The rain in Spain falls mainly on Lorraine

First of all, the appologies. I can't continue with this blog until I have blurted out a full paragraph on how HORRIBLE I've felt for not posting. But I've had a good excuse for that: I haven't been training. I have a good excuse for that too, which will come below. So if you're a new reader or you forgive me already you should skip to the next paragraph. If not and you've been reloading religiously every 10 minutes for the last 2 weeks, let me let you know that I really have been feeling so shitty about not blogging because it's been just another thing reminding me how much I suck for not being able to keep on top of my training. It's been up there with my growing (or returning) belly, the constantly empty fruit bowl in the kitchen (and the consequently empty toilet bowl), the gym towel collecting dust on the line, and my paranoia about the bordom of the receptionists at the gyms where I go to are as bad as the one I used to work at: where we would look at the last time each person came in and judge their worth on that. I set up this blog and now I feel like there are countless thousands of millions of billions of people reading my page every day who are only saying *tisk tisk* when they see that I haven't been updating. Have you ever embarrassed yourself in front of a whole bunch of people and then been afraid to ever show your face there again? It's a bit like that, and a bit like having to admit to your friend that you did something stupid and horrifically un-cool. So, again, I hope you all believe me, I'm REALLY sorry. I've been spending all week trying to find a way that it will REALLY never happen again.

Ok, so now for the excuses. So last time we spoke I was in Boston visiting my parents where it was cold and I had a headcold. In Boston it was too cold and rainy to run in the clothes that I brought home, I had no bike and I had no pool. I kicked back, had some beer with my friends, and chilled out. Remember, I hadn't drank since Christmas break.

WEDNESDAY:
When I got back to Barcelona early Wednesday morning it was all I could do to go home and take a 2-hour nap before my first class.

THURSDAY:
I was so jetlagged that I couldn't get out of bed at 6 to go work out, and the cold had moved into my chest anyway. You know that old addage, "Below the head, go to bed, above the head... get out there you whiny pansy!" Ok, so I made the second part up, but I don't know how it really goes.

FRIDAY:
I had morning meetings and when I got home I really SHOULD have gone to the gym since all my classes were cancelled, but what with it being the first afternoon of vacation I let my girlfriend convince me to go out drinking at 2 in the afternoon instead (ON or OFF with me, there's no in-between). I made up for it by going to bed at 9 so I could wake up for the 140k bike ride in the morning.

SATURDAY:
I woke up, got dressed, bundled up and biked to the rendez-vous point. The sky was grey, but it wasn't raining. It had been raining for like 2 weeks straight and I thought, "There's no WAY that this won't clear up!" I got there at about 7:48 and waited 10 minutes for the first group at 8 and no one showed up, not even someone rolling by on a cruiser. But at least the slower group leaves at 8:15 so I waited for them. At about 8:03 a guy from the fast group who always wears gear that looks like he's worn it every day since 1978 rolled up. He also talks funny, he doesn't separate his words and he's always got that grey mucus in the corner of his mouth like people who are either not mentally stable or chronically dehydrated (in this case both). "Haveyouseenanyonewearingthesamejerseyasmegobyhere?" "What?" "Haveyouseen...anyonewearing...myjersey...gobyhere?" "No, but I've been waiting for 10 minutes." "Probablytheydidn'tcomebecauseit'sraining." "What?" And then he biked off yelling, "ItNEVERrains...inthis...country!" Asshole. Either he went off to find his buddies assuming I was retarded (well I thought the same thing about you, buddy, and I can see your ass through your shorts), or he went off to do the ride alone. In either case, he could have waited for me. I went home and went back to bed. When I woke up it was SUNNY, but I couldn't get together the gumption to do more than a 1 hour ride on the indoor trainer (I don't know my way around BCN well enough will my female sense of direction and all the towns starting with Sant or Santa to find my way back home again).

SUNDAY:
Lorraine's coming! She was supposed to land at 7am in Barcelona, but when I was about to leave the house at 6 to go get her I saw an email from her husband that said, "Claire, Lorraine mist her flight. She'll be arriving at 12:03 from Madrid on flight JK???" (replace ?s for numbers). That was all. Mike's not a real cyber kinda guy. No idea what flight she missed nor what airline JK was. So I went back to bed. I arrived at the airport at 11:55 and went back and forth from Terminal A to Terminal B looking for where her flight came in. I waited in the domestic terminal for an hour and a half for her to come out. When she didn't I called home to see if she'd taken a taxi and shown up there. No Lorraine, no email. I tried to call her husband, Mike, but couldn't get a phone card. I looked at the board and saw that another flight arrived from Madrid on the same airline at 2:45. I grabbed a sandwich and decided to wait. 2:45 came and went. I watched tourists come from Mallorca, Granada, Seville, Madrid (on other airlines), Ibiza, Valencia... They were impossible to tell apart, so I had no idea who was coming from her flight (in Europe baggage claim is inside security to prevent thefts so friends and family can't meet at baggage claim).
***Meanwhile***
Lorraine's flight plan took her from San Jose to Salt Lake City to New York City to Barcelona. But when she landed in Salt Lake they made her sit on the tarmac for 45 minutes, thus making her miss her flight to New York, thus making it impossible to catch her flight to Barcelona. So Delta sends her to Atlanta where she will fly to Madrid and then to Barcelona. In Madrid she has to pass through customs. In other countries they make you collect your bags before passing through customs even if you are taking a connecting flight so they can check for drugs, immigrants, foreign soil samples, livestock, contraband 3oz toothpaste tubes, etc. What Lorraine didn't know is that this is not so in Madrid. So she stood there for an hour waiting for her bags, which never came. So she missed her flight to Barcelona. When she finally arrived in Barcelona on the next flight her bags were not there. She stood in line for Spanair (the Madrid-Barcelona flight), which sent her to the Delta window when she finally got to the counter. Then she walked across the termenal stood in line for Delta, where they treated her like she was crazy and sent her over to Spanair. Spanair finally filed a "LOST BAGGAGE CLAIM" report over an hour and 15 minutes afer arriving in Barcelona. Good luck, have a nice trip. When Lorraine finally came out of the arrivals gate 8 hours late and after travelling for 27 hours she finally broke down and cried. I took her home, bought her a drink, let her take a shower, and called Spanair before buying her dinner and getting her drunk.

MONDAY:
Still no baggage, they think Delta's got it, but they can't confirm. It's raining and Lorraine only has the clothes on her back. The day is spent talking on the phone to Spanair and American Express and then shopping for clothes to last the week. One piece of advice: Get American Express, then get their travel insurance. Compare a total of 114 euros (roughly $140) that Spanair gave her to $500 American Express for replacement of essentials. It was raining HARD all day, the kind that blows under your umbrella and we were wet, wet, wet and miserable all day. Then we drank.

TUESDAY:
Still raining. We go to the bike store to get a helmit (the only thing NOT in her suitcase) and a pair of running shoes so that she'll be prepared when her stuff gets here. We end up with a pair of bike shorts and the first pair of road (not trail) shoes Lorraine's had in nearly a decade. Then we stop for lunch. During lunch I get a phone call from my girlfriend. They just fired her. She doesn't want us to come home so that she can be alone. We come home briefly and go to the gym; Lorraine in my gym clothes. But after running for decades on the beautiful trails of Utah and the Santa Cruz Mountains Lorraine only has the patience for 5k on the treadmill and we go home. Then we drink.

WEDNESDAY:
Still no bags. We're starting to give up. After making a hangover breakfast we FINALLY get to go running outside. It's grey and cold and looks like it's going to rain, but we go out anyway. We go up to a FLAT recreational trail that goes around the perimeter of a mountain overlooking the city. We run for a bit and I feel breakfast and the alcohol that came before it. I did NOT feel strong. Then Lorraine looks left (uphill) and says, "OOH! A TRAIL!" This trail was a straight up single track with broken chunks of clay pots instead of ground under your feet. To my relief, we walk to the top and take some photos. Then Lorraine says, "Let's run down!" and is off like a shot before I know what hit me. Did I ever tell you that I never train hills? Did I ever tell you that I CERTAINLY never train downhills? Did I ever tell you that if I ever run "trails" they're fire trails that are more like gravel roads than trails? Lorraine is 57 years old: more than twice my age and older than my mom. There was no way I was going to be shown up (too badly) by an old lady. So I ran as fast as I could. I found her waiting for me around a bend. "How do you go so fast?" I said. "Take little steps and lean forward," she yelled over her shoulder as she FLEW down the trail. I found her again waiting for me at the bottom as I (no joke) was yelling "AAAAAARGH" at the top of my lungs and windmilling my arms to keep my ballance as I had been the whole way down. "It's not my fault that they lost your bags," I pouted. Then we ran down a little more, then walked up a bit, then we ran down a hell of a lot more. All in all we were out for about 3 or 4 hours (and it may be noted, sharing a 16 oz bottle of water since I'd messed up the public transportation and we had to spend our water money on 2 more tickets). Probably the only reason that Lorraine didn't leave my sorry ass heaving behind a corner dumpster was because she wouldn't know how to find her way home. To my credit though we ran through some heavily crowded streets. Ms. I-can-run-on-all-kinds-of-terrain-and-surfaces wasn't as good as me at dodging urban obstacles. When we got home we made dinner and drank, but at least we made dinner, which meant that Lorraine had her first meal with vegetables and a minimum of processed foods.

THURSDAY:
Now we've given the suitcases up for dead. They've probably been sent to Hong Kong and been pushed into the sea ("Why would you say that?" Lorraine said truly concearned when I suggested this possibility jokingly). And it's still raining; big drops that make you wet fast. Since Friday is a holiday and that's when our cleaning lady usually comes, Silvia told her (when she called on Wednesday night) that she could come by at 9am. So Lorraine and I have to be out of the house before 9, Silvia stays at home to sleep.
Lorraine and I went to a 9:30 spin class at my gym. I made fun of her for doing the whole thing in running shoes because I had to do SOMETHING to get my manhood back after she kicked my ass up and down the trails yesterday. I haven't done a spin class since Thanksgiving because they're too short, easy, and emphasize low cadence, high resistance work. But since we had no other choice other than watching the flashing red numbers on the dreadmill, then spin it was. The teacher was new since Thanksgiving but I had seen him around and pegged him as a triathlete by the fact that everything he put on had the ironman logo on it (ok, excuse me, there's NO reason to run with a mesh running baseball-style cap IN the gym!), his slim, cut physique, and the fact that his face and teeth showed serious scarring and chipping from what must have been a pretty astounding wipeout. There's a reason why they don't have triathletes do spin classes: because they do 45 minutes steady at 90 rpm! I would have translated, but the music was up so loud that I couldn't even hear what the guy was saying and certainly didn't have the lung capacity to be screaming it to Lorraine on the bike next to me after I'd been sneaking my girlfriend's cigarettes last night. Lorraine was not impressed by the class. Neither was I. When we got home I started to notice the soreness from my trail plummet the day before. We went souveneer shopping and to meet up with some of my friends (who wound up thinking better of it because it had started to pour again). Walking around I started to notice that I couldn't even walk down stairs. In fact, I was having trouble walking off the ramps from the sidewalks into the crosswalks. Barcelona isn't a VERY hilly city like, say, San Francisco, but the whole thing's on a slight grade and I felt EVERY DEGREE of that grade wherever we went, I tell you what! Also, as my dad said, "Spain hasn't quite cought up to the Americans with Disabilities Act yet, has it?" In the metro (that's subway to you) there are nothing but stairs going up and down, up and down. If I had cowboyed up to run down that trail yesterday, there was no cowboying up now. The best I could do was not groan EVERY time I stepped down a stair. But eventually I had to admit that even on the ramps from the sidewalk to the crosswalk I was just stepping out straight-legged and hoping for the best. My quads were WASTED!!! When we got home we ate leftovers, rented a movie, and started to drink. The one upside is, I found out that I'm not the only person who has to watch American movies with subtitles, there's a woman twice my age who can't hear movies either. Now I feel better. (I'm 23 by the way).

FRIDAY: (Lorraine's last day)
We have utterly given up on the suitcases. Lorraine doesn't even jump up out of bed to answer the door when the mailman rings the bell every morning to get in to the mailboxes in the front hall. I have to break the news to Lorraine that there's no way I can run today. She says it's okay, the lack of suppliments (which were in her bag) and the shitty food have taken their toll and she feels like she's getting sick. And then the damndest thing happens: the sun comes out! We decide to go down to the beach with swimming stuff to have lunch while the sun's still out and then go directly to the gym to get in a swim workout. On the way to the metro Lorraine says, "So, is it because it's vacation that everything's closed?" And then it hits me: it's Good Friday. If the gym is open at all it'll close at 2:00; in other words, in 5 minutes. This trip is so damned anyway that I promise that we'll try REAL Spanish Sangria at lunch. Then the airline calles: "¿Está la señora Lavelle por favor?" "Are you from American Express," I ask. No, from Spanair, but I speak a little bit of English. "Better talk to me," I said. They just "found" her bags, she said. Should I send it to your address in Barcelona, she asked. "No," I said, "she leaves tomorrow morning. Send it to her house in California." What's the nearest airport, she asked. "San Jose," I said. Is that SJO? she asked. "NO! SJC! C! SJO is in San Jose, Costa Rica! SJC, in California, USA!!!" God I hope that $4000 worth of clothes, jewlery, athletic equipment and everything else Lorraine couldn't live without isn't going to show up in Costa Rica!
We get down to the beach (the final painful meters before sea level) and walk around a bit before we find Silvia and go to a fish restaurant. The waitor obviously either likes one of us or feels bad because he took my gazpacho away before I'd finished because he brings us a bottle of liquour and 3 shot glasses before we get the check. When we don't like the first liquour he brings us another. We all walk out pretty wasted. It's 5 in the afternoon. Then Lorraine and I decide to take a sky ride over the port and up to a hill that has all these botanical gardens, museums, and the '92 Olympic facilities on it. The ride is full for the day, though, so we'll have to take the metro. We buy a beer to use the bathroom and then I have to walk the excruciating up and down, up and down of 3 metro lines to be plopped at the top of the hill and walk back down past all the points of interest. At least the sun's out though. And then the first lucky thing of the whole vacation happened, we were coming down the hill past the Catalan Art Museum and into Plaza Espanya at sunset, just when they were doing a water lights show. At least she got to see ONE of the fun, pretty and unique things that Barcelona has to offer!

I will spare you an account of all the stairs it took to get back home, and then to go out clubbing that night. Since her flight was leaving at 10 am we had to get up at 6 to get to the airport on time, so I took her to a tourist club that I thought was sure to fill up before the requisite 3am of most Barcelona bars. But when we got there and paid our admission at 12:30 it was only us, the DJ and the bartender down there. We got some stamps and went to get a drink somewhere else. When we got back there were only tourist predators down there. If there's one reason why I'm glad I'm gay it's so that I don't have to deal with that shit. One accosted me and wouldn't take "Go away!/¡Lárgate!" as an answer, but when one came up and started stroking Lorraine's hair and then some, we got pretty fed up. We stuck around as the dance floor filled up but no one was dancing. At 1:45 we had to give up and go try to catch the metro before it closed at 2. Probably Lorraine's final memory of Barcelona will be SPRINTING across a plaza (which she did trying to keep up with me, I might add) to catch the last train home.

SATURDAY:
Lorraine cought her flight home (filled with American study abroad students) with no problem. I came home and went back to bed and woke up too zapped from the disappointment and the accumulating fatigue of trying to make things all better that were out of my control to try to work out. I started drinking instead.

SUNDAY:
I woke up at about 1 in the afternoon and it was between taking a trip on the motorcycle with my girlfriend or going on a bike ride by myself. My girlfriend made a pretty convincing case about how she'd been alone that whole time we were shopping and speaking English and that I owed her some time. With the hangover it wasn't too hard a call to make.

MONDAY:
Still a holiday in Barcelona. I went for a short ride that felt harder than that same ride had ever felt before. Then on the way home I rented a House DVD and watched 4 episodes before CSI came on and I watched 3 episodes of that. In the process I drank 2 bottles of wine. Yes. 2 WHOLE bottles of wine.

TUESDAY:
Too hung over to work out. Now I have to work.

WEDNESDAY:
So here we are. I replaced a main set of 1500m swim timetrial for the same workout of drills with fins and did a pretty pitiful bike set on the trainer. I feel like I've lost 3 months of training in less than 3 weeks. The self-loathing is tremendous, only magnified by the fact that I had to drop out of my second biggest race of the season in part because I realized it'll be too cold to do it without a wet suit, and in part because I won't feel ready. I've been freaking out since Lorraine left about how I have no control over my own life and wondering if I should A) just give up on all athletic endeavors for the rest of my life because the Universe clearly is hell bent on getting in my way, or B) changing my phone number and my email address and my girlfriend so that no one can make me vary from my routine again. I know that neither of these two is realistic. Coincidentally both of the 2 taste like beer.