No Wetsuit Girl does Capital City

I'll be spending this weekend in DC visiting some family friends with my mom. I'm hoping to get to run around the city where our country's biggest decisions are made. Don't worry, I promise to behave myself! I'm hoping to go on a run and see how many famous monuments I can hit in one morning.

Also on the agenda: I'm coming to the Big Apple! I'm meeting up with some friends from California the weekend of November 30-December 2. So far all I know about the trip is that we're going to be staying "somewhere in New York" and that we're going to see Phantom of the Opera. I hope I get to meet some New York bloggers like Renee, Michelle, and Satan (although I could never keep up with the fallen angel if we were to go running).

So story time will be back soon. In the meantime, here are some exciting developments and recent observations:

1. I got a bike trainer, which took me a good half hour to put together (it's got 3 parts, including my bike). Now I can do two of my favorite things at the same time: ride my bike and watch CSI. One problem though, I have to turn my TV up to full volume to be able to hear it over the whirring of the trainer. Oh well, I think my parents can deal.
2. I've been running in the cold. I can't feel my legs by the time I get home, and I think that's fucked up. This is how people get hurt!
3. Daylight savings: I would just like to find the guy who invented streetlights that turn off when there aren't any cars around. I want to have just a few words with him. Most of those words will only have four letters in them.
4. They have the Total Immersion book and DVD at my library! Too bad I still don't have a pool. More to come on this topic as well.
5. It's too goddamn cold in my house, it's too goddamn cold in my cubicle (there's a draft so strong it blows the blinds around!), and it's CERTAINLY too damn cold outside!
   

Incoming!

Did you know that I'm Italian? I've always been Italian in that my father's mother is Italian and his father had Italian blood from the Ellis Island era; but now, I'm Italian like from Italy. I have an ID number and everything, but still no document to prove it... but we'll get to that.

If you're pressed for time then you can skip over the small type and move on to the big news below...

As you may or may not know, for the past year and a half I've been living as an (whispered) illegal immigrant here in Spain. What I haven't shared with all you people is that I've been working for much longer, well over 2 years, to get my paperwork sorted out. When I came I thought, 'This is Spain, not Texas, and I'm American. No problem.' It IS a problem, as it turns out. Which is why I've been driving myself crazy and starving to death teaching English, because no other industry will hire an illegal.

I've had a couple of minor heart attacks in this time, like the time that the Spanish department of work came to inspect one of my classes, the time they questioned me for 20 minutes in the Amsterdam airport, and five uncomfortable trips through customs in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Ireland.

I tried everything to get my papers worked out quicker. I considered getting married. I tried to find a business that would sponsor me for a visa (there were a few that were willing to do it, but then called me back after a couple of days saying, "How about you just call us when you have your papers sorted out?" - Thanks a lot, assholes!). I thought about going back to school; went to the university to get some information about visas and wound up walking out with another English class. I talked to a lawyer (actually, no, I talked to friends who were talking to lawyers) and found out that unless I was a surgeon or civil engineer then there wasn't going to be any amnesty for me. I even tried the idea that was too simple to work, just renewing my ID from when I was a student here. No dice.

Meanwhile, since early spring of 2005 I've been trying to become Italian. With a passport from any EU country you can work legally in any other EU country. It's like having a driver's license from Montana and working in Florida. You see, Italy has this law that if you have Italian lineage on your father's side and you can come up with all the documents to prove it, then you can be Italian too. I told my parents this in 2004 and they laughed at me. Then, in beginning of 2005 my dad called me and said, "Did you know that if you have Italian family then you can get an Italian passport?" The conversation went like this:
Dad- I was just talking to Bill (Something Italian) from work and he said something about having an Italian passport. He said that you can get an Italian passport if you have Italian ancestors.
Claire- I know, I told you that last year and you laughed at me.
Dad- Oh, well I'm sure you didn't have all the information.
Claire- Yes I did, I told you just as you're telling me now.
Dad- Oh, well I was thinking maybe it would be a good idea...
Claire- I know, that's what I said last year. I even sent you a link to the embassy's web page, didn't you read it?

So we started the process. I planned to move in about 8 months, that's enough right? Some of the documents were hard to find though, and my parents wound up paying $150 per document to something like a private investigation agency to get some documents. Other things were hard to find too, such as:

• My grandmother's birth certificate from Milan, 1924. (This required a couple of emails and phone calls to our Italian cousins who don't like Americans and don't speak English).
  
• My mother's birth certificate, the long form. You can get the short form through the mail, but to get the long form you have to go to the hospital yourself. This chore took two day trips to Manhattan.
• My dad's birth certificate from the Hackensack, NJ town hall that changed addresses without leaving a forwarding address. It took 2 months to track them down.
  
• My grandfather's death certificate from Florida.
• My grandparents' divorce certificate, which hadn't been seen since the 1970's.
• My brother and I had to officially change our names since our middle names are our mom's maiden name. In Italy you can't have 2 family names, and therefore we had to officially change our names in a country that still had no official record of us.
• My grandmother's valid US passport, which hadn't been valid for 10 years. So my dad had to cart my her out of the nursing home to get passport photos, then to the US post office to order a renewal.
• My grandmother's naturalization papers, which she said were somewhere in the apartment she sold 4 years ago.
  

Finally we rounded everything up and took it in to the consulate where we found out 2 things:

1. I had to present the papers IN PERSON, so I would have to come home from "California" where I was on an "extended vacation".
   
2. We had all the wrong forms. All the certificates (birth, death, marriage) had to have an official stamp on them called an apostele (or something like that), so it was back to town halls in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Florida.
   

And then, in March we had it all together and I flew home for 3 days to hand in the paperwork. "You can probably come in with passport photos in about 10 days," the Signore at the consulate said. April went by, no answer. May: no answer. In June we finally got a letter in Italian. I can understand Italian, but I couldn't understand this damn letter. I understood the words, but not the content. There were numbers and acronyms everywhere and a bunch of ambiguous past participles. When my brother got the same letter later that week he went in to the consulate to get some answers. What they told him: we're finally Italian, we have an ID number, and only need to get the passport to have proof!

So last week my brother finally got his passport. My brother is now Italian and we know that there are no more hoops for me to jump through. So...

I ' M C O M I N G H O M E F O R 3 W E E K S !

That's right, folks! My neoprene-free ass will be in the United States of America from July 25 until August 14. So here's the real reason for me writing this blog: Who wants to do stuff with me?!

Unfortunately, for a place where I lived for 18 years of my life I have surprisingly few resources in the Boston area. I will have no pool to swim in (unless I find a masters team willing to take me in) and so I'm down for all kinds of open water swimming (Cape Cod anyone?). My bike will be my mom's old bike from the 1970s which I will deck out with clipless pedals, a bottle cage and nothing more. I have no idea where people go for long bike rides in Boston?! The only thing that I'll have that won't be ghetto is lots of lovely New England roads and trails to run through (and FINALLY a track!). I won't always have a car at my disposal since the car I learned to drive on, the Battleship (born in 1992) was just sold to some friends for $1 and I'll be sharing a car with my mom, but hey, I can get around that.

However I WANT TO TRAIN AND RACE! Does anyone know any triathlons/open water swims/running races in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island or New York in the next 3 weeks that still have open registration? Also, other than the car constraint, I can be flexible about schedules since my only commitment in those 3 weeks will be 2 mornings in the Italian consulate.

My parents' house is in Winchester, which is a small town about 20 minutes north of Boston (inside 495), so if you are within like 100 miles of there, let's get together. Who's coming with me?! C'mon, it'll be fun!

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!

The Claire went over the mountain

The Claire went over the mountain,
The Claire went over the mountain,
The Claire went over the moun-tain,
To see what she could see.



And got really tired. And thirsty. And hungry.

That morning Our Fair Heroine had woken up at 5:20 in order to have plenty of time to get dressed and drink tons of coffee. Minutes before leaving the house she had grabbed her handy-dandy pump with pressure gauge and psyched herself up to not deflate the tires completely before figuring out exactly how to attach the damn thing to the valve. When she started wheeling the bike out of its home under the front window she noticed that the computer was a little crooked. This was nothing new. It seemed like after every time the cleaning lady came the little plastic mount was a little off-kilter in its zip ties. But this time, the mount and everything were snugly in their place. 'What the...?' she thought as she examined the little machine (which has no release lever, and therefore is a permanent fixture on her handlebars), as it came off in her hand. Two of the three little hooks that secure the computer in place were broken clear off. *tick, tick* they went as the little pieces of plastic fell off the back of the apparatus and onto the floor. Claire hates cleaning ladies. This comes from a deep-seated trauma from when she was little and had to clean up for the cleaners and her little 9-year-old mind seized onto the irony of the situation. But this cleaning lady is special. She comes in like a hurricane, eats the food in the fridge, takes a shower, watches TV turns the radio up loud and starts singing and dancing, and cleans the house like a natural disaster. A few weeks ago, somehow, this Lysol diva managed to tear the oven door completely off, where it stayed until Wednesday when we had to call in the technicians. The girlfriend fled to the kitchen to look busy while Claire launched a tirade about, "I don't care that you feel bad, I don't care how long she's been cleaning this house, I don't want that woman in this house anymore! This is a 175 euro piece of equipment!" I mean, what the HELL does she do to fuck the thing up so much? How do you break off a bike computer if you're not the rider of said bicycle? It didn't make sense. Claire did the best she could with superglue and walked out the door. The day was off to a good start.

The thought crossed her mind to give up this stupid cycling business. It's too hard. She kept dropping off the back, for she had gone out with a different group who seem to have motors in the backs of their Orbeas and Cervellos and Treks. She wanted to play the girl card, but there was a girl with a fatter ass than the Claire's way up there in the front of the group keeping up with the boys and chatting.

With the Tour de France starting in 1 week, all the talk was about that. Here are some oppinions (names invented because I don't know anyone's name):
Claire: Since they're busting everyone for drugs, there won't be anyone to do the Tour. Maybe I should sign up.
Pepe: It's all the Americans' fault. If it weren't for them, cycling wouldn't be getting such a bad wrap.
Manolo: It's not fair, how come cycling's getting all the bad publicity? Why don't they test people in soccer or tennis. What do you think Rafael Nadal's taking? Nothing but a traditional Mediterranean diet?
Miguel: Indurine was all juiced up too. Why do you think he retired? He knew he would get cought so rather than do his last tour clean and suck he dropped out.
Pedro: And let's not pretend that Armstrong was just genetically gifted!

She also found out that a guy that she called Patrick in a previous post is actually named Dave. He isn't even from Ireland as she thought. Coming back into Barcelona there's this one chunk where you come into a 6-lane free-for-all where you have to change lanes a bunch of times in the middle of tons of traffic. She turned to David Not Patrick and said, "Can I ask you a favor?" "Sure." "I hate this part, don't leave me." And David, not Patrick sat behind her and signaled to the cars and didn't leave her behind on the last little bumps. And she didn't die, at least not yet.

She arrived home after 125km (which was supposed to be 10 more), 2,500 calories, and a full gallon of water. She wanted to curl up in the corner and whimper. You know how when a little kid gets really tired they just start crying for no reason at all? She felt like that.

A letter to people who share my working out spaces

Dear guy with the Hawaiian shorts,
Please quit crouching on the wall, underwater, watching me coming, and then pushing off when I'm in mid-flip. You know I'm going to pass you anyway, can't you wait 2 more seconds?

Dear guy with a pot belly that looks like you swallowed a watermellon,
When you're swimming the old-guy-froggy-breast-stroke and staring at me the whole length of the pool, I can see you. Don't you know it's rude to stare?

Dear guy who hangs onto the lane line mid-pool to chat to his buddy in the next lane,
Your fat ass makes your butt and whole lower body buoyant... which makes your feet float up behind you, which makes you block the whole lane, which makes me have to swim under you, which makes me mad. Do like the old ladies do and chat on the wall.

Dear sidestroke speedo guy,
Oh, if you knew what that scissor kick looked like from behind you wouldn't do that to me!

Dear lady who crosses 5 lanes mid-pool to get to the ladder,
Please, please look both ways before you cross a lane. "I didn't know you were coming" is a poor excuse. Do you see a lot of people change course in a lap lane?

Dear guy who hangs out spread eagle on the T on the wall,
Get the hell out of the way! One of these days I'm going to dolphin kick you where the sun don't shine and make like it was an accident.

Dear mullet guy with prison tattoos,
Please stop racing me. A) It's rude and annoying. B) You need some serious swim lessons, because the pool gets a foot shallower after you've been in it from all the splashing you do, and I'm sick of choking on your waves. C) It doesn't make you any more macho to get to the wall first after 25 yards if you have to chill there on the wall catching your breath while I swim 75 more.

Dear anorexic lady,
Eat something, please! You're scaring me.

Dear lady who brings a pillow to the gym with her to use on her recumbent bike,
Stop asking me how many calories I burned today. I don't know, but I find it a really rude question anyway. I'm not going to tell you when my last bowel movement was either.

Dear lifeguard,
Please, please, oh please don't move the backstroke flags WHILE I'm swimming the last 5m of back stroke. Do you know how disorientating that is? Do you know how much it hurts when you smack the wall with your arm or head?

Dear maintenance guy,
Can you please wait till I'm OFF the indoor trainer before coming around to mop up the puddle of sweat under me?

Dear lady who wears makeup to the gym,
Don't stand in the middle of the double doors, arms outspread holding each door open oblivious to the people trying to get by, and then give a dirty look to the people who push you out of the way. It kind of gives me the urge to smack you with a resistance band.

Dear sweaty old man,
Use a towel! No one wants to come up to a machine with your sweaty old man juice still dribbling down the seat.

Dear everyone,
When doing a lat pull the bar comes down IN FRONT OF your head. Also, do not bounce while stretching! It's painful to LOOK at you all!

Dear sweaty old men numbers 2 and 3,
Please do not lean on my bike trainer while chatting... especially not when I'm ON it.

Dear old ladies in the locker room,
I can shave any place I feel like!

Dear fat old lady who gets distracted when she's getting dressed and talking at the same time and spends half an hour gesticulating naked,
Let's stay on task, please.


Ok, I feel a bit better now.

An epic bike with the Dirty Old Men

**Any offensive language contained in this blog is not from my own toungue, it is merely translated directly from Spanish, and if I chose the more offensive translations of certain words, it is to convey the sense with which they were spoken by people other than myself. I hope you will share the outrage that I experienced upon hearing them.**

Believe it or not, I'd never done two long bike rides in a row before this weekend. And given, maybe for some of you my "long" bike rides would be considered medium distance, but any given Sunday (no copyright infringement intended, just Sunday happens to be Bike Club Day) whatever I do is pleanty enough for me. Here was the program for this weekend: bike to Guissona, and back the next day. Guissona is a little town in Lleida. Lleida is the province northeast of the provence of Barcelona. The Spanish Pyranees are found primarilly in Lleida. Guissone is in the foothills of the Pyranees. Between Barcelona and Guissone there are 113 kilometers/70 miles (see map here).

We met in the usual place at 7am, a metro stop called Clot. Yuck, huh? Who wants to be in a place called Clot at 7am on a Saturday with 9 dirty old men in purple bike shorts? (Not that it interests you, but Clot is also in a yucky part of town and it's the station where both the purple AND red lines come together... just like a real blood clot). We took several pictures with several cameras and straddled our bikes to leave when Xavi said, "Christ, I forgot my gloves!" So we waited 20 minutes for Xavi to go home and get his gloves while the club's president (who you will get to know later) sat there and grumbled about how we should leave him behind. Whole again, the club took off to the other extreme of Barcelona and off into the great, wide beyond.

As it turns out, the first twenty-five kilometers of the great wide beyond is through the nasty, windy industrial areas of Molins de Rei and Sant Andreu. Barely out of Barcelona we found a group from the Saturday crowd just getting on their bikes again after fixing a flat. We picked them up and further down the road found the rest of their clan. With our powers combined we quickly swallowed another of Barcelona's cycling clubs and took over the streets of the suburbs with a force of nearly fifty men (and women) and continued that way for more than twenty kilometers. Imagine my panic since I hate going in big groups! Our swarm was so big and powerful that we were above traffic lights. The colony would engulf a car stopped at a light and if it changed while we were still passing, the car was obliged to wait until we had all passed and follow in our wake. And if you had a green light to cross our path, tough luck, you could wait. One motorcyclist following the same rout as us wasn't too pleased with his side of the arrangement. At every light he had to stop while we breazed past him as if a red light were no more than a light bulb and a white line on the road, and then he would pass us screaming, "S'ha de parar en vermell!" ("You have to stop on red!") The well-mannered members of the other clubs politely ignored him, while my lilac companions yelled out things like, "Call the police, he's threattening us!" and, "If you don't like it, get a real bike!" The problem, of course, only escalated as he would pass us and then be cought again at every light. I was slightly relieved when he finally got away, and I wondered to whom he would tell the story of the asshole cyclists to when he got to his destination 20 seconds late. Who's in such a hurry at 8:00 in the morning on a Saturday anyway? Finally, the yellow club turned off onto another highway, the blue team stopped to regroup and I was alone again with the "smurfs" (a name coined by a friend when she saw the photo above).

Will someone please define a "roller" for me? When does it stop being "hilly" and become "rolling". Maybe it's because I've always trained in places that only have coastal flats or mountains, no in between, but I have no idea what this topographical phenomenon would look or feel like. I suppose that the next section until we stopped for lunch would be defined as "rollers", maybe? Maybe it would be defined as a "gradual uphill with several downhill sections to break it up". We were getting into the country now and the pueblos were farther and farther apart, and there was more and more farm land between them. We kept seeing these posters for Ralluy's Circus! I didn't think much of it, I see those posters around all the time, "Come to the Circo Americano" or "Martin's Amazing Circus", but I guess I thought that they were jokes that I didn't get or advertisements for a brand of whiskey I didn't recognize or something. But then there, on the side of the road was a frigging big-top tent and a caravan of what looked like mini boxcars. "El CIRco de los rrrrrrrrruMANos!" ("The RoMANian CIRcus!") yelled Salva, like a Master of Ceremonies. No one laughed, so he yelled it again, and again, and again... Did he think someone would laugh only after the fifth time? I was thinking about real, live carnies. What are they like? Surely they're not that different from the ex-cons that roam the US with merry-go-rounds and Sizzlers. Do you think they have a freak show? How must they treat the animals? After about 45 km I decided that the town where we were going to stop for food didn't exist. We were already almost half way to our destination, and I hadn't seen a single sign for it. By the time we finally got there after 66km, I was ready to eat off my own arm.

After Lunch Number One (I call it that because we would have a second lunch when we got to Guissona) we didn't hit a single traffic light for the rest of the ride, and hardly saw a car. Before long the road took a turn towards the heavens. "Look at that," said David, pointing to a road sign that said, "7% grade, next 10km". "Phew," I said, "good thing that's for the freeway and we're on the highway" (I use the California terms here to differentiate a 6-lane free-for-all and a quiet country highway with a lower speed limit). "Yeah, but we have to get to the top all the same," said David. And that we did: 10k straight up an incline that let me comfortably stay on my medium chainring but not without wishing it would all be over soon. On top of that there was a head/crosswind that threattened to throw me into the bent-over weeds at the side of the road. David stopped to show me a 1,000 year old building and Xavi (of the missing gloves) and Jaume (who wanted to leave him behind) eventually came by. "Go ahead," said David, "I'm going to stay here and take pictures of everyone as they come up". Before long I cought up to Jaume and Xavi and passed them easily. "Vamos, chicas!" ("Come on, girls!") I yelled as I passed them. "I'm not a chica!" yelled Jaume. "Well then why are you riding like one?" I asked as I left him behind to eat my dust. Before long along came David and Miguel Angel. David sat in with me (next to me to chat instead of blocking the wind for me, to my dismay), and Miguel Angel took off for the top. I survived the hill, my water did not. It took a good while for everyone to finally make it to the gas station at the top where we all drank a coke before coasting down the back side of the hill, which was not nearly as long as the uphill, by the way.

We stopped to regroup one more time before getting to Guissona, in a town called Cervera about 15k away from our destination. Imagine my surprise when I realized I'd been there before, three years ago with my then-girlfriend for an escargot festival.

To the left: me and my (evil) ex at the snail festival in May of 2004.

To the right: my college mascot, the UCSC Banana Slug. Striking resemblance, don't you think?







From the rotary where we stopped, you could see the Pyranees on the horizon. It brought me back to the summer that I drove cross-country on highway 81, and after days and days of the purgatory of endless wheat fields that is the midwest skyline I could finally see the Rockies. Well, this wasn't flat, but there was wheat (and tons of red poppies) and there in front of me - this huge mountain range. Most of the mountains were that charcoal grey-green color that far-away mountains have when there's no snow, but there in the middle was this huge white mass with its peak tucked away in the clouds. "Look, it's still snowing where we're going in 2 weeks," said David. "What the hell are you talking about?" "We're climbing that in the Tres Nacions in 2 weeks," he said. "You have GOT to be kidding me!"

When we got to Guissona people compared the calories they'd burned. "I burned over 5,000," said Angel. "I burned over 8,000", said Xavi, who's tall and must weigh well over 200 pounds. "My heartrate monitor stopped working after lunch," I said (which it had ever since I took it off because Angel was sitting next to me and his watch was beeping constantly because together we got to above 250 beats per minute; to keep the peace I took off mine).

from left to right: Jaume, Xavi, Miguel Angel, me, David, Angel

When we got to Miguel Angel's apartment everyone carried their bikes up the stairs and got in line for the shower. The boys ran for the beer in the fridge and I ran for the bananas on the table. It was the first time that most of us had met Miguel Angel's wife and son, Isaac (except, of course, Angel, Miguel's father). The boy was a cutie pie and ran and put on his bike helmit when we came in so that we could see that he had a bike too. He kept staring at me, but hid his face whenever I smiled at him. Finally, when he cought me alone in a room he taunted, "Tu ets una ne-na!" ("You're a gir-rul!") "That's right," I said. "I tu ets un ne-en!" ("And you're a bo-oy"). At lunch David and I were sitting at the end of the table. Unable to sit still for a long time, Isaac came to our end of the table and said to David, "What's a girl doing on your team?" "This girl goes really fast," said David. "She goes almost as fast as Dad and she even won a trophy." Isaac looked shy and ran away.

It turns out that Guissona isn't a quaint old pueblo with buildings that are hundreds of years old and narrow gothic streets like many of the little towns in Spain. Guissona is full of apartments that are 15 years old or less and wide, well-paved streets that leave little shelter from the sun. Why? Because the heart of Guissona is the Bon Area meat packing plant, which employs 3,000 people in a town of 5,000 inhabitants. No one in the town pays electric or water bills because everything is on the plant's power grid. After lunch I came out of the restaurant and Isaac and Jaume (the president) were the only ones out in the street. Both were leaning against a car. Up the street a black family walked by. "There are blacks all the way out here in this little pueblo," Jauma said to the kid. "How disgusting!"

Now let me introduce you officially to Jaume. He looks like Hoggle from the David Bowie/Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth, but has the half-coconut mouth of an orangutan. He's 70 years old and super-Catalan. Many Catalans, especially those from the previous generation, see immigration as a degradation of their culture, since there were no immigrants during the dictatorship lasting until the mid-70's. Jauma is of this school, complete with machismo and everything. He really gets his rocks off on being the president of the club and gets off on getting away with pissing off club members. He's often talking about who's a maricon (faggot), and accusing people of mariconadas (faggotries/faggot behavior). Obviously I really don't like Jaume, not only for his oppinions, but also for how he rides. So many times he can't stand having a girl in front of him so he'll hang on to someone's wheel until they pass me and pull in front, then he'll stay to my left and box me in so I can't move up on the inside, nor move to the outside to pass. Then they slow down. I have to hang back and let them pass to pull up again. Let me also explain why I can't speak up against his behavior. Since immigration is fairly new to Spain, using racial slurs is all the same as using the politically correct terms and if you speak up everyone tells you to stop being so sensitive. Had I spoken up I would have been alone. There still is no forum here for anti-racism.

Later that day we were sitting in the patio (teraza) of a bar drinking beer. Jaume was there watching everyone go by. "Ugh! There are so many moores and niggers here, it's disgusting". Xavi said, "It's a workers' town. Someone has to work." "Well, let the whites work!" said Jaume. Xavi: "They work like dogs" (in Spanish "trabajan como negros", literally, "they work like niggers"). I couldn't stand it. Jaume kept going, talking about how horrible it was that they let so many rafts of west Africans land on the Catalan coast. His voice getting louder and louder. "They should do them all a favor and sink 'em all!" "Jaume, lower your voice," said several. "Who cares if they hear me?! Let 'em hear me, then let 'em go home if they don't like it!" he said with a grin. I could have killed him. I needed another beer. Jaume had just finished his. "Who wants another beer? Salva?" Salva shakes his head. "Miguel Angel?" Miguel Angel shakes his head. "One for me!" I said, "Nada de mariconadas," ("no faggotries here"). This was a private joke for me, making fun of them, playing ironically into their game and having them laugh at my burrs. I have this sense of humor where I like to make people say things that I might say behind their backs in a falsetto voice or with an exaggerated accent and make fun of them anyway, but it's much more satisfying to make them be assholes themselves, in their own voices. It didn't matter that no one got my joke, and they fell into my trap. It was my own private revenge, a girl indirectly calling them maricones in front of their friends. But when the phrase "Nada de mariconadas" came up every few hours I started to regret it anyway.

Jaume couldn't stop talking about this pueblo de mala muerte ("god-forsaken town", only stronger than that). There weren't enough bars, there wasn't enough shade anywhere because the streets were too wide and the trees too young, around every corner there was a construction site, and most of all it was full of FOREIGNERS: Arabics, Blacks, Eastern Europeans, everything but his precious Catalans. And he didn't make any secret of his opinions. For dinner Miguel Angel took us to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Now, I'm a vegetarian who's learned not to expect anything from Spain, but even I wasn't expecting this experience. We all walked to an enormous supermarket which looked much like a Costco (keep in mind that so many supermarkets here are barely larger than a 7-11) with people everywhere. Off to the right there was a change machine and a turnstyle. Next to the turnstyle there was a big, mean-looking man watching everyone that came in. Entrance to the buffet was 4 euros which you fed into the turnstyle (hence the change machine), or you put through a Bon Area credit card which automatically charged you the amount. Once inside you could choose from dozens of different kinds of meat: frozen and coldcuts. Then you stood in line for one of four grittles and cooked your meat yourself. There were also gazpacho, eggs and bread, which I took advantage of. People went up to the grittles with plates piled high with raw meat and cooked forever. "This is the only time in a week that a lot of people get to fill their stomach," explained Miguel Angel (who had paid for ALL of our 12 euro lunches earlier that day). It was somewhere between interesting and supremely depressing to see the whole families there enjoying the biggest meal of the week in this 4-euro buffet. "You have to go up there to salt your food," explained Miguel Angel, pointing to the end of the buffet with the oil and vinegar vats. "The salt shaker's chained to the counter because people steal anything that's not nailed down." The children acted the same as any group of children in a restaurant where the whole family goes out to eat, they filled their guts and then went off to run around the place to burn off the leftover energy from a special occasion. Apparently there was a talent involved with snagging a grittle and Salva didn't get it, so he took about 20 minutes to get a grittle. Meanwhile, Jaume sat there tearing off pieces of balogna with his teeth and throwing it on his plate with disgust. "I'm not hungry. This place is disgusting. These people are disgusting." I wanted to throttle him. Miguel Angel was right there, just having sat down after toasting bread for everyone and could hear all his comments. Walking home Jaume walked ahead of everyone with a giant storm cloud hovering over his head, not saying a word to anyone. "What's up?" said Miguel Angel. "You're never quiet". "I just don't feel like talking," said the world's biggest asshole. The whole incident gave me the urge to either kill him with my own bare hands or break down and cry. Here was Miguel Angel, a bit rough around the edges, but one of the nicest men I'd ever met. He even lent me his bike and drove it down to Barcelona so that Lorraine could ride it when she came out to visit me. He wasn't the richest man in the world, but he had opened his house and home to us so that we could all have this weekend of cycling and spending time with the club, and his wife and kid had gone to sleep with the neighbors to free up sleeping spaces. And then here was this ape condemning the whole situation. "Listen," I said. "You don't do anything but complain. Why don't you just fucking lighten up a bit?" My heart was racing from standing up against The President and he ignored me.

The next morning we all met for breakfast in a bakery downstairs and rode off into the sunrise. We clocked a record pace since nearly everything was downhill and after 2 hours we'd already covered over 60k. When we stopped for lunch I was starving after hardly eating more than bread and pasta after yesterday's adventures. I ate liberally from the bread basket before getting my half baguette with an omolette. When they served us coffee Jaume started again. "The only problem with the town is that there were so many niggers". He then launched into some speech that made me shake with anger, repeating his arguments about how white people should be the ones working, how the coast guard should just sink any rafts that turn up on the coast. I stood up with my coffee in hand and muttered something about having to make a phone call, not really trying to hide my anger. "Watch out," someone said as the coffee sloshed out of the cup onto the saucer. I didn't give a flying fuck. It made me so angry to have to sit there and listen to the whole bullshit conversation, knowing that Xavi had taken me aside yesterday and said, "Listen, it's just a thing that happens with old age. I'm sure he thinks that things were better in the dictatorship. Let it go."

On the way home everyone seemed to be flagging but me. Maybe it was the extra bread that I ate (the time I left the group behind and won a race I'd eatten about half a loaf of bread also), or maybe it was the disgust with the whole situation, but I was flying ahead of everyone and didn't care to hang back like the stronger guys were doing. Still, Jaume was caging me in worse than he ever had before, or maybe it was irritating me worse than it ever had before. Either way, I wished I could just pull away from the fucking club and go home already. We got to within 25k of Barcelona about an hour ahead of schedule. I could be home with my girlfriend around one, but the boys were LAGGING. The wind picked up, but I still felt strong and I picked up the pace, grabbing my drops and dropping my head. Who fucking cares about those 200 lb wind shields? But then there was a problem: I didn't know how the fuck to get home. I was going to have to turn somewhere, but I had no idea where. I had to stop and let them catch up. "Come on, ladies!" I said, "Let's get home and get some grub." "Calm down," said Miguel Angel. Salva's shoes were bothering him so we stopped. Angel went ahead, but, well, it was just as well to wait as to go ahead with Angel since we'd catch him anyway, so I waited. Then, after that, the ladies were dawdling, no two ways about it. I just wanted to go, but every intersection that looked like it might lead back to Barcelona, I waited, just in case. Finally, finally, FINALLY I knew where we were, but not necessarily how to get home. And who was next to me? Jaume. "Are you going to stop to have a beer with us, nena?" "Naw, I just want to get home already, but I don't know how to get back to Barcelona". We were already only one town away (back in Molins de Rei). "Chill out, nena, I'll tell you how to get there," he said. But then the light changed and I was off, and the next was green, and the next. When I stopped at the next red light he was gone. Who gives a rat's ass? All roads lead to Rome, right? And I did find Barcelona just fine, and was back with my girlfrend half an hour early and not a moment too soon.

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?

Hey there, Waldo Watchers!

I'm always extremely satisfied and impressed with my workouts, but it's so hard to see results in the short-term and so hard to keep track in the long term. One bad day in a bench mark or a bad race makes the whole season look like crap. Since over the next year or so I'm going to be concentrating on volume I decided I'm going to do a virtual tour of certain parts of the world to keep myself motivated:

I'm going to swim from Barcelona to Rome. I'm going to bike from the northern tip of Newfoundland to the southern tip of Chile. I'm going to run from New York to Los Angeles. Clearly I'm not really going to do this, but I'm going to stretch my high-tech know-how and trace my "progress" on 3 google maps (I have such a geeky obsession with maps!) which I will put a link to on the sidebar of my training log (see link in the top right corner of this page).

This continuing effort, an enormous triathlon if you will, began on April 14,2007 (a day of no real significance, just a day I got disgusted with myself and decided I needed some extra inspiration), and will have a cut-off time of 8:59 am on May 16, 2008: my 25th birthday and 2 days before Lanzarote.

Routs in real space would be impossible. That's why I've devised a superpower for myself: I can bike across all surfaces and I can run over short bodies of water such as streams and small lakes. Also, I will not always be able to measure distances, for example, I'll assume that I go an average of 25 kmph on the indoor trainer in the gym, and will do my best to guess running distances. Since I am also doing this with a combination of the high-tech services offered by google, and the low-tech services of my tape measure against the screen, not all distances will be accurate. Here are the approximate distances I plan to cover:

Swimming To Rome: 844 km
Northern tip of Newfoundland- Southern tip of Argentina = 8,667 mi
New York-Los Angeles = 2,150 mi http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8&channel=s&lr=lang_es&om=1&hl=en&z=2&msid=118209305642889227553.00000111fee9dce11baa0&msa=0

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.