Where's Speed Racer

Well, Sports Fans, it seems that a certain redheaded blabbermouth sent out more links to my blog than I knew about this summer.  Most people in my "real" life don't know about my blog, and those who do are sworn to absolute secrecy.  But sometimes people take liberties.  

It seems that links to my blog have been circulating the office of my speedo-clad companions and they have requested that I take the post down.  So until I can edit some photos, and until the emails stop circulating, the speed racer blog is going to be on hold.  

I am VERY angry, and do not plan on giving any more get out of jail free cards.  So be warned.

Hey, where's No Wetsuit Girl?

The clock's run out. My 100th No Wetsuit Girl post will also be my last. But don't cry, don't fret, I'm not going away, I'm only moving!

My new URL is now (drumroll please):

speedyspeedracer.blogspot.com

Perhaps you've seen it hanging out at the bottom of my profile page trying to blend in like a 19-year-old in line outside a bar. Maybe, you've been the 19-year-old and tried to get in, only to be turned away at the door when you show your ID because you weren't on the guest list. Well from now on, the site is public.

So why the change? Well, there are a few reasons:

1. I can't go on living without a wetsuit forever, and it was naive of me to think that people would actually go through the archives to find out what the name meant.
   
2. Not only do I plan on acquiring a new wetsuit this season, I also plan on acquiring a speed suit, thus justifying using the word speed (twice) in connection with moi (the first and last time, I'm sure). So there you go, there's the swim apparel connection. If you want to stretch it you could also get really creative and point out that I don't even own a bikini, only SPEEDos (I look like I'm cross-dressing in a bikini anyway).
3. I have a personal pet peeve against people who use "Girl" at the end of a nick name. It is a misdemeanor to use it after a single word, but to use it after an entire sentence fragment is a felony (as is spelling it "grrrl", by the way). God knows what I was thinking.
4. There was some kind of justification of the wetsuit reference when I was "... Overseas!", however tenuous. But now that I'm back in the states there is absolutely no play on words that I could think of to salvage my creative pride. The whole thing had to go!
   
5. Finally, the title "Training and Blogging in Spain" was originally longer and in an argot that only me, my friend Allie and a few other high school friends share where every list of verbs ends in "... an' Thuggin'". My original title was "Trainin', Bloggin', an' Thuggin' in Spain", then I realized that was stupid but couldn't think of anything better, so I took out the "thuggin'", added a couple of Gs, and voila! The world's stupidest blog title!

Every time I got a new reader I cringed because I knew that if I'd come across the above mentioned sins of cheeziness I wouldn't even read my own blog, no matter how brilliant it was.

To those of you who have a link to my page on your sidebars, I respectfully request that you change it. So, bye bye No Wetsuit Girl, and good riddance.

Extra Credit Reading:

For those of you who are interested in knowing the story behind No Wetsuit Girl, I'll tell it quickly right now:

I first started swimming seriously in January in Santa Cruz with the SC Masters team. Santa Cruz (and that whole part of the coast) have particularly cold water, in part because of an upwelling of water from some of the deepest parts of the ocean in that region. This does not prevent the local Masters team from swimming in the ocean regularly year-round, either around the wharf (roughly 1 mile) or "swimming the buoys" (a string of 4 buoys that works out to be about 1000m round trip) WITHOUT A WETSUIT. Every New Years the SC Masters team puts on a New Years swim around the wharf on January 1st when water temperature is usually in the 40's, and every August they put on a 10k Wharf to Wharf swim when the water is at its warmest (around 60*). As in all SC Masters races, your results are not counted if you wear a wetsuit.

Really, I thought that this was normal. So every week I sucked it up and swam the buoys without a wetsuit. I did intervals submerged in the cold plunge at the gym to get my body used to being in very cold water. I thought that this was the way it worked, I thought everyone was doing this. So imagine my surprise when I showed up at the start to the Big Kahuna (coincidentally, the same year the Iron Kahuna did it for the first time, by the way) and I was the only one on the beach without a wetsuit. This earned me lots of cheers of "GO NO WETSUIT GIRL!!!" and marked the first time in my life that I was proud of the results of going through life with my head up my ass. It was the beginning of an era... and an identity.

Wild Turkey 5 Mile Road Race Report

I've been looking forward to the Turkey Trot in Salem for weeks. Why? Three reasons:

1. The web site said that the t-shirt was going to be "tech fabric".
2. It's a late fall race, so the t-shirt was pretty much guaranteed to be long sleeved.
3. The registration site allowed you to specify your t-shirt size, so I was sure to not get XXXL.
   

Really, can you ask for more in a race? I think not.

Since 5 miles isn't even as long as my training runs have been lately, I decided to run this event for speed. Well, "speed" is a relative term I guess, but my goal was to break 45 minutes, or 9-minute miles. I usually avoid "speed" goals because I invariably go out way too fast, have GI distress by mile 1, and sometimes puke. It'll be different this time! I assured myself.

And what better way to prepare for a speed goal than riding my trainer for 2 hours and 45 minutes while watching Chariots of Fire and sprinting during all the running scenes to make sure that my legs were nice and fresh. Two observations about Chariots of Fire:

1. All English guys really do look gay.
2. The only thing that looks gayer than an English guy in 2007 is an English guy running in white man panties in 1922. (Really, watch that first scene where they're running in the waves, they run like a bunch of girls!)
   

Wakeup was at 5:30 to be out the door before 6:30. Driving up to Salem it was so foggy that you couldn't see the road signs until you were right under them. The fog never burned off over the course of the morning. I was a little upset that I wouldn't get to see the sea views, but I decided that it would be more spooooooooooky to run through Salem in the fog. Unlike the last time I ran in Salem (the Witch City Sprint), we got to run past all the creeeeeeeeeepy stuff that downtown Salem has to offer: the Witch Museum, the Wax Museum, the Myths and Monsters Museum, and the statue of Nathaniel Hawthorn which gives adults nightmares for weeks about high school English classes. The only thing creeeeeeepy about the part of town we ran through in the Witch City Sprint triathlon was that this was probably the part of town where people would dump a body.

Beforehand everyone was complaining that it was sooooo cold. I was actually feeling okay in my surfing top and ninja sweatshirt (sans hood). I was happy about this turn of events, until I started running and immediately began to overheat. The ninja sweatshirt is NOT easy to get off while running, so rather than elbow a fellow runner in the face trying to pull it off I just sweat it out. You're welcome, guy with Jesus tattoos on each of his calves.

The first mile I went out really pushing the pace, sitting right at what I hoped would be my anaerobic threshold. Turns out I was going a bit harder than that, and by mile one breakfast was reminding me that this is not the way we do things around here! My smoothie was threatening to make its way out the front exit, while my intestines turned to jelly to let my English muffin out the back way. I let off a bit, but there was this chick in front of me that had very unfortunate cellulite distribution. Not only that, but Thunder Thighs seemed to know everybody on the whole North Shore, runners and spectators alike, and while I concentrated on keeping my sphincter closed she was waving to runners coming in the other direction, calling them by name, and yelling hellos to spectators watching from their porches. Pet peeve: people like that. I was NOT going to be beat by a chatty Cathy with Thunder Thighs. I now had a reason to dig deep.

We came out onto a little peninsula with some "views" of the ocean (by "view" I mean that the visibility was about 10 feet out to sea, so you could see spoooooooky looking rowboats bobbing away in the fog, waiting for the ghosts of fishermen lost at sea to come and claim the bodies of tortured runners). Here there were a lot of spectators out to cheer us on at 8:30 on a holiday morning. A morbidly obese woman stood in her driveway cheering, one family had a table set up with dixie cups of beer, another had a big bell (the kind they have on ships) and one of those horns that they blow before setting the fox free in a steeple chase, and yet another had the whole family, 7 members from grandma all the way down to grandson lined up in age order along the porch, all wearing Red Sox sweatshirts (I wonder if this was planned).

By mile 4 I'd backed off enough that I was starting to feel like I could press a little harder. That lasted about 2 minutes. What was frustrating about the weather was that, since you couldn't see 20 feet in front of you, you couldn't tell when the finish line was getting close, or even when you were coming into town. It made the last, painful mile seem to go on forever. I have no idea if Thunder Thighs was ahead of me or behind me. I couldn't see the finish line, but I began running faster and faster until I was gasping for air and my GI tract melted into a steely yuckiness. Let's get this over with! I thought. I sprinted into the finish trying to overtake a middle aged woman with a sloppy stride. I did eventually pass her, but since there was no finish line on the ground I may have just cut her in line in the finishing coral. My time: 44:33! I broke 45 minutes!!! (although mapmyrun.com clocks the course at only 4.77 miles, but we'll ignore that, I'm sure that my mapping of the course was inaccurate. Yeah, that must be it.)

There were two adjacent finishing corals, and both were really crowded, and the transition from sprinting to standing still made me pretty woozy for a minute. When I got to the front of the line to hand the tearoff slip from my number to the volunteer she looked right at me and froze with a look of horror on her face. "Uh oh!" she said.
"What?" I said, wondering if I looked ashen. All the blood was probably pooling in my legs now that I'd stopped running. She pointed right at me, mouth agape. "What?" I repeated, feeling to see if I had a booger on my face or something. Then I turned around just in time to see...

... the girl behind me in the other coral spew chunks. Blaaaaaaagh!! she went and ralphed all over the exit to her coral. Blaaaaaaaaagh!! she went again as the crowd dispersed so she wouldn't hurl on their shoes. What must have been her mother ran up to rub her back as she retched again. Don't judge, we've all been there. Now that's how you make room for a nice, big t(of)urky dinner! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Reminder: This blog moves on Tuesday morning.