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Hi, I'm back. Shane's gone to Italy for 2 weeks which gives me time to write.

I've finally, officially made the decision to move back home to Boston and become no longer "No Wetsuit Girl... OVERSEAS!", but "No Wetsuit Girl... With Absolutly Nothing to Justify Her Silly Online Alius but Now She's Stuck With the URL So What Can You Do?" (No, really, it makes sense, just read the story!). But then again, you know that.

Today I finally got around to breaking the news to Silvia (my girlfriend), and that was definitely horrible. But then again, you read that post too.

So, understandably I've been hyper sensative in the last month to vibes and signs and feelings and emotions that 3 years of living in California taught me, plus one extra credit year of living with Californians finding themselves abroad. One needs these things to decide whether somewhere is a good space or a bad space, you see. So today I went to my swimming pool space, which is also home to my triathlon club presence.

Now let me take a minute to explain to you why my triathlon club is toxic to my aura. When I joined in January they offered me this sweet deal that they would pay for my triathlon license, give me the club membership for free, and pay the entry fee for all the "Catalan Cup" events if I would only agree to participate in 5 races this season. It was a sweet deal, but that was before my soul got sick (ie my relationship drew me away - begrudgingly - from my dreams of athletic excellence). So now we're 2/3 of the way through the season, I'm leaving in 3 weeks, and I've only done one race in which I lost the chip (or never had one to lose), and pulled out of another cuz I couldn't get to the start on time. We call these omens in California.

So basically, I'm a giant flake. I never flake, but this year I've been like a box of special K. Flakey McFlakerson, that's me.

Last night I couldn't sleep (as usual) and I was trying to find a legit excuse to get out of this week's race in East Bum Fuck because there's no public transport and I don't want to admit I'm poor. I could say that I'm injured, I've been deported, I was in a car accident, or my bike was stolen... I needed a distraction. I got up and signed on to myspace and decided to write to my little student's little boyfriend since I'd heard they'd "split up" and I wanted to make sure he was okay. WELL, let me tell you, if you translate "split up" from Spanish "break up" and "take a break" translate to the same thing. Imagine my surprise when I get an email from Nacho saying,

"Pepe* didn't tell me that we were broken up, only that we were
taking time apart to think. Thank you for saving me the heartache
and thank you for all your support this summer while
he was in Wisconsin!"

Oh shit. OH SHIT! No sleep tonight for Claire, especially since I was going to have to break the news to my own girlfriend that we were "splitting up" the very next day.

*name changed to protect the identity of a minor.

So I woke up tired after a fitful dream about a homocidal kitten (no, I'm serious) and decided to go swimming. Some people can think when they run or bike, I can only think clearly when I'm watching the black line at the bottom of the pool. Maybe it's the zen of the regular breathing, zero gravity, and sound deprivation. My plan: 3 sets of 1000 meters at a pace I could think at, no faster, no slower.

Now usually I'm the fastest one in the pool and the only one over 10 who's not obese, but half way through my second 1000 I noticed that the guy next to me is going faster than me, and so were both the guys in the lane next to mine. Pushing off the wall I saw that they all had the body type of Adonis. "Oh God, don't let it be the triathlon club, don't let it be the triathlon club!" I begged. After another 500 meters I stopped to "rest" and tried to get an idea of who they were. I was having trouble distinguishing a face I knew and starting to get optimistic that maybe it was just a swim team when I saw that one of the Adonises in the next lane was wearing an "IRONCAT" cap. SHIT! It IS the triathlon club! And they were doubled up 5 lanes deep! The pool suddenly became a toxic space.

I immediately understood the sign and got out of the pool and went to the women's dressing room where they wouldn't find me. All showered and dressed I had nothing better to do than to go home and break up with my girlfriend. I signed up for an aquathlon in a couple weeks to try and redeem myself and ran out the door before they could make me feel bad any longer.

We have a kitten!

We got it because the other cat, Neo, is the stupidest, fattest cat you've ever seen and Silvia wanted another animal so he'd have someone to play with during the day. Ever since I came home from Ireland in mid-May he took over my suitcase as a bed and hardly gets up all day long. Really, it's kind of strange how attached to the thing he is.

Silvia, who would live out the rest of her life collecting unimployment, watching daytime gossip shows, and never leaving an apartment filled with cats and junk food if she could, absolutely loves animals. Loves 'em. I have seen her pick up a stray cat on the street and hug it and tell it how much she loves it while the beast wriggles and squrms to get away from her and she's got the biggist childish grin on her face that you've ever seen on a 30-year-old woman.

So weeks ago Silvia started saying that she wanted another cat. Neo was lazy and never got up from the suitcase. He's fat and is only getting fatter. She loves animals, she wanted a kitten. I argued, but then finally conceded to letting her volunteer our house as a foster home for ferril kittens until someone wanted to adopt them. When they didn't call her right away with an orphan, she was frustrated. Then she started talking about getting a kitten of her own. Friday was her birthday, so a long time before I decided to give her a kitten for her birthday. But I couldn't hide a kitten in the house, so I bought a can of baby cat food to give to her.

Then comes Thursday, the day before her birthday and I get a call from Silvia: "I was looking lon loquo.com (like the craigslist for Barcelona) and I found a girl who's giving a cat up for adoption and we're getting together this afternoon and I've already taken the whole day off tomorrow to be with the kitten!" Shit! There goes my whole surprise, I thought. I wanted to see the look on her face when I gave her a kitten. "You can't have a kitten!" I said. "I don't want a kitten. Neo will shit a brick. This isn't the sort of thing that you just decide and then do it one day! We're going away this weekend, wait till Monday." "Oh, but I want one!" she said. "No," I said, and hung up because I didn't know what else to say. Then I sent her a message, "If I come home today and you've got a big smile on your face and a ball of fur in your hand I'm going to kill you". She called me again, "Come on, I get so excited about so few things, and I'm excited about this." No. "You're just like my mother." No, you can't just make a decision like this! "You're fucking up my excitement!"

Finally, when I got home at 6:30 I went into the bathroom where I'd hidden the cat food. It wasn't wrapped yet, so I draped it in a towel. "This should teach you to get yourself what you've been asking for for moths the day before your birthday," I said, handing her the towel. Her face lit up and she gingerly took the towel. She carefully pulled away the towel and found a can of cat food, "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!" But then she got it, we went across town, got the cat from the shelter and brought her home. The other cat was pissed and the rest is history.

Anyway, we have a new cat and this time it was up to me to pick the name. I took one look and decided her name was Natasha. Not so much AFTER Natascha Badmann, but because Natascha reminds me how much I like that name. We're going away for a day this weekend and I told Silvia that if we come home and find a cat missing an eye, it's her job to clean the eye up off the floor.


Speaking of going away for the weekend, my next post will be more relevant. BIG biking weekend was had today.

Finally! / Why I will never be a bike messenger

My girlfriend finally started working again. For two months she's been sitting alone in the apartment staring at the wall and smoking cigarettes all day long. That would make anyone bored and lonely and put them in a foul mood most of the time. When I get home she's like a puppy, "look at me! Look at me! lookit me, lookit me, lookit me!" Any time I sit down to check my email or stand up to get in a workout she whines, "awwww, don't you want to be with ME?!" God forbid I say no. Everybody knows that telling that to a girl would be suicide. So finally, after two months of sacrificing sleep, internet, training time, DVD time, and most of all ME time, my girlfriend finally skipped off to work this morning! Now I'll finally have one beautiful, sweet hour a day, five days a week alone in the apartment to do whatever I want! Welcome back to regular blogging!

Later that morning...

Good thing I have all the effing time in the world because I just wasted so much of it! I'm sick of climbing the same frigging mountain all the time (especially after I paid 30 euros to NOT be allowed to climb it last week). There's this other hill that's across the city (see map here) called Montjuïc. It's a really beautiful place with parks, gardens, museums, fountains, athletic facilities (including the Olympic facilities), views of the city, the mountains and the sea, and a big, old castle at the top. Today I decided that I would climb up to the big, old castle at the top. I hadn't been there since the very first day I got my bike (when I had to stop half way up a climb to catch my breath, then couldn't get moving again) and I was curious.

One problem: It was a weekday at about 10:00 in the morning. Subsequent problem: There were many, many cars on the road. Making this problem worse: I had about 5 km through downtown Barcelona to go through to get there. And as if I didn't have enough problems already: there were something like 37 (or more) traffic lights between my house and the base of the hill. Clearly, like most of the things I do, this was not thought through.

Barcelona has been working really hard over the past few years to get more bike lanes in the city and get more people on bikes. They've really been doing a good job, but there's one problem, the motorists in this city are still Spanish and still don't give a shit. Whenever possible I stayed in the bike lane, but when every block there was a truck, or a cab, or a Mercedes with their flashers on in the bike lane I still had to risk life and limb in the regular traffic lanes. And, my lord, people will honk... and often for no apparent reason. For example, today I saw a guy in the delivery van who made a right turn, came right up to within about a foot some pedestrians in the crosswalk who had a walk sign and HONKED in their faces. Before this morning I used to think that being a bike messenger would be the most bad-ass job in the world. I used to fantasize about being a bike messenger in San Francisco and then becomig a butt model or something. Not anymore, biking in cities sucks! From this day forth I refuse to feel guilty for doing so much training on an indoor spin bike.


So finally I get to the bottom of the hill where there's a big old plaza, one of those 6-lane rotaries that European cities are so fond of, and a big convention center. There was a convention going on I guess, because they'd BLOCKED the road in front of it. They'd blocked the sidewalks. They'd blocked the little fenced-in grassy patches where it says "Please Do Not Walk On Grass". I found another way up, and I swear, everywhere I turned the roads were blocked. True, some of the roads up there don't look like they've been repaved since the Spanish Inquisition, but why did they have to be repaving today?

And you want to know what the most fucked up part of the whole thing was? Once I finally found rout to the top from what was pretty much the bottom, it only took me about 8 minutes to climb the damn thing anyway.

My final stats when I got home:
Time from start to finish: 1:20
Time moving: 1:10
Distance: 20.2 km
Average speed: 17 kmph
What my bike computer is thinking: "you suck!"

Sharing the love OR Have you accepted Richard Simmons as your personal savior?

I always imagined myself with someone active. Someone who could come with me on my long workouts, or at least carpool with me to the gym. I found a girl who I love, who's a wonderful person, who's caring and supportive, and who's a couch potato and a smoker. The expression "couch potato" doesn't exist in Spanish, so when I found her still in bed and wrapped up in a blanket at 4 in the afternoon one day and said, "you look like a potato!", it had some novelty. And the name stuck. As in every couple we have our nicknames that make other people gag. For me and Silvia it's Potato ("patata") and Co-Potato ("compatata"). A verb has even been born of it: "patatar", "to potato" and it's my other half's favorite thing to do. In fact, it's pretty much all she does. In fact, sometimes she gets depressed and it's hard to get her to STOP being a potato, even to just get up and go to the couch. And she's ALWAYS yo-yoing. When I first met her she was only eating 800 calories a day, all in meat (some of it raw - also, who the hell would have thought you'd find me with a carnivore!). Then, one night we got drunk and she ate an ENTIRE baguette's worth of bacon sandwich. When she had finished she went to a gas station and bought another sandwich of the revolting variety that you can find next to the Red Bull in any gas station or 7-11 in the US. She weighs herself every morning and will say "I lost 3 kilos yesterday" or "I got 2 kilos fatter". I tell her it's impossible to gain or lose that much fat mass in a day and that it's probably water, but she pays me no never mind.

She loves to tell me about what a good athlete she is. "I did Camino de Santiago," she says (a many day hike starting as far away as Switzerland and ending up in the north-west tip of Spain). "That was 10 years ago," I say, "it doesn't count anymore". "I used to climb up Tibidabo on my mountain bike and bike 40k to Sitges," she says. "But you couldn't do it now," I say. One day I was talking about a run I'd done and she said, "That's not that far." "You couldn't even run a kilometer," I said. Potato: "Sure I could." Me: "Wanna bet?" So we made plans to go to a track on Sunday. The terms: she must run one full kilometer without walking. Loser buys the other one dinner. We went to the track and had to ask around to find out exactly how much we had to run to hit a kilometer, 2 laps around the outter-most ring of the track. She started out fast and by the end we were nearly crawling, but not walking. She was breathing so hard that I seriously wondered if continuing to push her like this was a good idea and if I would need to do CPR. But low and behold, 6 minutes and 10 seconds later she finished. You should have seen how high she held her head that day. She was sick to her stomach and coughing all day long from the effort, but she was proud of herself. I'd never seen her proud of herself before.

I see in her exactly what I was like before I discovered triathlon. She hates her body and punishes herself with food. Either she totally deprives herself, or she binges, and to punish the binging she binges even more. She's depressed and doesn't really have any reason not to be. Why bother to find a reason to get out of bed every morning if bed is so comfy? But I KNOW a more active lifestyle would do her good. I KNOW she'd feel better in her own skin and wouldn't say "yeah right" when I tell her she's beautiful. I KNOW she would have more energy and WANT to eat better rather than depriving herself and then eating a whole pizza (or two) by herself. In the beginning I tried. I said, "You know, you would feel a lot better if you got a little exercise". "I don't have time". "Sure you do, you sit alone for 3 hours every evening staring at the wall and drinking coctails waiting for me to get home". "Ay, Claire," she said, "I'm tired when I get home from work,". I tried starting small, "Why don't we just go for a 20 minute walk 3 times a week?" "Ay, Claire!" she said, like I'd asked her to walk 6 hours in the freezing rain. "You could burn more calories in a day and eat more," I tried. "I don't like exercise, I'd rather starve myself," she said. "But then your metabolism...". "Ay, Claire, I don't want to!" Now she just says, "Ay, Claire" every time I even start.

I have a lot of respect for Richard Simmons. Given, the man's a walking joke, but you gotta give him credit where credit is due. He gets the lost causes, the people who can't even get out of bed or roll over because they would crush their lungs, and he gets them moving. Forget a sprint distance triathlon, many of these people literally risk a heart attack walking to the mailbox. He gets the biggest, fattest people who have lost ALL hope, and he manages to get them up, moving, slimming down, and feeling good about themselves. In my last job I gave introductory workouts to new gym members and encountered a lot of these women. I tried like hell to make exercise un-threatening so they would keep going. It's NOT easy to do and I lost most of them. Richard Simmons is a good man in my book.

So it all gets me thinking, this must be what door-to-door bible thumpers must feel like. "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?" Slam! It's the same as, "Why don't we go for a wa..." "Ay, Claire!" Religion is something that either you have it or you don't. Same goes for a fit lifestyle, and all the fitness missionaries are convinced that they can save others' quality of life like they've saved their own. People "find fitness" like they "find Jesus". There's nothing more irritating than a pair of clean-cut boys in ties and starched collars trying to save your soul. Alright, they love Jesus, I get it. I'm very happy for their souls and that they've found a reason to enjoy life, we all know how difficult that is and anything that gets you through the day is great. Really. Just keep your personal savior away from my soul. I'm a lesbian, for heaven's sake! I must sound eerily like those guys when I get started. "Have you accepted Richard Simmons as your personal savior?" And Silvia's probably not the only one who wants to scream at me, "Alright, you love your heartrate monitor, I get it. I'm very glad that you've found a way to deal with your own demons, but keep them far from my beer and Chinese take-out! I'm a smoker for heaven's sake!" How could someone get so angry when you're just trying to save their soul?