"You suck, go home!"

Saturday was my first big cycle race of the season: Transcollcerola. Collcerola is a string colls directly behind Barcelona. If you don't know what a "coll" is from the Tour de France, it's a hill or a mountain depending on where you're from. I'm not from Nepal, so I'll call them mountains. This particular event offered an 80k "short course", and a 150k "long course". In keeping with last week's "I can't do that. Sign me up!" attitude I signed up for the long course despite a phone call I got a couple of weeks ago from Miguel Angel (the fastest guy in the club) asking, "Are you sure? All that way? The whole 150 kilometers?!" Cavalier, I said, "Well, it's all above Barcelona anyway, if I die, then in all likelihood I'll probably roll backwards downhill and wind up at home anyway." So I signed up. No problem.

Below you see the short course profile (for reference, the tall one on the right is about 500m tall):
And the long course, seen above (the second picture), looks like two tits, with one hill just below 500m tall and the next one just above 500m tall. See, if you are intelligent you would assume that the long course map was in addition to the short course map, and you would be right. I'm not so bright, though, so I thought, 'only two climbs, up and down, up and down the hill I do once a week anyway? No problem! I love tits, this is going to be great!' I was, of course, wrong, but we'll get to that.

All 450 or so participants started facing downhill on a short decline with a 90 degree turn about 50 yards away at the bottom. Generally I'm not too comfortable biking in crowds so I was freaking out right from the start. It didn't help that people shot out the gate at about 100 miles per hour and kept going 100 miles per hour through the first several miles of the course. Here's what it sounded like in my head, 'uhhh huff, uhhh huff, get away from me, uhhh huff, get away from me, slow the f&%# down, get uhh away huff from uhhh me huff!" And then there was another sound, *clang-cla-clang tickaticka...(silence)* as my chain fell off the outside of my big chain ring. I pulled over to put it back on and watched the back-of-the-packers fly by. Thus, right from the beginning I was relegated to the chunks of people who are constantly questioning if they're going the right way because there are no other cyclists in sight. And there I stayed.

I bought my bike with one of those "granny gear" chainrings (I'm sure it has a real name, and you're screaming it at your screen right now, but I don't know what it is). In the name of "saving my energy" I immediately switched to this chainring every time the road headed for the skies. Well, Saving My Energy was my excuse anyway. I passed a couple of chicks on the first coll, and then came the first white-knuckled, heart-in-your-throat descent. There's something unnerving about how your bike naturally swoops a couple of degrees closer to the pavement when you go around a turn at 30 miles per hour. I know I have good cornering form because it usually works out pretty well for me when I have the balls to trust myself, but I always second-guess myself and feather the brakes, which makes me swerve ever-so-slightly, which makes me freak out, which makes me go rigid... and if I'm lucky the turn ends before the freaking-out process smears me across the pavement. And you know when you're flying down a hill (and you're barely in control) and a car swings around a curve in front of you? And they're usually not even in danger of hitting you anyway because they're on their side of the road and you're on yours and there's plenty of time to avoid each other? I always jump out of my skin and swerve when that happens. Not good, kids. Well, we got to the bottom and the guys that were with me said, "Did you see those beautiful views?!" No, actually, I didn't really notice.

I don't know if this is good or bad, but when my legs are shaky from a climb (even if it's small), I like to keep them moving. So once the hill starts to tip down again I flip up a chainring and get the wobbliness out of my legs. It feels good. Most of the day I'd been floating along a few feet behind the boys, but once we were pointed downwards I would pull ahead. "Take it easy," David said, "we still have a long way to go!" David tries to be my Jimminy Cricket, always telling me how I should ride. "Stick yourself to his back wheel", "Slow down, you'll tire yourself out", "Stop at that stop light" (when no one else does), "Don't wear a camelback, you only need one bottle of water", "Do this bit on your small chainring", "Take the shorter rout today". As a general rule, I don't pay any attention to David. Maybe some of his advice is good, and some of his advice isn't so much, but I can't get the sneaking suspision out of my head that he's telling me to do this stuff because I'm a girl. Girls need to be protected. Girls don't know how to ride their bikes. So I ignore David. But today I was in a good mood and I paid attention to David and took it easy. I tried to enjoy the scenery.

In a flat section where everyone shook out their numb hands and reached in jersey pockets to try and find food we came to an intersection. The volunteers asked, "Are there many more behind you?" What the fuck kind of question is that?! How the hell should we know? Are we that far behind? Do we suck that much? Sheez. Gimme a break, I'm going as fast as I can. "No idea," said Patrick.

The whole event was circling around one town away from where I live, but until the third hill I didn't see anything that I knew. It was the hardest hill thus far, but at least it was something I had done before, and finally I came over a crest and the Barcelona skyline finally broke over the edge of a ridge. The climb seemed to last forever, and every time I thought it was over and we were barrelling downhill David would say, "Here comes a break". I was thinking "What do you mean a break? Isn't it over yet?!" But still, because I knew where I was, I was on an upswing. I convinced myself, I can do this. We stopped and grabbed some more water (which I mixed with Accelerade, "What's that?" David asked) and as we were picking our bikes up again two chicks pulled into the aid station. "Let's go," I said. And then we flew down a hill that I knew. Reluctantly I feathered the brakes. I knew every contour of this hill, and it frustrated me to stay behind David, but it didn't frustrate me so much that I was going to risk my life passing him on a hairpin turn.

And then we were gliding into Sant Cougat (where the race was based) again, and there were volunteers with flags waving us to the left. "We're doing the long course!" yelled David. The guy with the flags waved away and said something inaudable. When we were on a straightaway again I yelled ahead to David, "Are they kicking us out?" "I don't know, maybe," he said. Of course when we turned right and found ourselves face to face with the finish line at exactly kilometer 80 we knew the answer. We crossed the finishishing strip and the timers beeped as it registered our finishing times. Shit! Game over. We found Miguel Angel who was already in his street clothes and went to find out our results. The first chick, a girl that I'd beat easily a few months before had come in 8 minutes ahead of me. Right behind her was another girl, putting me in third. "Why were you dawdling so much?" asked Miguel Angel. "You could have won". "We stopped to eat, we didn't know that we were going to be classified on the short course,". "That's the last time I listen to David," I said. "Yeah, don't pay any attention to him," said Miguel Angel. "I won't," I said, and meant it.

David, Patrick and I were all in the same boat. We'd been sticking together, Taking It Easy for 3 hours, 30 minutes and 22 seconds (give or take), and essentially we'd all been disqualified together.
David: Why don't we get a snack and keep going?
Patrick: I came by train, I might as well be getting back to the train station.
David: Why don't we just ride home, the course takes us through the cemetary and then you'll be back in Barcelona.
Patrick (thinking about it): Alright, why not.

We took off back towards Barcelona again and someone pulled up next to me. "Hola," he said. "Hola," I grumbled and looked over. It was some guy (I don't know his name) from our club. "Dude! HI!" I said. "I waited for you guys at the top of X Coll. You never showed up," said... whatever-his-name-is. "They kicked us out," I said. "They wouldn't let us do the long course". After awhile whatever-his-name-is pulled up to talk to David and I found myself next to Patrick. "Are you sad?" I asked. "Well no, sad no," he said. "But if they wanted to have a competitive race, I wish they had told us and I wouldn't have signed up, you know? I can ride these roads anytime, why am I going to pay for it if they won't let the likes of me finish? It just leaves a sour taste in your mouth." He was totally right. That was exactly what I was feeling without having the words to say it.

The path through the Collcerola cemetary is especially steep on shitty pavement that eats all your momentum. I have never made my way over it except in my grannygear chainring, and that's how I got over it, watching the boys disappear in front of me. I lost sight of them and heard a car growling behind me. I hate that feeling, knowing that a car's grinding away up a hill in first gear behind me waiting for a chance to pass. I waved him around a couple of times, but he never passed. Finally I came to a fork in the road with no sign of David and Patrick in front of me. Left went down, right went up. 'Well fuck it,' I thought, 'what else has this course done all day?!' and I turned right up the hill. The growling car passed me and I got a chace to get a good look, it was a hurse with a giant three-foot wreath of red roses attached to the back of it and a whole train of cars following in the funeral party. 'Fitting,' I thought, 'I've been being followed by a funeral procession'.

I'd chosen the right rout though and the boys were waiting for me a little way up the road. "Wouldn't it be better to wait for me at the intersections?' I asked (ironically). "There aren't any intersections until we get to Barcelona," said David. I didn't feel like explaining the encounter with the funeral march, so I just shut up. "Maybe I'll go back into Barcelona with Patrick," I said. I was sick of this game, and I knew my girlfriend would be pissed at me for being away for so long. "Alright," said David, looking crushed. But when we got to the intersection where Patrick had to go down and David was going back up I realized that I'd left 100 euros in David's car so I went back up with him. It's amazing what money can do. I'm sure if I were a professional, sponsored athlete I would have even won this thing.

We were climbing and I clicked back down to my granny gear. I was totally over pushing myself. "You go ahead," I said to David. "I don't want you losing any momentum just to keep up with me, it's easier to go at your rhythm uphill than to slow down". "Don't believe it," said David, "I'll get behind you, you decide the speed". "Stop being a prince, I'll meet you at the top, anyway, you're making me nervous." He seemed a little hurt by that. Backpedaling: "No, I mean I don't want you to waste any energy on me, I feel bad, but I don't feel like pushing anymore". "Don't worry," he said, "I'm tired too". So we went up together and I looked at the worn-out part of his pants seat and wondered if he was wearing checkered underwear or if he was wearing something else under his shorts. Who buys checkered underwear? I was just so sick of climbing and descending, climbing and descending.

I know I could have finished the long course, my legs were fine, but I was so pissed that they wouldn't give me a chance. We were on track to do a 7-hour century which isn't anything to write home about, but with all the climbing I don't think it's anything to sniff at either. While we were riding to the parking space I clicked over to 112k at a total of 4 hours, 58 minutes and 59 seconds. I had spent the whole day hanging back, and the one major regret of the day was that I still had no idea how I could have done. I could have gone faster on the short course. I could have pushed harder on our course (equal except for one climb). I could have finished the long course. But I wasn't able to get any of those notches in my belt. I understand that we were on heavily-trafficked roads right outside Barcelona and they didn't want cyclists on the road after a certain time, but David and I went there anyway. There are always cyclists around in Barcelona. So, I mean, what the hell? You know?

Hey, why didn't I think of that?

Titled: Diet Coke, You're Insulting My Intelligence

From nataliedee.com

Insomnia

Insomnia is the worst kind of hell on earth, and I'm not exaggerating! Last night I went to bed at 10:30, but couldn't fall asleep until after 3, and that only lasted for less than an hour as my "bunkmate" is (was) quitting smoking and kept tossing and turning and getting up. I didn't finally fall asleep for good until 6 in the morning, 20 minutes after I was supposed to get up. Everything seems to wake me up: noises (doesn't help that I live 2 blocks from a hospital and there are ambulances all night), movement, snores, heat, cold, anxiety if I wake up and find that my bunkmate isn't there, the need to go to the bathroom, and most of all - light. If one light in the house is turned on I'm more awake than if you'd just picked me up and made me drink a whole pot of coffee. Then I have about an hour of looking at the ceiling to look forward to.

Not like many of these things matter since I can't fall asleep most nights anyway. I lie in bed tossing and turning until the sheets are so messed up I can't get my whole body covered anymore. Then I take a blanket and move to the couch, where I do the same routine. Soon enough I start worying about all the stuff I have to do tomorrow. I think about how I really needed to fall asleep half an hour, an hour, two hours ago, etc and how I'm going to be exhausted tomorrow. I think about how my body needs this time to recover and it's going to be trashed in my next workout. Then my heart starts beating really fast and I can hear it in my ears and I think that surely this isn't right, I'm under too much stress. Then I start to blame everyone ever who's stressed me out and decide that they're selfish to ever have put me in this position. Sometimes I get pretty angry, and if you're ever unlucky enough to catch me sleepless, watch out.

I watch my insomnia and try to figure out what causes it. Overtraining? Undertraining? Afternoon coffee? Watching TV before bed? Talking before bed? Spending too much "awake time" reading or talking or eating in bed? Nothing seems to cause it. I've tried pills: valerian, tylenol PM, nyquil, xanax (didn't want to make that a habit)... all stopped working after awhile. Basically, sometimes my body can't sleep.

But here's my dilemma: after a sleepless night where tossing and turning has eatten away at 4 hours of your precious sleep time, do you go work out or do you stay in bed and rest? What if it happens for weeks on end?

Oh my aching back

Yesterday was one of those epic workouts. Maybe you all are smarter than me about this, but every once in awhile I get it into my head to do an enormous workout that I'm way not prepared for. Usually I do this because it's out there and someone's doing it and it sounds like fun and I'm not going to let the fact that I'm not prepared in the least keep me from doing something I want. I'm a taurus, I'm like that. My longest bike workout this season has been 100k. I came home that day totally shelled but there was an enormous sense of accomplishment after those 100k's where I thought I could do anything. So this weekend when the Saturday 150k ride was more convenient than the shorter Sunday ride I thought, '150k, it's as long as the longest ride I've ever done in my entire life and it's one-and-a-half times longer than the longest ride I've done this season, I'll do it!' I mean, what better way to make up for the fact that my training's been erratic lately at best? And by "erratic" I mean "nonexistant" more often than not.

At least this time I remembered sunblock.

We went up the coastal rout towards Girona that we usually go up when we go north. It's flat and fast and windy so the group stays close together. There are a few hills, well, "rollers" really and I was sticking in close to the group until we got to the first one where I feel off the back. They dropped me like I was standing still and when we got to the top I was some 50 yards behind. For the next 15 minutes or so I was pedaling all out, fighting the wind all by myself trying to keep up with their pace. I was grunting and groaning and whining and saying out loud, "wait up, just wait the fuck up, please!" because it made me feel better. I find it really satisfying sometimes to throw a temper tantrum if I know that I'm not going to get cought. I finally got to within 3 bike lengths of the last guy... just at the bottom of another hill. There wasn't no temper tantrum indulgent enough to justify the effort of catching up with them again so when I fell off again and cracked like Humpty Dumpty I let them go. Spinning alone along the coast at about 33kmph (just under 20mph) I wondered if they were the fast group and I was going to get stuck doing the 200k round trip that the advanced group was doing. I wondered if they would even know they had lost me and come back looking for me. I wondered if I should just turn around and go back to Barcelona right now. But then there was a lone biker waiting at the side of the road for the pokey people like me. I always worry too much. I think I'm turning into my mother. Turns out I wasn't even the slowest one out there and we came into the restaurant at a much more comfortable pace (especially since the guy in front of me was about 6'8 and thicker than a refrigerator, I grabbed his wheel and hardly had to pedal it was so calm back there).

On the way back once more I fell off the back faster than you can say "loser", but at least there was another guy named Manolo going a comfortable speed. We dove into the headwind alone together the whole 80k back through the mountains. I'll never understand how you can have a headwind both ways on an out and back rout. My legs felt better, but my low back was killing me and my hips felt like they were being ripped out of their sockets. I didn't think that I was one of those people whose backs hurt on the bike, but there I was and the feeling was familiar. Weird. There was something else that was also killing me from so much time in the seat, but that's a personal thing. As I was chasing Manolo through rotaries and along regional highways I was thinking about how weak I was. I was schooling myself in a lesson about being humble and knowing my limits and wondering if maybe I shouldn't do the century ride through the mountains next week. And I couldn't keep my eyes of the numbers on my odometer as they ticked up to 150 painfully slowly. Finally we hit a traffic light and I said, "Sorry for not pulling in this wind, it's just that I'm barely hanging on." "I was going as fast as I could because I didn't want to disappoint you!" Manolo said. After that we both let up and I sat up into the wind. Sure, it wasn't what tough-as-nails Claire would do, but it made sissy Claire's back feel a lot better. Let me tell you, when I got home I was one hurt unit, but my legs were okay!

After a shower I was cooking lunch in my underwear (my favorite thing to do after a long workout) and another effect of such a long ride showed up: my cyclist's farmer's tan is well on its way! The right side of my body was a blazing red, while the left side a cool pinky-brown. North in the morning, south in the afternoon and the sun stays on your left the whole time. For 5 hours the sun was toasting only one side of my body. I have a line from my sleeves, a line from my shorts, and a line from my gloves. Is anyone else just as proud of their funky triahtlon tans as their sleek and defined triathlon muscles?

Happy Birthday to me!

Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday dear Claire,
Happy Birthday to me!

Today is my 24th birthday, or, depending on how much of a geek you are, "the first day of my last year in the 18-24 age group". I have a record of having bad birthdays.

When I was 17 I had such a bad relationship with my parents that we kept fighting and fighting and my birthday celebration kept getting pushed off until the dust had settled. It took 6 weeks.

When I turned 20 it was a Friday but I had no one to party with so I went to a party where I didn't know anyone. I had a horrible time, my ride ditched me and I had to walk home 4 miles alone at 2 a.m.

When I turned 22 I was working and studying so much that I hadn't seen most of my friends in months. Almost no one came to my party. I was drunk and I cried.

The last one I cried when I saw my birthday cake and locked myself in my room for about two hours before anyone could eat the cake. I was having some kind of nervous breakdown last spring because I was committed to doing too many things and felt like I couldn't even take care of my basic life functions: sleeping (I had terrible insomnia and was only sleeping about 4 hours a night), going to the bathroom (there are no public bathrooms in Spain and I was out and about 8 hours a day), water (I was only able to get in about 2 liters a day because I didn't want to have to go to the bathroom and not have a place to go), eating (I'd lost about 15lb in 2 months) and free time (I once went 4 weeks without finding time to go to a supermarket). I was a wreck and resolved that this year I was going to learn to say no to people. A year later, I think I've had some success. At least I'm happy this year.

I think my birthday is a better time to make resolutions than new years. It's spring, I'm a year older, um... it's spring... summer's coming, I'm not getting any younger... So this year I'm going to make some more resolutions. Here are some of them:

• Take better care of my teeth
• Do IM Lanzarote in one year and a couple of days
• Get a job that allows me to open a savings account
• Run more, instead of skipping it whenever I can get away with it
• Learn to speak Catalan

That seems like a good list, for now...

• Oh yeah, and blog more consistently!
  

Get in a cave and throw things.

This weekend is the last event in my travel/visitor marathon. It all started at the end of March when I went back to Boston, then I was back for 3 days and Lorraine came, that took some recuperation and then I was back on the wagon for about a week before my brother and James came in the same weekend and James wound up staying for 12 days. This weekend it's off to Ireland to see my family. I'm excited to see my family, but I'm less than thrilled about Ireland. My brother's been studying in London and my parents wanted to see us in Europe before my brother left, but they'd already seen London and Barcelona. "Let's go somewhere new," my mom said. And it was. In January Dad sent a list of possible destinations. I responded, "Anywhere except Sicily (I don't like Italy, or Italians - Italian-Americans are fine, I am one, it's the REAL Italians that bug me) or Ireland," I said. In January he send out an email saying, "We're going to Ireland!" Damn.

It's not that I hate to travel. And it's definitely not that I hate visitors. It's that I don't deal well with disruptions. I really, really, REALLY like routine. I love planning out my day and seeing how well it all turns out when it goes exactly according to plan. I like knowing where and when I'll eat, where I'll go, and exactly what my workout will be. I feel safe and happy when I'm in control. Am I type A or what? Anyway, when friends come, or I get dragged away, there are too many things I can't control. Trying to maintain a normal life when someone's visiting is like trying to collate in the wind. I get anxious and depressed. I give up. I drink. Sometimes, depending on the guest, I smoke. I convince myself that I'm a failure. Deep inside I look like this (right) while my adoring friends (left) are none the wiser to my plans to kill them in their sleep:
It makes me just want to crawl into a cave and crouch at the mouth of my lair with a pile of rocks. When someone passes my cave I will throw a rock at them and scream, "Leave me the f%&# alone!" That's what I'm doing on the inside. On the outside I'm going out to dinner and taking photos next to public monuments. I can't wait to have my life back! It's been so long that I don't even remember what it was like to have control over my own time.

Let's all breathe a sigh of relief, life is back on Monday.

Corte Inglés: Round 2

Today I kicked off the 2007 season with a local 11k fun run put on by the Corte Ingles, a Spanish department store kind of like Macy's. The great thing about this race is that it draws everybody, not just runners. I guess that's why they call non-competitive races here cursa popular or "the people's race". In the Cursa de Corte Ingles you see runners, walkers, rollerbladers, old people, little kids, wheelchairs, baby carriages, numbers strapped to dogs, and giant paper-mache people (used in parades at local festivals) with numbers taped on being pushed in wheelbarrows. Today I saw a man carrying a sign that said "Damià Roig, 100 years old", he was walking arm-in-arm with his son who must have been over 70. The cool thing about this race is that you can't be competitive, it's physically and practically impossible. There are no chips, no race officials, and people take off at the start all willy-nilly as they're able to push their way through the crowd under the arch. The motto of the race is "To participate is to win". Other than the finish line, the main draw is that all participants get to do a lap around the Olympic track (from the '92 games) which is usually closed to the public.

Today the crowd was so thick that it took me 3k to dodge through enough people to be able to run comfortably. Even so, I never got out of groups of people so close together that you could smell their breath and body odor as you passed. And even in the finishing chute I had to slow down as I came up on chunks of people. What a thrill to spend a solid hour passing people, from start to finish! The crowd has its disadvantages, of course. With all kinds of people out there, no organized start stratified by projected finishing time, and people who jump into the game as far as 5k into the course there are always all kinds of people moving at all different speeds competing for asphalt. Yes, people suck, like the guy who shot his arm out 6 inches in front of my face to point at something and nearly clothes-lined me, and the people who inevitably get ankles turned every year by being cut off or run down from behind. But the nice thing is that because it's non-competitive it gets everyone out there and moving, and you are given 2 1/2 hours to finish so that even grandma can walk across the finish line with her 4-year-old grand kid holding her hand.

Oh yeah, and it's free.

Cheap: that's one thing that I've noticed about the Barcelona athletics scene. This race was free because a department store had paid to shut the city down for two and a half hours on a Sunday morning to have 51,000 billboards for their store parade around half the city. But even other races are cheap. When Joolie and I started to sign up for 10k's and half marathons she would say, "I feel so bad doing something like this and knowing it's not for charity". But the thing here is that the race is the charity. Catalunya has been really trying to get people active for as long as I've been here, subsidizing gyms to lower monthly fees, building bike lanes, throwing bike festivals, running festivals, skating festivals and also sponsoring races in order to drive entry fees down and get more people involved. In this way, the race is the charity. City Hall is doing everything that they can to get people moving and their hearts beating. Why? Probably because they have public health care and having a fit population eventually drives down health care costs, but does that make it any less cool? Can you imagine if our government valued the physical well-being of its citizens like that instead of letting Asics and Burger King vie for our lifestyles and ergo loyalty?

My first ironman, sort of

Yesterday Silvia, my trusty sidekick, and I participated in our first ironman... as volunteers. It wasn't an official IM so there weren't tons of participants, and for many triathlon seemed to be a hoby (I'll get more into this later). Most of all, the organizers were local, so the thing went off like just like you would expect something like this to go off if a Spanish person organized it: without a hitch - mostly by luck and a little bit of faith that mankind was smart enough to figure out what to do for themselves. My job was to stand by the metal gates blocking off side streets and make sure that no cars went through and drove onto the course anyway. Of course, the organizers hadn't put any indication down the road to warn drivers that the main road was closed, but never mind, when they got to a big, yellow gate at the end and we made them back it up they figured it out.

The race was in a little town that is called, fittingly, L'Ampolla. If you don't get it I'll help you out, ampolla means "blister" in Spanish. The race organizers tried to open themselves up to participants from all around the world with the following image on their web site, but despite all their efforts, most of the participants were locals.
(in counter-clockwise order starting from top center: "The Milky Way", "Earth", "Spain", "The Ebre Delta", "Blister").

My hat goes off to ANYONE who participated in this race. Well, my hat goes off to anyone who has completed an ironman (and if you, reader, have finished one, my hat goes off to you too; you are a rockstar), but especially those roughly 111 people I saw slogging away past me yesterday. First of all, after months of rain, it was hot and sunny yesterday (around 80 degrees) and the course had no shade anywhere, as far as I could tell. But worst of all was the course. I guess when a small town tries to put on a big race you get a lot of loops. This course was a SEXTUPLE (that's the word for 6 times, right?) out-and-back bike AND run course. That means that the bike course was only 15k (9.3 miles) out, and 15k back, six . flipping . times. The run course was only three and a half kilometers (2.2 miles) out and 3.5k back six . futher . mucking . times, on the same course as the bike! I'm confident that I would have the physical fortitude to finish an ironman one day, but to complete a race where 72% of the course was on the same 2.2 mile stretch that I had to cover twenty-four times in one day would break me before I ever got to the finish line (for the 24th time).

When Silvia and I were taken in the back of a white van to our post it was 1:30 in the afternoon and the guy in first place still hadn't finished his final bike loop. I didn't know about the 6 "loop" (read: "out and back") situation, and since we were only about a quarter of a mile from the finish line/turn-around point/transition area I started screaming my head off for everyone that came by, and then again when they came back in the other direction 5 minutes later. When I saw them come back again I would start screaming, "Way to go! You're here! You're finished!" Some people yelled out "I still have 2 to go". I figured it must be 3 loops. I wonder how many morales I broke that way? One guy rode by with a ham and cheese sandwich flapping in the wind and I screamed out, "¡Que aproveches!", which I thought meant "Buon Apetite!". "It's que aproveche," Silvia corrected me. Turns out that I'd said something like, "Hope the sandwich enjoys you!" Oh well, he stuck his hand out and waved anyway. There were surprisingly few smiles as people came in from their last loop, but man, if you could have seen the few smiles that there were. One guy audibly said, "¡Por fin!!" ("Finally!").

By the time the bikers had all trickled in and were pacing back and forth on the run course I was getting pretty famous. Some of the people I saw so many times that I could have sworn that they were throwing the little bracelets they got when they finished each lap into the sea. I think one guy said it was great running past me, but then again I either didn't hear him right, or didn't understand the expression that he used. Either way, he used the word grande ("great" or "big") and seemed to like me. When another ran by smiling (or maybe grimacing) I yelled, "Just keep smiling!" and he trotted for a bit grinning and doing the Queen Wave. Another guy who'd been running back and forth for ages (it turns out he took second, I think) was coming up behind someone else, "Come on, you got him!" I yelled. He kind of gave me a dirty look. "Honey, he's totally wasted (está hecho a polvo, litterally "ground to dust")," Silvia said. I felt bad. Another guy who looked like he was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other passed and I yelled, "Just one meter at a time!" Only as it turns out there's no expression in Spanish to say, "one at a time" and I was screaming gobbeldygook at him, something like, "Remember, all at once one meter".

Silvia could have sworn that we were only going to be there for 2 hours, so when they drove by at 3:30 we thought it was to pick us up. Then 4 arms stuck out of the driver's side window with two sandwiches and 2 8oz bottles of water. Silvia sat back down in the shade where she'd been sitting all day (in her neon traffic vest, see right) and lit another cigarette. I opened the foil and looked at what was inside. Ham. No sandwich for Claire (Claires are vegetarians). It wasn't quite as blisteringly hot anymore, but it was still sunny, and we had forgotten sunscreen. By the time they finally came to get us at 5:30 I was starving and thirsty and both of us were sunburnt (me more than Sílvia, but she wins for having the racoon-eyed sunglasses tan). I wanted to stay and watch someone finish, figuring that some of the people that I'd seen run by half a million times must be finishing soon, so I stalled by asking for a t-shirt. In the 15 minutes that we were waiting for the t-shirts, no one crossed the line even though I saw some of the bracelet chuckers come through the aid station... again. When we left to catch a train at 6:00 (hour 11) only 3 people had finished and I didn't get to see the look of satisfaction on anyone's face as they became an ironman.

Now, this is an event that I had almost planned to do. I even started training for it in October, but wound up falling back into drinking and smoking instead and had to admit that this was NOT the time. Since Europe tends to be more serious about athletics I didn't want to be the one to show up just trying to survive and finish grumpy because I was dead last instead of with a smile on my face. Nevertheless, when I got there, I saw people doing a lot of things that even I thought were silly. Here are some of the things that I saw:

• Long-sleeved, all-black jerseys.
• Disc wheels on a windy day (like you usually have on the coast).
• People way in the back wearing aero helmits (you have to be going fast for them to give you any advantage) with the point sticking way up in the air like they were trying to pick up satelite cable.
• A bottom-of-the-line surfing wet suit hanging on the bike rack in the transition area
  
• Mountain bike shoes
• One guy running with his bike jersey still in his hands.
• A transition bag that was nothing more than an IKEA shopping bag.
• Countless people with elite gear and a weekend warrior's fitness.
  

But it's so easy to sit there and be critical from the sidelines. And I'm not making fun of those people, I'm only saying that I would have felt a whole lot better signing up for the race if I'd known that some of the competition would be as ghetto as me. And speaking of competition, there was only one woman in the race. ONE. She was among the last of the bikers - the ones that we thought for sure were going to miss the cut-off. The complete results aren't up yet, so I don't know how she did overall, but she did the swim in 1:23:43, and wasn't off the bike for about 7 1/2 hours. I couldn't help but think, 'dude, I should have trained for this race. I would have won my first ironman." Now, again, watching from the sidelines on fresh legs and calm lungs is quite different from racing head-to-head. I've never even swum 4000m straight without stopping or turning, and have never quite made it past 100 miles on the bike, and I can't even imagine a marathon after something like that. I won't have any idea how my body reacts to the race until I try it myself. Either way, it was hartening and it got me pumped to try one (a different venue) next year.

I'd asked Silvia along to keep me company, but I did have an ulterior motive in asking her. I was hoping that it would get her fired up to get off her ass and start moving, but her reactions were more of shock than awe. When we showed up a guy in his 50s was in the transition area with his bike. "Isn't he a bit old to be doing this type of thing?," she asked. Pretty soon we figured out that he was dropping out, and she said, "This is too tough for an old body like his". As it turned out that he had won the race a year before. "Ooh, look at his jersey, it matches his pants!" she said. "He looks like he's about to fall off his bike," she giggled. "Isn't he a bit fat?" "Oh my god! Look at that guy's muscles! He looks like Victoria Beckham!" "That guy just cheated! He took a sandwich from that chick with the baby carriage!" And when we hadn't seen someone in awhile she would say, "He probably dropped out." (me: "No, I don't think he did, he's probably just going very slow.") "I bet he died." When I asked her what she thought afterwards she said, "It's enough to kill you. I don't know why anyone would do that to themselves. I mean, you looked at them and they were dying." I had to give in and not be angry when she said that she didn't want to do the 11k walk/run with me the next day (stay tuned: to be talked about in upcoming blog).