run this amazing day

I've been sitting here for a while. Alternating between staring at the blinking cursor and tabbing over to answer emails, adjust schedules, other normal work tasks. Because when so much time has passed without diving into this space, it's hard to know where to begin. The remainder of my trip to New Zealand was amazing.  It's easy to reflect on how hard I raced by measuring how many days pass before I get the itch to move again. Ironman was Saturday and by Tuesday night I was ready to jog a local 5K with my friend which answered that question:  not hard at all.   I found a 33-meter pool nearby and swam a bit between consuming mass quantities of chocolate and coffee and before too long, it was time to return home. My first stop in the US was a doctor's office, where I had a very minor medical procedure done that left me with sixteen stitches, a slew of inappropriate jokes and nearly a month off the bike when all was said and done.  That turned out to be a good thing

I am a good friend. I don't do a lot right in life, that's for damn sure.  People make me nervous, awkward; if I don't know you I am highly likely to stuff my foot down my throat at the first opportunity.  There's still a lot of that shy kid that didn't have any friends until the seventh grade left in me and I don't make new friends easily.  And I have a lot of flaws as a human in general, but friendship, I know how to do that right.  I am fiercely loyal.  I am trustworthy; if you confide in me - and for whatever reason, plenty of people do - it goes in the vault.  I am thoughtful, although sometimes in quite the belated fashion, I will remember your birthday but it will probably take me five months to mail you a card.  I will drag you on random adventures that you will agree to because I don't give you the chance to say no, I will surprise you with baked goods instead of actually saying, you matter.    If we are friends, I will have your back like no one

As anyone who has ever ridden a bike with me knows, I am a damn good eater.  I eat, often and a lot.  It took a while to train my body to eat enough (this much?) on the bike but once I did, nearly all of the GI issues of my earlier ironman days disappeared   Since then, my nutrition plan for ironman hasn't changed.  It means that by the time the race rolls around I am really fucking tired of Bobo's bars but they work and it's not supposed to be a gourmet buffet anyway, it's a race. On that note, I got rolling and noticed that I was starving so I put a bar down right away.  There were some little punchy crosswinds as we rode by the lake but I knew it was going to turn into a killer tailwind once we got out of town.  Traffic was pretty light so I chewed and ate and drank and made my way out to the long out-and-back road that is about 90% of the bike course.   I had power goals for the ride, as we do, and I settled into what felt like the right effort and was happy to

I flew straight to Auckland from Hawaii. The last few days in Kona were pretty light on the training and the day before I left, I had one of those rides where my legs were bursting to ride hard,  let's go let's go let's go already.   But the travel wrecked me pretty good, I jogged a little Monday morning before driving to Taupo & did a quick spin through town that evening and felt like good lord I think I've gained forty pounds in the last twelve hours mainly in the ankles and the ass.   To the delight of all of my people, I divided my time pretty equally in the days leading up to the race between feeling like shit while training and bitching about feeling like shit while training, mixed in with my normal race-week magic trick which allows me to sleep for at least fifteen hours per day.  I did get out out Taupo to explore, hot springs and mountains and lakes and dozens of coffee shops and only a few horrifying wrong-side-of-the-road near misses. It wasn't