run this amazing day

I've said it about twenty dozen times in the past several hours, but I'm going to say it once more.  Anything can happen on race day. Anything.

If I could draw a circle around me with chalk, I said to the poet the other day, I would draw the tiniest circle that I could, and you would still be inside of it. And then Graham would shove his butt between us , he replied. The week leading up to ironman is a quiet time for me, I've discovered.  It's not a time to be bursting with energy and socializing and tweeting a million pictures of the M-dot logo.  It's definitely not a time to be using the words crush  or smash  or destroy .  That isn't what ironman is about, not for me.  So, for maybe the only time in my life, I pipe down.  I spent the week leading up to Lake Placid talking quietly with my husband, having deep and peaceful conversations with good friends, reading alone, or sometimes just sitting quietly with my thoughts.  I leave the iPod packed away, I let the TV shows wait, I stay off of twitter except for the occasional hit-and-run post, I give the volume button on my surroundings a good hard twist to

Since I am getting closer to ironman time, it  means some workouts with the words "test" or "TT" are showing up on my schedule.  Now, I love training.  I really do, I'd almost rather just train and train than race, races are scary gahhhhh, but training, I love it.  It drips happy juice into my life.  But testing or time trialing or whatever you want to call it, it brings up a feeling in me that I only recently began to pinpoint as dread.  Dread and fear. Now, why, when I love to train so much, why do I dread these sessions?  Send me out for a long run and tell me to run 60 minutes at MAF and I'm happy as a clam, but send me to the track for a six mile MAF test and I'll do my warm-up and then dither and dally and scuff my feet and poke around and retie my shoes and look around for someone who is going to kick me off for being on the track during school hours until I finally have to say out loud, Just go already, sheesh and then it STILL takes me anothe

Over the summer, I went down to Albuquerque to visit with one of my closest friends.  While I was there, she got a new tattoo, to remind her of being in the moment. She told me that her husband would tell her this when she was rushing around, trying to figure out what to do with the next day or the next.  I was ready to get a tattoo of my own, but was spooked by the "five days to possibly four weeks" of time that I would have to spend out of the pool while it healed (see you in a few weeks, tattoo lady).  But this thought has stayed with me, inked in my brain instead of on my body (although until I just looked up that picture, I remembered it as, "now we are here" so maybe it was just scribbled in pencil up there).  It's a thought I've had rolling around in my head the past few weeks as my life has undergone some more change and growth - which can sometimes be uncomfortable.  But this thought is similarly uncomfortable - not only as a reminder to stay gro