run this amazing day

Taper is fucking brilliant, you guys (white grape juice, nobody have a stroke). I've spent this whole week happy.  I smile a lot (smiling's my favorite!), I have energy, boatloads of heart rate and watts and...swimming fast crap, my body feels good, it feels lean, durable, strong, supple, elastic.  Ready.  I never seem to realize how underwater I am in a training block until the fog lifts at the end.  It's like getting a new pair of glasses, a few solid nights of sleep and suddenly I can see that bird in the tree at the other end of the neighborhood.  But the rest isn't driving me crazy, I feel relaxed by it, the rest is letting me bring everything I need for Sunday to the surface.  Sharpening my ax.   I spend most of my time while tapering reading.  Sometimes it is trashy pink novels, sometimes it's the new Diana Gabaldon, and sometimes it's another book on vulnerability, durability, grace, or resilience.  Curled up in bed, a cup ...

I started writing this post on June 2nd. It was the day after the Boulder Sprint.  I didn't race, but I had athletes racing and I was there in the morning to help yank people into their wetsuits and slather them down with sunscreen.  Before the race started, I sat and chatted with them about how they were feeling, listened to conversations flow around me.  Most were training for IM Boulder, so the sprint wasn't really a key race, it was more of a let's see if I can remember how to get the f*ing wetsuit off and do all the sports in the right order  kind of race.  And the comments that I heard over and over again were things like , my legs are exhausted, I'm not going to race well , and I've been putting in so many bike miles that I'm not ready for the run , and I drank too much last night so I'm not doing anything special at this race.    I hear athletes say things like this all the time, and it drives me a tiny bit crazy.   I'm not good at f...

It has been a long time since I've lost my shit. In a training session, that is, not in my entire life (because that would be a masterful feat).  I like to share stories about training for my first ironman, how often I cried, and how much I laugh at myself now for it.  The time I called for a ride and after the poet picked me up and packed me into the car and drove three miles towards home, I asked to be let back out to keep riding.  The time I thought it was a good idea to do a MAF test in the hottest part of the day ( see, I do it too ) and ended up doing it as two mile repeats on the track and hiding under the bleachers wheezing and crying between reps.  The time I got out of the pool and came home and called Sonja and she turned me around and sent me right back.  So I have plenty of experience with the meltdown. It's a good thing, I think, the ability to talk yourself into holding your shit together when you really, desperately, more than anything, want...

My initial instinct when talking about this race is to find ways to qualify it, to minimize it, and then to brush it off as a brief highlight in a long summer of training.  It’s the voice in my head that insists no athlete can ever be too humble.  So I’m not going to dwell on it forever but I am going to spend just a few selfish moments reveling in it because, you guys, winning a race is totally goddamn awesome. Back in April, CoeurSports announced that they were the title sponsor of the TriBella Sprint Triathlon down in Denver.  I thought that was pretty excellent so I signed myself right up and then mostly forgot about it.  I figured it would be a high spot in a big block of ironman training, a little blink of hard then back to riding my bicycle all day every day and complaining about running. Saturday morning, I woke up grumpy.  I didn’t sleep well, and then I dropped my recovery drink and it exploded into a clumpy almond milk disaster all over the kitc...