run this amazing day

I am a sentimental person. A bit of a gross understatement along the lines of sometimes people do not agree on Facebook .  For a long time, I was embarrassed by the deep extent of my emotional, nostalgic, downright cheesy streak.  I have an excellent memory for important events in my life; one of my high school boyfriends and I still argue about which day who said what to who and which song was playing on the radio when it happened back in 1996.  Every important event in my life has music linked to it, emotionally, embarrassingly so.  I can clearly recall the Indigo Girls song that was playing the first time I kissed my now-husband, the Nico & Vinz that played on repeat while training for my first crack at IM Boulder, the Diana Krall that never fails to rip my heart wide open, the Journey song that made my ears ring in the bar down the shore where I first met one of my oldest friends, the Lionel Richie I played on repeat for months after my first silly teenage broken heart, the

Well.  So here we are.   I find myself wishing that I had kept up with blogging these last two months, for myself, to have all this shit written down somewhere in a permanent fashion.  Last summer it was helping me to write my way through, but now I understand what it's like to be completely exhausted by my own story.  I am tired of being trapped in a spiral of injury, I am tired of constantly feeling frustrated, isolated, sad, angry, and I am beyond tired of talking about it.  If I heard it once growing up I have heard it a thousand times, if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all. There is really no way to summarize any shorter than this.  Coming out of New Orleans, my mojo was brimming over, my batteries were at 100% and I honestly believed that my physical body was ready to start training again - really training, not just la-tee-dah what shall I do today training.  As it turns out, it was not.  A little niggle in my high hamstring that

I can tell you the exact moment I decided to race. It wasn't Monday evening when, after a big - all things being relative - weekend of training and a long day of work, I sat down and wrote a brief race plan only so I wouldn't do something stupid like forget to pack my bike shoes and then had a bowl of ice cream after dinner (no, all of my clothes being tight right now is not a mystery). It wasn't Tuesday afternoon when I dropped my bike off with Wes ( ProBikeExpress is the best way to go, as always!) and laughingly told him that I was sending it on vacation and maybe we could ride Saturday afternoon while everyone else was napping.   It wasn't Thursday  afternoon when I was getting the shit beat out of my hamstring or Friday morning when I showed up to swim half of masters with all my friends before hopping on the plane.  Or later that day when I switched over from "eating like a normal human" to "eating only food that is white which includes both

I love to swim.  It's a fact of my life, a big ol'  no duh  right up there with the sky is blue  and the grass is green  and double stuf oreos are goddamn delicious  and I certainly don't need to rehash my love for it here, yet again.  When I first got hurt, it broke my heart that swimming was at the top of the long list of things I couldn't do.  But a physical therapist gently suggested that I try a buoy and to quit dicking around with open turns, and it came back.  Slowly.  With all the gear at first; paddles + buoy has always been my favorite combo of toys (hashtag triathletes), I love the feeling of shoving water back with so much strength and power.  So I happily pulled myself bonkers for weeks.  It was something that I could do, running was off-and-on and riding was firmly scrapped, but I could swim twenty minutes easy.  That calmed my brain.  It helped, at times it felt like that twenty minutes was the only time during the day that I got a break, swimming was the