run this amazing day

Every year, I spend the week of my birthday working through all of my favorite things, little traditions.  I like to go ride my bike all day (bikes are MY FAVORITE) in the sunshine, so I do, and not just because I've signed up for yet another late-season-keeping-me-from-racing-cross ironman.  I like to do a batshit-crazy birthday swim of some sort, especially since I convinced Michelle to be the boss of my sassy britches, so I do.  I like to drink a reasonable amount of tequila and eat an unreasonable amount frosting, so I do.  I don't work on my birthday - not because I don't like to work, but because I simply don't believe in doing anything called "work" for this one day a year.  I want to spend my birthday brimming over with laughter with the people in my life that I adore, so I generally drag them all out for margaritas or over to my house to force-feed them burned meat and fancy ice cream.  I make it a point to get my yearly haircut, to take a real shower

After I missed IMCdA, Ironman was kind enough to let me (pay to) transfer my entry to a 70.3, and I had airline credit and points travel so it was pretty inexpensive to tack this race onto my fall schedule.  It got me going again after a couple of rough weeks following Boulder, but then I felt like I had only been training again for a few minutes when suddenly it was time to dial it back down.  I spent the weekend before traveling down to Albuquerque to celebrate the upcoming birth of a good friend's first child.  It was fantastic to visit, blow up her kitchen with failed recipes, eat too much baby shower cake, and unwind a bit.   A week out from the race, I had a few moments of well, this sure isn't going to go well  after how inconsistently I've been training this summer.  But once I got to California, I was glad to be there.  Ashley let me shack up with her in boiling hot Santa Clara, which was nice except for a sleepless first night due to her house attacking me with

After Boulder, Michelle and I had a good talk, and hopefully she won't mind me sharing a piece of it.  She told me that she didn't want me to drop out of the marathon because she knew it would be excruciating to walk for six hours, which it was, and because she wanted me to hit rock bottom, which I did.  And she didn't want me to do either of those things because she wants to torture me, she did it because she wanted me to finally start figuring out how to change. So now a month has passed, and a lot, in fact, has changed (not puppies, they are the same).   The first thing I did after ironman was reach out for help in dealing with all of the crap I was going through.  Which maybe was long overdue with my specific challenges related to sport, but for whatever reason, I wasn't ready until now.  And maybe that's why the universe dumped me on the doorstep of IM Boulder, so I would keep dealing with my shit.  I accept that.  I know that I've been lucky in life i

Perhaps the most overused term in discussing training for ironman (myself included) is the concept of a village.   It's overused, though, because it's true.  You can't get through ironman completely alone, you need a support system, I say it all the time to athletes.  And I am grateful on an ongoing basis for the one that has grown up around me: Michelle, Erin, Charlie, Julie, Geoff, all of the people who invest their energy into keeping me healthy & building my machine.   But the ironman village is quite different from the village of your life.  There, more often, the cliche is describing life as a table with a select number of chairs, and I've been thinking about this concept a lot over the last few weeks.  What I've come up with is that I should fill  those chairs with people that deserve a seat.  There is certainly value in privacy, but also in allowing my own path to be colored through relationships rich with love.  My table has filled slowly over the ye