run this amazing day

In the week leading up to this race, a lot of people asked me what I wanted out of it, what my goals were, what I hoped to do.  And to all of them, I said essentially the same thing, I want to see what happens  and that was all   (except for when I said it in front of my masters coach and he made the face he makes when he wants to hold me underwater until I stop kicking and started spouting off crap about breathing count and effort and stroke and sighting).  Sometimes I would add something like,  no broken bones would be great!   But that was about it.  The week before a race, I try to steer clear of triathletes and twitter and anything else that is going to give me anxiety about the day.  Most of my time was spent sitting on my ass reading, working, napping with a little bit of lunging outside  every time the temperature went over 70º  to try and prepare my skin for scorching southern sunshine. I've read a lot of excellent ...

When I signed up for my first ironman three years ago, I wrote a blog post about how it takes a village for me to do most things.   I was one of those PITA tweeters who couldn't decide whether or not I was ready, I drove myself and everyone else around me crazy with indecision until I finally whipped out the credit card, filled out the form, and spent the next three days walking around, unblinking, saying WHAT DID I JUST DO.   And it took that whole village to get me through the first ironman .  Friends, coach, internet, parents, husband, puppies, I was often alone, but I was never stranded, I was never more than a phone call away from the support I needed to survive the hell I put my body through that summer, and I was grateful for every last bit of it when I got myself over the finish line in Idaho that June. Fast forward a year to last July.  As we were driving back from IMLP, I got an email from Hailey which prompted me to pick up the phone and call my frien...

I spent some time in December - in the absence of swimming, biking, and running but not drinking or eating - thinking about the things that I complained about in 2013 (twitter makes this easy to revisit).  To name a few: running off the bike, the size of my ass, I can't do a pull-up, I have two fabulous abs but that's out of a possible eight and those two might actually just be ribs, I let my head tank me on race day, I get the crazy hungry kind of angry, I hate the way my legs look in running shorts (below), and I always have to be the one to send the last text message.  Every single thing on that list, I can control.  I can complain all day about how the running shorts fit, but that isn't the fault of the running shorts.  They are just shorts.  I'm the master of the body inside them, and bitching about the shorts doesn't seem to have made them fit any better, so it's either time to try something different or decide to quit bitching about them altogether. ...

The best races of my life have happened when I have carried something with me.  A thought, a mantra, an idea, those are plastered all over these pages, the words that have followed me along.  And sometimes these words come from quite the unlikely mouth (spoiler, in case you don't want to read the whole post). I've been struggling with how to talk about this race. On the one hand, I've had a rocky winter.  I've been continuing to deal with a knee situation that has plagued me on and off since last summer, and while the field of vision towards complete healing seems to be getting narrower, it has made for a somewhat inconsistent few months of training.  Some sessions shut down here and there, pain popping up at the wrong times, some tears and railing against the universe.  And it's the truth to say that while on the surface I've bopped along just fine, I've struggled with maintaining a positive attitude in the privacy of eight billion emails to my coach, ...