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.