Our bikes’ temporary home

View from our hotel room

On Saturday Jason, his dad and I woke up and prepped everything for our ride. We parked a few miles from the transition area and started setting everything up when I realized that the black rolled up wad of fabric I grabbed and shoved into my bag wasn’t arm sleeves like I thought, but rather compression sleeves for my legs. Fudgers! It was going to be a gray, chilly day, and my wimpo arms were surely going to freeze without some sort of cover. Jason suggested I just wear my compression sleeves as arm warmers. I didn’t have any better options, so that’s what I did. I ended up with 90 miles of compressiony goodness, but unfortunately I realized two things after the ride:

1. The sleeves, which typically go from under my knee to my ankle, weren’t long enough to cover my entire arm.
2. Even though the sun wasn’t out, that doesn’t mean the rays weren’t poking through the clouds.

As such, I ended the ride with this B.S.:

This is not a good look for me

The watch tan I’m used to. The half-forearm tan? Not so much. (I’ve grown accustomed to the hairy arms though, so deal with it.) Anyway, I started riding for a whopping minute before realizing that, no fucking way, my bike computer’s cadence sensor wasn’t working again. What the shit, I just replaced this stupid thing two weeks ago! I angrily fiddled with it for a while, and it went from not reading my cadence to not reading anything. Great, now I was going to ride 90 miles with no indication of my speed or cadence.

Frustrated and fueled by rage, I took off and anger-rode for an hour. After a while, Jason appeared next to me, slightly out of breath, exclaiming, “It took me forever to catch up to you! You need to slow down!” Apparently I was averaging about 24 mph and was climbing rollers going 20. To be fair, the first 30 or 40 miles of the Canada course are pretty fast, with lots of flats/downhills and a few inconsequential hills. I pouted a bit more about my broken computer but decided to slow it down in anticipation of Richter Pass.

Before we got to the pass, Jason’s dad got an epic flat by running over a huge kinked wad of wire. He wrestled it out of his tire and changed the tube but wanted to stop at a gas station to properly fill the tire with air. While he was fixing his bike, I stopped inside to use the bathroom and buy more fuel. When I came out, I saw Jason barely hiding his irritation while a filthy grifter with roughly four teeth peppered him with questions about our bikes. Apparently this Canadian mountain man had been marveling at how nice our bikes were and said that someone should build an eight person stealth bomber out of the same carbon fiber our bikes are made from. He then paused, looked at Jason, and said, “I see you’ve got a belly under all that gear! You must work in an office, eh? This is good exercise for that!” Jason muttered a “Yeah…” while murdering the dude with his eyes, and I resisted the urge to laugh. What kind of person makes remarks about a complete stranger’s stomach? Dudes with meth mouth, that’s who.

“Your belly offends me and my professional appearance.”

After our brief break, we continued on and hit the pass almost immediately. I gotta say, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Don’t get me wrong, Richter Pass is no picnic, but you get to climb for a bit before shooting down a decent decline, then lather, rinse, repeat for a while and before you know it, you’re done. Unfortunately, after you conquer the pass (and are rewarded with a nice downhill), you get hit with a bunch of rollers that are pretty sucky, especially when you factor in a craptacular crosswind (which we got hit with on Saturday).

We skipped an out and back portion of the ride and continued on until we hit the second significant climb, which is the stretch of road leading to Yellow Lake. (Brief aside: who names a body of water “Yellow Lake”? Nothing screams “urine-soaked” like that moniker. It actually is a pretty lake though, and not at all yellow. Still, not the best name.) I thought this climb was uber-shittier than Richter because unlike Richter, which has steep climbs but brief reprieves where you get to descend, the Yellow Lake climb is pretty much a long, arduous, gradual, relentless son of a bitch until you get to the top. On the way up I saw several banana peels and wondered if Jason was trying to take me out, Mario Kart style. If only I had a red shell…

I’m gunnin’ for ya, Jas

The last several miles of the bike course shoot you down a pants crappingly fast descent that scared the bejesus out of me due to the semis and crosswinds. Operation De-Chunkify has been going well for me, but at that point I wondered if I should have actually gained an extra 15 lbs instead of lost weight so I’d be better anchored and wouldn’t get bitch slapped by the wind and cars. At several points during the descent I envisioned myself getting blown over the guardrail and falling to my death while still clipped into my bike.

The next day Jas and I ran the middle portion of the run course, which is the same stretch as the first part of the bike course. We did about 15 miles in the sun and I thought about how miserable I was going to be racing in 90 degree heat considering I was already feeling overheated at 70 degrees. The “inconsequential” hills I mentioned earlier on the bike suddenly seemed like a jerk crusted bastard during the run. This will not feel good on race day.

We spent the remainder of the weekend enjoying the gorgeous scenery and buying roughly an asston of wine:

View of the swim start from a vineyard across the lake

Loitering in some Canadian’s vineyard

Jason’s mom gets inspired by the boobalicious mermaid statue

Our Ironman training fuel

Before we left, we flailed around in the freezing lake (“freezing” being 55 degrees) for about 20 minutes, making me think that I really need to do a couple more open water swims before Boise. Poop. Other than that, though, it was good to explore the Ironman course and dump my paycheck into many, many wine purchases. I can’t wait to come up with the team in July and do it all again. Hopefully Teresa will have some good advice on how to pace myself for the ride, and I’m counting on doing more wine tasting with some of my teammates. Don’t let me down, Ironman crew!

(Yes, this is the little kid from Jerry Maguire. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have leukemia or lymphoma, but he is pretty spazzy looking so just imagine that he has Hodgkin’s and be overcome with a sudden urge to help out the kid who talks about 8-lb heads.)

That’s right, your favorite mediocre athlete is going to try and run up 69 flights of stairs. Me, aka the person incapable of running along a flat sidewalk without tripping. (This actually happened to me–I was running along 19th and looked down to skip a song on my iPod at the exact moment I came across a raised sidewalk groove. Before I knew it, I was flying forward and skidding my knee and hands on the hot, gritty concrete. I immediately snapped up and looked around to see if anyone noticed my blunder, and sure enough, there was a group of people staring at me from across the street with their mouths agape, silently mouthing (“silently” because OK Go was still blaring in my ears) “Are you OH-KAY?” I squeaked out a falsely cheerful and overly loud “YEAH! I’M FINE!” before scampering away as fast as I could, blood running down my leg.)

So yeah, jogging up a butt-ton of stairs can’t possibly lead to disaster for the clumsiest person in the Pacific Northwest…

Anyway, I pledged to try and raise $500, so I’d really appreciate some donations (think of it as a tip for serving up awesomely mediocre blog content). Check out my donation page at http://www.llswa.org/goto/rebeccakelley and donate some money if you like me, if you hate me but like science research, if you like me and hate leukemia, or if you hate me and want me to leave you alone. If you donate money, I promise to write an especially amusing and self-deprecating recap post about the Big Climb once I haul my ass out of bed and do the race on Sunday, March 22. I imagine the post will consist of about 30% race details and 70% post-race brunch recap.

Please donate! I also have a team page (we’re actually not Team Flabalanche, though I wish that were our name) in case you’re feeling especially charitable and want to donate more moolah, but at the very least I’d really appreciate anything you can contribute.

And, I swear to God, whoever she pairs me with ends up running like a minute frickin’ faster than what Teresa assigned us as our pace. We all take off in a group and I check my watch to make sure I’m running at an appropriate speed, then I look up and see that the group I’m supposed to be running with is a million paces ahead of me, competing in some sort of unknown foot race that I’m most certainly going to lose. I mentally shake my fist at them and call them jerk face overachievers for running faster than they said they would. I then proceed to run by myself. This happens to me a lot.

The same thing happens with Jason. We start off on a long run together and he half-ass jogs right in front of me because he thinks he needs to hang back and run at my pace. But then if I need to stop for whatever reason (e.g., I have a cramp, that hill nearly killed me, I’m fat and out of shape), he begrudgingly slows down and walks alongside me for roughly twelve seconds before whining, “Can’t you at least jog?” Then I snap at him to run at his own pace without me, which he ends up doing. He trots back to find me every so often, which I both hate and like (hate because I hate that he’s faster than me, like because at least he’s not completely ditching me).

I’m starting to think that I’m destined to run by myself because apparently there is nobody in the entire Seattle metropolitan area who runs at the same pace as me. It’s like the Farmer in the Dell and I’m the cheese who stands alone. Or, in this scenario, I suppose I’m the cheese who runs alone. Hi-ho-the-dairy-o, the cheese runs alone. I’ve gotten pretty much used to it at this point, though. Besides, I’m not much of a talker when I run. I once ran around Greenlake with someone who talked my ear off the entire loop, with me offering up the occasional grunt and winded “Uh huh.”

But still, there’s something about having a presence next to you that’s somewhat comforting. It’s like you mentally push each other to keep going and maintain a good pace. You don’t have to exchange words or have a lengthy, heart wrenching conversation about the meaning of life or anything. Oftentimes all you need is the physical presence of someone next to you to encourage you to keep going. And I don’t have that. (Well, Jason is pretty encouraging when we do our long runs, but I find his encouragement to be great or annoying, depending on my mood. Today it was annoying, then begrudgingly great.)

Maybe I’ll tape a dummy to the side of me, you know, like one of those vaudeville acts. Or I could pay a ridiculously fast runner to trot alongside me in a tortuously slow pace, just to stick it to him. (Wait, if I’m paying him then the joke would be on me.) Or I could get faster…that could work, too. I guess I’ll just have to work hard and try to catch up with all of the fast a-holes I train with. Until then, the cheese runs alone…

Me: See, isn’t this great? It’s not too cold out, it’s not raining, it’s getting a bit dark but hey, that’s okay.
Body: I hate this. Are we done yet?
Me: No, we just started.
Body: Hey, we’re running past the Kingfish! You wanna get some fried chicken?
Me: NO. Keep going.
Body: But everything’s all hurty and I don’t like it!
Me: It’ll get better, I promise.
Body: Ok…so how long have we been running?
Me: I dunno, I don’t want to check. Keep running for a little while and then I’ll reward you by checking the time.
Body: Ok…how about now?
Me: No.
Body: Fine…now?
Me: No!
Body: Come onnnnnnn, just look.
Me: It’s been six minutes.
Body: God damnit.

We approach a hill.

Me: Come on, we can do it.
Body: This sucks! My chest hurts and my shoulder hurts and I can barely breathe and my side hurts and my abs feel tight and I hate this.
Me: Don’t you remember when you used to do hill repeats on this hill? Suck it up and run!
Body: Grumble grumble…

We get to the top of the hill and keep running. Soon we see another runner up ahead.

Me: Pass that runner.
Body: What? Why?
Me: Come on, we’re faster than her. Pick up the pace and pass her! Also, stop crossing your arms. And stand up straight. Stop leaning forward. Don’t run on your toes.
Body: Jesus, anything else, your majesty?
Me: Shut up and pass her.

We pass the runner and reach the turn around point. There’s another long, gradual hill up ahead.

Body: I hate you.
Me: This is good for you! We live in a hilly neighborhood, and it’s great for training.
Body: Arghhhh…
Me: Keep running on 15th, I need to pick up a prescription before the pharmacy closes.
Body: Fine. Whatever.

We get to the pharmacy and quickly duck in.

Body: Jesus Christ, it’s freakin’ HOT in here! Ugh, look at me. My face is beet red. I look like Louie Anderson after he’s just tied his shoes.
Me: We’ll be back outside in a second. Head over to that counter.

We walk over to the counter and pay for the prescription. The pharmacist gives us an odd look.

Pharmacist: So, uh, decided to go for a run?
Me/Body (trying to act casual): Oh yeah, no big deal, just felt like getting a quick run in.

We leave the pharmacy.

Me: Okay, I’m starting the watch back up. Keep running.
Body: Ok…hey, this isn’t feeling so bad.
Me: Yeah?
Body: Yeah, I’m not hurting as much as I did when we started. I could keep going for another hour!
Me: Well, we’re home.
Body: Ohthankgod. That was miserable.