Can too!

I don't know why no one believes me that I can do this marathon. Yeah, right, I know, I haven't done a run longer than 12 miles since... um, let's see, my last marathon in March, but that doesn't mean anything. But everyone still thinks I'm "crazy" (rocketpants), nuts, round the bend, insane, bonkers, mad, whacko... Angry Runner has me languishing in an ICU with ruptured legs. Renee, the feminist runner has me puking and soiling myself the entire length of the course (and maybe on the drive home too). Bob Almighty has made an educated guess that I just plain can't do it and my legs are going to fall off below the knee at mile 23. And 100 mile Rusty just wants photos of the carnage.

Oh ye of little faith! What ever happened to "I can't do that, sign me up!"? In fact I've gotten such a negative response to my last post (Angry and Renee have even come back to beg me to re-think this) that now I feel I have to do it, just to prove that I can. What's been one of the mottos of this blog, "If you're going to talk the talk, you'd better walk the walk" (or run as it may be)?! Of course it's going to hurt. Marathons always hurt. Suffering is kind of the point, though (left - look how much my life sucked in the last .2 miles of my last one). See, for me there are two kinds of challenges: the kind where you train, bust your hump and work your booty off for several months, and go out there gnashing your teeth to beat your competitors to a bloody pulp. The alternative is to go out there and beat your own limitations to a bloody pulp. Personally, I find it much more gratifying to be competing against no one but your own expectations.

You only get one first marathon: one time that you get to nervously wonder if you can go the distance, and only one enormous swell of pride when you first realize that you put in all that hard work and YOU DID IT! Congratulations to Renee and Michelle who just smashed this important milestone last weekend. But then what do you do? Go for a PR, try to place better than you ever have before? Try to qualify for Boston? And more congratulations are due to Mr. Satan A. Chillies who not only managed to finish the steamy Chicago Marathon last week, but in a blazing 3:30! Amazing! This isn't my first marathon, it'd be my third and like hell I'm going as fast as I can for 26.2 miles! So where does the new challenge come from? If you aren't looking to go further or faster than ever before, where do you get room to test yourself and find something to be proud of? Twenty-six point two miles is a helluva long way to go to not feel like it's something special. Anything above 10k deserves bragging rights.

So how do I make myself proud? I take something that's someone else's big deal, and I do it on the spur of the moment. This is not to take away from anyone else's big marathon achievements in recent weeks, it's a way to draw upon that enthusiasm and be able to feel the doubt and subsequent exhilaration of finishing again and again. Think of it this way: you're at mile 24 in your first marathon and you find yourself running with a stranger. "This is my first marathon, and I'm going to make it!" you gush to the stranger next to you. Now would you rather have some snooty person next to you saying, "This is my 15th, but I did Chicago/Boston/the Olympics last weekend so I'm just taking it easy today" or someone who says, "I've done one before, but I just wanted to see if I could do it again! Come on, we're going to make it!" A marathon should be a challenge to everybody.

This is not the first crazy-long thing I've done untrained either. I climbed a mountain in Andorra after only one long bike ride in months. I hiked 52 miles on absolutely, positively nothing but my base triathlon fitness. I biked a century all by myself because I hadn't even ridden my bike in a month. I told myself when I started training for distance events that I wanted to be fit enough to be able to sign up for any event (within reason) that I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. I want to be able to see a century or a marathon in the paper and say, "Hey, I'm going to go ahead and do that!" And if I decide one day that I want to do an Ironman, or a 7-day stage ride I want to have the fitness to jump right into the training when it's time. What's the point of having the fitness if you're constantly waiting through a 12-week buildup to use it? When I feel like I need an ego boost, why should I have to wait for an A race to come around?

When people run ultra events, how do they train? Do ultra marathoners run 100 miles a day for a couple of weekends before their taper? Do elite ironmen go out and do an ironman-distance workout once a month before Kona? Was Lance Armstrong simulating the Tour de France once a month for 6 months before the tour every year? HELL no. Know why? Because these kinds of events tear the body up too much, you can only do these things once (maybe twice if you're lucky/crazy) a year. If you try to do these things too often you'll get sub-optimal results at best. The way to train for ultra-endurance events is 50% fitness, and 50% a willingness to grit your teeth and suffer. Then you get to relax. For us mortals, a marathon is the same principle. Very few marathoners actually run 26 miles in their buildup. The idea being that your training is not to cover the distance, but for your body to be able to deal with the strain and load of several hours of strenuous exercise. Although I haven't done a marathon buildup per se, and the pounding is sure to do a number on my legs, my body is used to having 4-6 hours of exercise thrown at it at a time. I'm confident that this will hurt less than my first marathon.

I have my own personal reasons for wanting to do this marathon. In short, I need to prove to myself that I am still strong, and that I do still have the drive to push myself beyond my limits. The reasons why I'm doubting that aren't relevant. But as far as finishing, I know I can. I haven't been sore for more than 2 days after anything I've done in the past 2 years (except maybe lifting weights). Don't you worry about me. As long as the weather's nice and they don't wrestle me off the course (I'll be running as a bandit since I won't be able to raise $80 by Monday), I'll survive. And I'll write a fabulous race report to rub it in the faces of all those who didn't believe in me, and if I can, photos for Rusty. (Do I have to be IN the photos? Sometimes event photos can be pretty ugly - see below).

A memory from when I couldn't sleep last night

I don't know if this happens to you, but when I can't sleep and I'm just laying there looking at the ceiling and trying to find the cool part of the pillow one of 2 things happen in my head:

1. I get ideas that seem totally brilliant, until day breaks and I realize they're stupid. ("Yeah, I'll call up my ex-girlfriend from 3 years ago and give her pointers on how to be a better person. That way she'll thank me and stop talking shit about me behind my back and we can be friends and I can get back at her for being such a bitch to me.")
2. I remember things that happened to me years ago that I never bothered to remember since they happened.

THE FOLLOWING STORY IS ONE OF THESE MEMORIES:

When I was living in California I rented a room from a retired soldier who was a compulsive over-eater and spent most of his time writing editorials to the local paper. In the house next to ours lived about a dozen college students (as happens in any college town) as well as their girlfriends, boyfriends, squatters, dog, 3 cats, and untold quantities of beer and weed. We shared a driveway/back yard with the Animal House and I would even exchange a word or two with them every once in awhile, although I never got so far as to learn their names, or who actually lived there.

One afternoon I was sitting at the end of the driveway wrestling hopelessly with an inner tube and the wheel from the 1970s Pugeot that I was training on for the Big Kahuna (a half-iron distance race). The tires were original and they were stiff, and my pump was a PoS, and in general I'm hopeless with these kinds of things. As I was tackling this impossible feat of mechanics and the minutes were ticking away, it got harder and harder to hide from my neighbors that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. They were all were standing around in the driveway drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and casting, 'Who's going to be the big man' looks my way. Finally, one guy came over and said, "You need some help with that?" I did what I typically do when I don't want to look like a stupid girl, I made excuses, blamed it on the bike, and then handed over my tools, but not without sticking my hands in his way every once in awhile to make it look like I was helping. To my relief, after about 20 minutes he told me that, in fact, it was a hopeless situation - but not before having a very interesting conversation. I can't remember what his name was, so we'll call him Jeff.

Jeff: So do you ride long distances on your bike?
I didn't know what to respond. At the time getting to my 56 mile gole was almost inconceivable, and I was amazed at myself the half dozen times I did it. I didn't know if this merited an affirmitive answer or not.
Claire: e. Ummm, I guess. Longer than most I suppose. I think I got up to about 60 miles once.
It turned out that my long rides every couple of weeks did not merrit long distance standard as Jeff was defining it, but he had the grace not to tell me so.
Somehow it came out that I had been studying in Barcelona the year before (obviously, previous to this particular stay) and that I was planning on moving back.
Jeff: Oh really? I just got back from being in Europe for a year. I was riding my bike, see, that one over there.
I was well on my way to tri-geek-dom at that point and when I saw a hybrid (on the mountain side) that he was pointing at with horns on the handlebars but no shocks on the forks, inwardly I scoffed. (Keep in mind, that at this very moment I was incapable of changing the tire on a 197? Pugeot, a brand they stopped producing in the US in the mid-80's).
I was real into asking questions back then. You can learn a lot more from asking a really open question than talking about yourself, I thought.
Claire: So what were you doing over there? I was expecting him to say something like "I wanted to see the French countryside, so I visited all the suburbs of Nice on my bike" or something.
And then Jeff surprised me: a surprise on par with the first time I swallowed the scope of a marathon, an ironman, a 100 mile trail race, or a Tour-type effort. (I hope I'm not the only one who has these moments where someone forces you to stretch your concept of what you thought possible). Jeff kicked down my mental barriers of what was possible for any Joe Schmoe around the world with words something like this:
Jeff: Well I landed in the Czek Republic, then I went up through the former USSR like Estonia and all that. I spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia, you know like Bosnia. And then I went west through Poland, Hungary, Germany. I was in Italy and France for a couple of days, but I never made it to Spain. Then I really wanted to go back to Eastern Europe so I made my way back. I had to get my return flight through Prague anyway.
By this point my jaw was on the ground. I'd only ever made it to San Mateo county (the next one up from Santa Cruz) on my bike.
Claire: So, if you don't mind my asking, how much did you spend on this trip?
Jeff: Well, I got the ticket and I think I went over there with $1,000, that included the money for my trip back home.
Claire: So how did you, like LIVE and stuff? I mean, lodging and food and stuff can really add up...
Jeff: Well, I camped a lot. I had a tent in my *inseart word for the little packs you put next to your back wheels, the ones hippies carry their books to class in*. When I got to a town I searched through a lot of trash bins. When I couldn't find anything, I would ask people for food. People were really nice. They usually gave me something they were going to throw away.
Claire: But do you speak any Slavic languages? I mean, how did you let people know that you were hungry.
Jeff: Mostly like this *bringing hand to mouth*. When I could I told people that I was riding my bike through Europe and they seemed to understand. I met a lot of cool people.
Claire: Wow, that sounds so cool. I'd like to do that some day.
Jeff: (Somewhere in here the fact that I'm a vegetarian had come up). I wouldn't recommend it. You can't be to picky. I mean, you're eating out of the trash. No one knows what a vegetarian is out there.
Claire: And what did you do if you ever had a technical difficulty? This was suppremely significant, considering the situation with the Pugeot.
Jeff: Well, I mean, it's Europe. There's a cycling shop in every town. But I met a guy from Estonia along the rout who had some weird tire dimension that they only make in the old Eastern Bloque. He told me that he couldn't find a spare tire anywhere in Western Europe and that one of his tires had some 113 patches on it.

I had a 50-mile ride to do that day, so when I gave my tire up for dead I had to walk to the nearest bike shop and leave "Jeff" behind. But, how COOL is that?! Jeff had rode all around Europe on that crappy bike, and he'd also rode across America in the same way. His next plan was to ride from San Diego to Alaska. Alaska! On a Bicycle! And this dude was just visiting some buddies and smoking a cigarette and drinking some beers with his homies. He wasn't all into gear and training zones and treating his body like a temple, and still he did all these crazy feats for fun, not glory. This is the kind of thing that would get most people's picture in the paper. I want to do an ironman someday, I want to do a 100 miler before I die, but my main goal is to be a real lifestyle athlete like Jeff was. Who says you can't see the world on your bicycle and $1,000 a year? Now, I pretend that I'm a badass, but really, Jeff was (say it with me so I don't feel like such a cusser) ONE BAD ASS MOFO!!!

Suicide Ride

It was getting on time for me to punish myself with a suicide workout. Suicide workouts or races are what I call the days when I set out to do something way beyond my means to punish myself for not being in the shape I want to be in. This wouldn't be the first time, for example:

• There was my second marathon, penance for watching the year before while I watched hung over and trying to figure out how to clap and scream while smoking a cigarette at the same time. I felt like such shit watching these people's best day while I felt like crap that I promised myself I'd do it the next year. When next year came and I'd only done 3 long runs, I did it anyway.
  
• That 50+ mile hike I did on zero training, which was payback I did for a half ironman in Portugal that I trained 6 months for and then couldn't go to because of transportation bureaucracy that wouldn't let me cross a border with my bike.
• And that half marathon I did on a treadmill in the mid-afternoon in the dead of summer without air conditioning because I'd bought one of those enormous king-sized chocolate bars on the way to the gym and eaten the whole thing because it was melting so fast in the heat that there was no way to wrap it up and save it.

So, again, it was due. It's been a rough spring and finally, now that I have the time to pull myself together again I've been finding myself lacking in inspiration and gumption as much as fitness. Why do triathlon? It hurts, the training's often boring, and it's weird - definitely not what sane people do, and there are a million "normal" things I could do with my time that are a lot less tiring, lonely and painful. So for this conviction I set myself a sentence and went out today to do my time. My plan for today was to bike to Girona, exactly 100 km from my house (click here to see a quick map), and if all went well, return home the way I'd come. Alone. Biking all that way there's a lot that could go wrong: I could get lost, I could flat (my hand pump is busted), I could bonk, I could be trampled by an elephant (I did actually see an elephant... weird how you see so many circuses around here). So I gave myself permission to take the train home if need be.

I woke up with Silvia at 5:45, and when there was a downpour at 6:00 (while I was dizzily watching the coffee brew) I thought I was saved. But it only lasted about 10 minutes, so it was back to the bike. The luck I'd had last week inflating my tires without deflating them first had run out big time, so I went out on kind of squishy tires. We can blame any weaknesses hereto forth on that.

I walked out the door at about 7:30 am, an hour not totally immune to Barcelona's eternal rush hour. I took a wrong turn going to a place I'd been 100 times before, about 1 1/2 miles from my house. I was off to a good start, I was off to a stellar start! Miraculously, it didn't happen again. However, after toughing it out with the Barcelona weekday traffic I gave myself permission to pick up the train in the last 20k back into the city. This would still clock in at 180k, exactly ironman distance!

The next 30k were straight up the coast, with landscapes reminiscent of the California coast. This chunk is all along the train tracks, almost close enough for me to reach out and touch them, which gives my wireless bike computer an identity crisis. My heart rate reading goes up to 227 bpm, my speed goes to zero, the computer beeps, then goes to pause (even though I could swear I was moving). *Beep*, Pause, *Beep*, 0 kmph, *Beep*, Pause, *Beep*, 1.7 kmph, *Beep*, pause, *Beep*, zero, *Beep*, pause... So some data was lost (remember this information for later). In this chunk I also found myself in the first of three road blocks where they alternate 2 directions of traffic in one lane. I sat behind a semi choking on fumes and damning impractical socialist countries that spend all their taxes on maintaining roads rather than using that money to build bombs like civilized countries do.

When the highway turned inland I was surprised that I'd been there before. I was also very, very disappointed to see that the road started to undulate rather severely. 'Take it easy, Claire,' I told myself. 'This isn't a race, no one will know if you go slow,' but then there you all are, dear readers. You know. Somewhere around here I figured out another problem with my solo journey: what do I do with my bike if I have to pee? I'm not a dude, so it's not like I can just turn my back to the road and drop my trollies. There were all these little trailheads going off into the woods, but they were all hedged by white plastic deck chairs. What do these chairs mean? A whore works here. Seems like there was good business going on this Thursday morning because most of the chairs were empty and held in place with a big old rock on the seat. However, some whores (all of whom were toasted to the other side of leather from working in the sun) were around strutting their stuff or lounging in the seat. We mutually avoided looking at each other out of curiosity. I had to pee, but I didn't want to have to hike my bike past a hooker to do it, and I wanted even less to wheel my bike past an empty chair and find its owner and her John 100m into the bush. So I held it.

Closer to Girona the road work started again, this time including dirt flying in the air and into my mouth. Eew! My romantic bike ride was spoiled temporarily by industrial areas and the smell of pig shit (or "raw pork" as Angel calls it). But I was inspired by the countdown of miles to Girona on the road signs. 20...15...10...5... bang, bang, like it was nothing.

And I made it to Girona! I was back in city traffic, looking for an open bar with street tables or "terraces" as they're called here (so I could watch the bike) and marvelling at how fresh I felt. I ordered a sandwich and a huge bottle of water. I guzzled the sandwich and stored most of the water in my camelbak. When it was time to pay I still had to pee. I looked around for an honest-looking person to watch my bike for 2 minutes, but the nice-looking rocker boy and his mother were walking away from their table and the German tourists at the table next to me looked like bitches, so I pushed off planning to find a gas station or un-whored path later.

It took me awhile to find the highway again, and when I found it I was unpleasantly surprised by its ugliness, the number of trucks, and the narrowness of the shoulder. My bladder complained as I rolled over the ghosts of rumble-strips past. I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed before how long this ugly section with no shoulder to speak of was. And did I mention the trucks? The trucks really suck in between rural areas and the middle of nowhere. A couple of trucks passed with uncovered cargoes of hay with little flecks of hay flying off into the air and my face. When I got back to the next road work I got stuck leapfrogging with a truck layered with double-decker pigs. It made the vegetarian in me (jaded by years of living in the capital of HAM) feel really bad for these piggies who looked just like in the movies sticking their pink little snouts through the slots between the wood slats.

Meanwhile the wind picked up. I remember vaguely scoffing at the leaves flapping in the wind on my way out, but it hadn't really registered that I might, maybe, perhaps have a headwind on the way back. But oh, boy did I ever! I was brought back to the days when I would be riding up towards San Francisco in San Mateo county on Hwy 1 (you'll only know the winds there if you've been there, but bear with me) when I used to sit there just yelling into the wind. These winds were so strong that (no exaggeration here) the downhills felt like flats, the flats felt like uphills, and the uphills felt like, well, hell. On the flats I had trouble getting above 10 mph, and on the uphills my granny gear just crapped out and I was reduced to that kind of sobbing you do without tears when you're angry. I haven't yelled out loud at the wind since California but I yelled today. I tried asking nicely, "JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?! PLEEEEEEEAAAASE!" I tried begging, "Please, please, please, just don't make me work on this next downhill, just let me rest, please!" I tried cursing, "YOU FUCKING SON OF A BITCH! JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! FUCKING GO TO FUCKING HELLLLLLLLL!" I tried threatening, "DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE!" I tried despair, "Noooooooooo! Just no!" But the next 40k to the coast had no remorse and I had no one to draft behind. It got to the point where I was sure that the sea had disappeared and taken the train tracks with it. I decided that if I made it to the coast alive, it was okay to take the train. I was getting pretty close to 140k which is the most I've done this season (maybe ever) and that seemed plenty enough for me.

Finally I made it to the sea, but there were still no train stations to be seen. I saw a sign for a station too late to turn and decided to keep going. Really, now that the headwind was gone I was feeling better, but when I had clocked 150k I passed a building set a bit back on the street, 'Is that a train station?' I asked, and as I passed I saw that it was. I braked right there on the highway, hopped up onto the sidewalk and turned around. And finally I peed (in a public handicapped bathroom where I could bring my bike in with me) and bought a 4-zone ticket back home, whatever that means.

Waiting on the platform were a group of kids making an excuse for year-round high school. It was one of those bumblefuck stations where the trains come in both directions on the same tracks to the same platform, and these dipshits were playing chicken to see who could hop on the train and jump off at the last second before the doors closed and took them away. Then, the losers would get off at the next station and come back to play again. When I got there a train took one away in the other direction (away from BCN), and then, there he was there on the next train for Barcelona. Because of the logistics of the bike, I could only take a seat next to the door, but I needed 2 for myself not to block someone in. I was in luck, because there were two right there when I got on. I lined up the bike and was ring-around-the-rosy-ing the front wheel (keeping my hand on the handlebars) to sit down when two of the trainhopping dipshits came and jumped into my seats. I walked down the car: at the next door there was a woman with a baby carriage. Next door there was a man with luggage. And then the end of the car. So I had to stand there with the bike sliding everywhich way with every acceleration or braking of the train, and me in my clippity-cloppity cycling shoes that weren't meant to be stood on. Then I opened my huge bottle of water and a scam artist elbowed past me to ask people for money for his 500 starving children and the cap fell on the ground and rolled 10 seats down the car. So here I am, with my right hand trying to handle the bike which is rolling up and down the car, my left hand trying not to tip my 1.5L bottle of water, and my shoes with no traction and the toes raised half an inch trying to keep my ballance on a moving train. I wanted to walk down the aisle and teach those kids a lesson, but it was hard to walk considering my situation and they got off at the next station anyway and I got their seat.

But the train fun wasn't over yet. I got out in Barcelona and went up the escalator with the bike hiked up on my shoulder (after almost slipping on the slick platform on my clippity-cloppity shoes) and tried to put my ticket through the reader to exit. "Please See Control Point," it said and spit my ticket back at me without opening the gates. I clipped and clopped around the whole area trying to find a security guy. Finally I found one on the other side of the Berlin Wall, one of those lanky guys that looks like Mr. Bean but not so intelligent and with a more hooked nose. "Ei, Señor! Señor! Disculpa usted!" waving my arms the whole time. After a period of time that was not so long, but not short either I got his attention and got him to let me out. "Now you ride that bike home, okay," he said. "No trains." I wanted to throttle him and say, "Do you know how FUCKING far I've biked today?! Do you know how fucking LONG?! I wasn't GOING to take the metro home, but don't YOU tell me what to do!" "Thanks," I said out loud. "There's an exit there," he said, "but there are only stairs. There's an elevator over there (pointing to a different exit)." "Stairs are fine," I said as I hoisted my bike on my shoulder and came up to an intersection I knew very well: the one I'd lost that morning 8 1/2 hours before. It was getting on 4:00.

At the end of the day I rolled up to my door clocking 153.3 km. Now, with all the crapping out my computer did with the train tracks in the beginning I calculate that I lost somewhere between 5 and 7 km (based on road markers), which puts me at about 160.3km. But since we like me on this blog, we'll give me the benefit of the doubt and say it was more like 8.7km that I lost with the train tracks, police radar, and miscellaneous radar interference in Barcelona itself; putting me at the end of my first century ride! In any case, I've never gone so far (although I've come close), and certainly never alone (no more than 60 mi solo), nor for so much time (something like 7 hours in the saddle, even if I have to count all the 2kmph traffic jams in the city and at road blocks to get to that number). So, if you still can't decide how to feel about me, let me give you a hint: I'm a bad-ass motherfucker, but not so much as if I'd gone the whole 200k. If there's one thing I've learned from today is to respect all those IM folks out there that go 12 extra miles after a 4000m swim, THEN stare down the 26.2 miles of a marathon.

Oh! And by the way, you should see my Irish tan lines! Gloves, shorts, socks, sleeves, watch, jersey zipper, sunglasses, I got the works!