run this amazing day

Last night at dinner, with a few of my best girlfriends, we started talking about race day.  A little, not really specifics, but about the ins and outs of the day.  And it led to a discussion of what we are afraid of, this time around.  We all had very different days at our first shot at ironman, and we all fear different things out of number two. I know what I want and I know what I am afraid of on race day.  I can guess at what a perfect day might look like, but the thing about ironman is, you rarely have a perfect day.  Because what everyone says, when they are striding about with their shaved legs and their 3% body fat postulating with wisdom to an eager audience of newbies, is actually true: anything can happen.  You can get a broken nose, you can trip running into T1, your helmet buckle can break, you can flat, you can pop a spoke, you can break a chain, you can flat some more, you can eat too much, you can eat too little, you can puke, you can cha...

I woke up a few days ago and felt odd.  Training for this ironman is almost over, and I'm actually a bit sad to see it go.   This go round was different than last year.  Going through it the first time was like walking through hell.  Barefoot, with someone giving me a wedgie.  I had no idea what to expect.  There were a lot of collapses, a lot of tears, a lot of sitting down on the side of the road and calling for a ride (okay, maybe that one only happened once).  The fatigue that I carried broke my brain into a million pieces and I had no idea how to deal with the fallout. This time around wasn't like that.  There were a couple of small cracks, there was a shampoo-bottle-throwing incident in the shower (that will teach that bottle not to open, oh yes, yes it will), there was running into a coworker 75 miles into 100 and BEGGING for a few miles of a pull, there were a few nutrition cracks (we will blame the salt in potato chips for that one)...

I'm not sure why I've gone from being able to post five days a week to not be  able to post five times a month.  But here we are. When I started this blog, I weighed roughly 40lbs more than I do right now.  I could run for about 2-3 minutes max, before I started to feel pain and had to quit.  I was in my first semester of graduate school.  I was in a job that I straight-up despised.  I was six months fresh off of a divorce.  I had a new boyfriend who I still wasn't even ready to call by that label, although he was mostly residing in my house by then.  I had no idea who I was, where I was going, what I was doing with my life.  I was lost.  Or rather, constantly in the darkness, a line I picked up from the song I played over and over and over, in my headphones, in my car, at night when I couldn't sleep (Diana Krall's "A Case Of You," live in Paris version).  Blah blah blah, I've talked about my journey quite a bit as I've traveled ...

I was supposed to run a marathon in February. I was supposed to, but I didn't, because I let life get in the way.  And that's okay.  But somewhere along the way I realized that I still wanted to run one.  Maybe because when I stand at the line of IMLP, I don't want the last time I covered 26.2 miles to be last year in Coeur d'Alene, maybe because I've never run one before, and maybe because I'm not even sure why.  Sometimes things just sound like a good idea.  So I very carefully worded an email to Sonja requesting her consideration, and she shocked me by not only saying yes but that she had been thinking about it too. Long story short,  Saturday morning we flew out to Buffalo.  We met up with Allison in the airport and then spent the remainder of the day doing all the things you do the day before a race, mainly eating too much and diagnosing yourself with multiple stress fractures and changing your mind about which shoes and which shorts and whi...