skidded across the road. I remember the texture of the road, gritty beneath my fingers as I crawled to the side and sat in a heap on the curb. I could see my bike had slid about ten feet past me. The clipless pedals had evidently released during the fall, not unlike the bindings on a ski boot. My water bottle had come out of its cage and was rolling in the middle of the street. I could see one of the energy beans from the pack I had tucked in my back pocket was rolling slowly back in the direction I’d come.

The biker who I had passed before came up and stopped. He got my bike out of the road then came and stood with me, asking my name and if he could call 911 for me. A woman in a car had swerved around me when I fell. She stopped briefly, asking if I was okay, before getting back in her black station wagon and driving off. A man who had heard me fall while he was out mowing his lawn (was the sound really that loud?) came over. The biker and the lawn guy were very nice. The stood there, checking my pupil dilation. I kept saying I was okay, but I was not feeling okay at all. My entire right side was scraped and bleeding and my right arm was excruciating to move. I didn’t know if it was broken, if my shoulder was dislocated or what.

I asked the biker if he could fish my phone out of my cycle bag and he did. I tried to call Diane, but she didn’t pick up. I called the Cranbury police and explained that I had fallen while biking and needed medical assistance. They said they would send an ambulance. I then texted Diane that I had fallen and that I had called the police and was going to go to the hospital. A few seconds later she texted me back; she was terrified, wanted to know where I was.

Diane arrived first, then the police and finally the ambulance. The medic in the ambulance was the mother of one of Valentine’s classmates, someone I see every day on our walk to school but had never had a conversation with. After a whole year of our kids being in the same class, I finally learned her name was Suzanne. Suzanne and the ambulance driver, John, brought out the stretcher. I was not going to be able to stand up to get on it. I felt scared. The pain was picking up as the first rush of adrenaline began to ebb. It had been about ten minutes since I hit the ground.

My ambulance ride was bumpy. My shoulder screamed with pain but I tried to take my mind off it by talking to Suzanne. How was Nate doing in school? Was he excited for first grade? I worried I might be sounding crazy, or that I’d say something stupid. “If I say something dumb, can we both just pretend like it never happened when we see each other on the way to school in the morning?” I asked Suzanne. She smiled and said we could. I was so thankful for these volunteer EMTs. John called from the front that we were almost there, would be pulling into the hospital in less than two minutes. I felt a sense of relief at the thought of getting out of the bumpy vehicle. I hoped I had just dislocated my shoulder and that the doctors would be able to pop it back in.

Suzanne and John filled out paperwork and wheeled me into a room in the ER. A pregnant nurse named Michelle came in, along with an African American nurse who had a computer on a rolling cart. She verified my name and address, asked me when I had my last period. She said this in a whisper, but everyone in the entire hall could hear. I responded in an equally loud whisper “yesterday! Doesn’t that just suck?” Everyone laughed. But the nurse said it was good because it meant I was cleared for x-rays, since I wasn’t pregnant.

Diane turned up then as Michelle was taking my blood pressure and temperature. Michelle wanted to get me into a hospital gown, but short of cutting off my orange tri top, there was no way. I balked. Diane balked even louder. We agreed we’d cut it off if the doctor said we had to, but that we’d wait to see if the doc thought it was necessary. Michelle relented. Leaving the gown in a heap at the foot of the bed, and leaving the un-inflated blood pressure cuff on my arm.

The nurse had offered a Percocet a few minutes earlier and I had turned it down, fearing that it might make me sick. I was thinking of another medication I had once been given for tension headaches that gave me racing thoughts and made me sick. That was Xanax, but I had the two confused. Now I remembered that it wasn’t Percocet that had made me so ill, and as the pain was intensifying I asked Diane to tell the nurse I’d changed my mind. A young, female orderly brought me the pill and helped me get it down as I couldn’t hold the cup of water.

A radiographer named Theresa showed up next and took me to the x-ray room. I had some serious problems getting into the positions she needed, but we worked together, slowly and methodically. She would brace one part of me, help me rest back. It was slow going and the pain was still strong. My right arm was trembling uncontrollably and I was afraid it might be blurring the photos, but Theresa said they came out alright.

After taking the first round of x-rays of my shoulder, Theresa contacted the doctor. I waited, feeling sleepy from the Percocet. Theresa told me they needed to take more x-rays, now of my collar bone. It seemed, she said, that that was where the damage lay. Fortunately I didn’t have to move much to get those pictures taken.

When I left x-ray I went to an area called IRW, though no one knew what that stood for, and the doctor, an avuncular guy who I remembered had once seen my dad when he had pneumonia, told me that my collar bone was broken. I needed to go talk to an orthopedic specialist and in the meantime there was nothing much they could do for me. He prescribed Percocet and got a nurse named Nicole to come in to scrub out and dress my wounds.

Nicole told me dirty jokes and got me through the cleaning process. She was awesome. Then she brought a wheelchair and wheeled me out to the curb where Diane picked me up in our minivan.

The road rash doesn't look too bad in this pic, actually, but that shiny spot on my shoulder turned into a weeping wound the next day, and my leg (not pictured) was sliced up pretty bad.

First tri

Red Bank triathlon was my very first and, cliche or not, it will always hold a special place in my heart. We got up at 5 and looked out the window into steely clouds and pouring rain. It wasn't a cold rain, I guess that was something. By 5:30 we were on our way, the old clunker mountain bike tucked into the back of the minivan (you can fit so much crap in a minivan!), my bag stuffed with my bike helmet to the wetsuit and everything in between.

I felt jittery and took a turn off of a rotary so hard that Diane's morning coffee --an item without which she cannot survive-- spilled all over her legs. I worried that she was there at all. What if I failed and had to quit? It was going to be wet. I was certainly going to make a fool of myself. And now I'd spilled her coffee everywhere. I should have told her to stay in bed.

Fortunately Diane is plucky and reassuring. As soon as we got parked she became calm and sensible, while I began panicking about under inflated bike tires (I forgot my pump, of course, but about 1,000 other people had pumps, so I really didn't need to panic). Then I worried about my bike's brakes. Diane saw through the nerves and just jostled me on down to the transition area where I could set up my stuff. The rain had eased back to a kind of damp mist at this point.

On my way into transition, a lady with a fat Sharpie marker came over and asked me my name and if I was doing the short course (sprint) or long course (olympic) distance. I mumbled answers and then felt the cool wetness of the marker on the back of my calves as 36 and S were written on them. Someone gave me a wrist band that indicated I was a racer so I could get into the transition area and the lady with the pen noted my race number and wrote it vertically on my upper arms. The numbers felt very official and badass. They reminded me of hieroglyphics.

Diane wasn't racing, so she didn't have a wristband and she couldn't go with me into the transition area. Probably the toughest part of the whole day was that moment when I had to separate from Diane and go face transition on my own. I tried to look cool, but inside I was complete jello.

I had read up about triathlons and knew to have a plan for how to set up my gear in transition. I found a space on the racks and began putting things in order as I'd practiced at home. I felt like a total impostor. On the one hand, I was too scared to even look around me at everyone else, and on the other, I was sure they were all skinny beautiful competent people and that I really didn't belong among them.

I pulled off my sweats revealing my spandex shorts and tech shirt underneath and then began the process of getting into the wetsuit. There is no pretty way to get into (or out of) a wetsuit. In the end, I looked exactly like I'd been poured into a sausage casing.

Here I am in my suit. Note the ominous cloud cover in the background. The skies were about to open.

Finally I got to go back out and find Diane and stand around in the rain, feeling so grateful for her company and wishing we could just get started already. There was a lot of waiting around, watching other groups get in the murky looking river water of the Navesink. I had been nervous about it being really cold, but when my "wave" of participants was finally called to get in, I was pleased to discover that 65 degrees is practically warm when you are in a wetsuit. [Side note: I have since raced in water as cold as 58 degrees and even that wasn't too bad.]

Here's me at the start. I was one of the first in. There were about 30 others in my wave. 

I began to notice how incredibly nice everyone around me was (and how, in fact, many different body types were represented) as soon as we began lining up to get in the water. Everyone was chatting, encouraging one another. It set me at ease.

Be the time the air-horn blew to start us off, I found myself completely unworried. The only thing to do was one thing at a time. Get to the first buoy, get to the next, turn to the right, keep going...and so on. My goals was simple: to finish my first triathlon. That was it. If I could do it in some kind of respectable time, so much the better, but I didn't give speed too much thought. 

The swim is the shortest portion of any triathlon (too bad, because I love the water, even murky gross water like the Navesink), so I was out an into T1 --that's lingo for the first transition-- within 10 minutes. I fought with my wetsuit and finally won, put on socks and shoes, helmet and gloves, and headed off to the bike. I spotted Diane, gamely cheering me on as the rain began to pick up. 

Here I am on my super clunker bike I got at Target in 2003. No joke.

The rain just poured and poured during the hour I was on the bike. I covered 15 miles of rolling hills that felt like enormous, steep hills, but reminded myself just to take it one thing at a time. 

It was somewhere on the bike course that I realized how much fun I was having.  Unlike a half marathon, where there is altogether too much time to get up in your head, to think and obsess and get tired and moody, in triathlon your mind is always on "what's next?" In running events, the goal is just get from point A to point B. In triathlon there are lots of points, and each one requires different muscles, thoughts and strategies. I was on the course for almost as long as I would be for a half marathon (okay, maybe 40 minutes less) and the experience was extremely taxing on my body, but psychologically I found it easier. 

Amazingly I put in a sub 30 minute 5k run at the end. I didn't learn that until I got home and got my final times, but when I did find out I was in shock. I have no idea how I did it. To this day I believe there may have been some kind of error. But everyone says there wasn't. I had, up to that point, never run a sub 30 minute 5k, and certainly never done so after just biking for 15 miles. 

It was a great day. I went home completely elated, so grateful to have had all the support from Diane, and so smitten with the sport of triathlon. It was the beginning of a new era.