I Told You So

I'm not a morning person, I never have been. Well, except maybe in Italy - I was regularly up before 8am without an alarm and was happy to be awake instead of cursing the sun. This is not that kind of morning. It's 5:10am and I'm putting on a swimsuit and shorts that are waaaay too tight for my comfort - the fact that they are designed to be that way because they are biker shorts doesn't make me feel any better. I'm going to be running in these things and I'm not used to doing so in such, uh, revealing clothing. But, as 6am rolls around and my friend picks me up to take me to our event, he reminds me that no one looks good at these things and you can't hide anything, so take comfort that everyone feels the same way.  
The sun still hasn't decided to join us and the ride to Decker Lake is quite a dark one. Not a lot of people up in Austin at this hour - until we hit the road to the park. The line of cars and tail lights goes on as far as we can see. Are there really this many crazy people in this town? Apparently, yes.
This is the Rookie Triathlon. The kickoff to the triathlon season, a warm up for veterans and a time to get hooked on the sport for newbies. I've always heard that triathlons are addictive but sitting in the car at this hour I'm not quite seeing it. To set the tone as we inch along through the line, we put Eminem's Till I Collapse on the iPod and I can tell I'm starting to get nervous. Why? Well, I haven't trained for this. At all. I consider myself a fairly fit person and I have no problems running a few miles and I can play tennis for hours, but swim? Bike? Uhhhhh..... I'm not sure. And certainly not all in one race. Granted, this is a rookie, so it's short - 300m swim, 11.3 bike and 2 mile run - so I feel confident I can do it, but in what time and accompanied by what pain, I have yet to find out. 
We park the car and you can already see the culture of the sport. It's blatantly obvious that despite this being a rookie, there are some people here to compete in a serious way. People walking by look you up and down and do most of their assessment on your skill level by looking at your bike. I don't own a bike so I've borrowed a friend of mine's for this event, but it's a hybrid meaning it's considerably heavier and has thicker tires than a road bike - the kind you would want for something like this. Not that this bothers me. I'm just trying this out and seeing how I do. I'll make the investment someday later given that somehow I actually enjoy the day which, again, doesn't seem likely. 
As we walk to the start of the course to get body marked and set up our bikes in the transition area, we realize that it is unusually cold for an Austin morning in April. Normally this would be welcome with a run or bike race, but this has the ever daunting component of a swim. Given the air temperature, there's no way the water can be any warmer - the officials have deemed this a wetsuit appropriate race to help deal with the cold water. I have no such wetsuit and this doesn't do much for my nerves. 
The transition area is like controlled chaos. A sea of bikes, helmets, biking shoes, running shoes, towels, water bottles and everything else you could think of for a race with three separate components. I get my little patch of grass set up with everything I need and rack my borrowed bike. From talking to many of the women around me, they are just as unprepared as I, so calm down a bit and decided I'll just go with it. I can do this. 
The race starts off at 8am with wave after wave of swimmer, seperated by age, gender and expertise level. Being in the womens rookie 30-39 group we are the second to last to enter the water. Thankfully the water is warmer than anyone expected an that is not a factor. What quickly becomes a factor as I start swimming is the fact the this isn't a pool. It's open water, choppy and filled with other people trying to swim past you all at the same time. By the point I get to the half way mark to the first buoy, a whopping 50 meters, I am in a full out panic.  Flashes of EMS pulling me out of the water before I can even get to the first buoy are running across my head and it becomes blatantly obvious that I have to change strategies. Freestyle isn't going to cut it so I swtich to breaststroke. Ah. Happy place. I may be a turtle swimming through the water but I'm moving 
And more importantly not panicking. I slowly make my way around the buoys and sight the land. Good god, just get me on a bike. 
Getting out of the water we run up the hill to the transition area where most everyone is already coming back from the bike. A quick dry of the feet, throwing on a shirt, socks, shoes and a helmet and I'm off. This whole biking thing seems pleasant enough. Pretty country side, fairly flat and nice weather - oh, but this is just the first mile. Then I start to remember the trick about biking. You should always pull just as much as you push when you pedal to even out the load between your quads and hamstrings. That will not be the case today because I have no cage or clips so this is all pushing. Hmm, this could be bad for the run. And as I'm contemplating this, a 45 year and 52 year old blow by me on the bike (everyone is marke with their age on their left calf). This is not helping my confidence. We reach mile 8 and I do get an odd lift from seeing the hills ahead. Many of the riders are dismounting to walk it but I know I should have no huge problem, which I don't. I blow past them and pedal my way through the rest of the bike with only one thought, good god, get me to the run. 
And then there it is. Time to dismount and push through the 2 mile run. As soon as I start running, which after biking is always an odd feeling, I know I'm not going to stop to walk. Whatever zone they talk about runners getting in is firmly where I have found myself. I know my calves hurt and my left hamstring isn't too happy, but it doesn't really seem important, so I just go. And with 1:29 since the gun went off for our swim wave, I cross the finish line. I will finish 98 out 338 women when the results come out. 
At the beer garden, my race buddy asks me what I thought. He's trying for a half ironman, so he's already been squarely bit by the triathlon bug. "That was awesome. When can we do it again?". He laughs and says, "See, I knew you would like it. I told you so."
See you at the Pflugerville Sprint Triathlon in June. 

A Little Sunshine

I was reminded twice in the recent past that I haven't blogged in awhile and am severely overdue. I am happy to report that the dismal tone of which many of my posts were taking is now gone and I hope it doesn't return anytime soon. It wasn't so much a list that got me back on track, but it was saying 'get on with it' that eventually sunk in and gave the nudge I needed. I give most of the credit to getting up off my ass and getting my exercise and diet back to where it used to be - even better than it used to be. Ever since I was a senior in college I've had to fight black clouds overpowering my thoughts on a regular basis and I've done a lot of that management through exercise because I can't stand to be on medication. After the spiritual high of Italy, I was already on a downward slide as I came back to my real life and with that came being a couch potato, eating whatever I wanted and drinking far too much. The all out downward spiral resulted as was slightly chronicled in this blog, but to be honest, I kept a lot of it to myself with only a few people knowing how bad things were getting. To those few, I owe a big hug - I hope they know how special they are. Thanks to them and working with a trainer that showed me how to re-tool my diet, I was able to start to feel whole again. It's funny, I was wallowing in self pity for at least three months and it only took three weeks to lose almost 10 pounds and for my ego to rebound. Guess it goes to show that sometimes when you have your mind set on something, you can do good things.
So for the physical aspect of life, I've gotten a big lift. I recognize though that it probably wouldn't have happened quite so easily if I didn't have the job I do. I've talked about the flexibility it affords me, but it became very apparent as I was able to add in tennis drill sessions on Friday afternoons at lunch, workout for an hour on random afternoons with my trainer, and making meals at home that fit my new diet. The culture of the job I have now allows for those things. Granted, I pay for it by having to work later at night and on the weekends, but it's worth it to me. I'd rather have the time to screw around a bit during the week and work a few hours on the weekend then have the 9-6pm locked schedule at an office. The other factor is that I can work anywhere in the world - when I interviewed and got this job when I was over in Italy, I remember talking about how I could move to Italy if I wanted to and it wouldn't matter. While I still have no plans to move overseas, I do have plans to work from Philly while I visit my family for a week. I could go anywhere or visit anyone and as long as I have an Internet connection I don't have to take any vacation. Again, that's pretty amazing and I am hugely thankful for it.
And speaking of Italy, Lucie and I touched base via email and I passed on the news that I will not be making it over there until September. The summers get quite warm there and she highly recommends that I wait until then so that I can enjoy it. I'm going to take the opportunity to work remotely in Philly to show my boss that I can work away from home and have no issues or loss of quality with my work. The thought of being able to work at Lucie's house with the cats roaming all over the place and getting back to feeding the horses in the morning and everything else that was so magical there makes me want to get on a plane immediately. I was thinking the other night about the places that have had the most impact on me just by the air of the location. Lucie's farm is definitely one of them. I will never forget walking back from the barn from feeding the horses and looking onto the house with a thick fog enveloping it, the grass green and wet, and the chickens roaming about. I will also never forget watching the sunset at Athena'sTemple on the Greek island of Naxos. Being able to stand on that hill and watch something so beautiful with no one around will never happen again. And the last place that hugely stands out in my mind is the Black Hills in South Dakota. I haven't been back there since I was in AmeriCorps, which is a huge failing on my part, but it will always be with me as one of the most spiritual places in the US. Everyone has places that stick with them, experiences they carry with them - it reminds me of a toast a friend recently gave this past weekend at dinner. There was much more to it, but the takeaway was this: "Life is a collection of stories". We share in the experience of them, intertwine with them and connect through them. This weekend I added a huge collection of stories to my life and this coming weekend I will add another collection as my friend gets married and moves on into another phase of her life. I'm also observing my 33rd birthday, although it doesn't feel like that is coming up at all which seems appropriate this year. Maybe I just want my friend to have the spotlight for her wedding. Maybe I'm just content this year. But something feels good, something feels right. Finally.

Voices on Vaca

The beginning of this blog started off with a post about Eat Pray Love, one of my favorite books of all time. Throughout the chapters, the author talks about communicating with God or whatever you want to call the higher power you believe in. I can say that I have tried on many occasions to duplicate this line of communication and have not gotten the same response she has - which is to say that I have rarely had a calm but piercingly crisp and loving voice part the thoughts in my cluttered mind and impart wisdom. However, one of those rare occasions actually did happen the other night and it has stayed with me throughout the days since.
It was the middle of the night around 3am and I was half asleep, wishing I was completely asleep because I had been up late again doing mindless things, like watching TVand playing silly games on my iPhone - all in a consistent effort to not think about the things seriously bothering me. The things bothering me are all the same that have been spoken about before, but at the moment I feel like they are getting the better of me. I've lost my motivation to deal with them, face them, fix them or give them any positive energy whatsoever (negative energy, on the other hand, is abundant). I'm pretty sure it's this lack of motivation that drove me to hear the clear voice in my head earlier this week. And no, it wasn't some booming authoritarian bellowing at me, it was simply, from what I can tell, myself or my subconscience trying to get through. "Get on with it already." Initially I thought it had to do with my romantic life and moving on down that path, but now that I've had time to digest, I believe its meaning to be much broader.
Almost everyone I talk to has a dream that they keep in the back of their mind, wishing there was a way to bring it to the foreground but not knowing how. At some point, the dream gets lost or forgotten but rarely does anyone ever make the decision to say yes or no to it. The whole process is much more passive than either reaching for the stars or gracefully bowing out knowing you're ok with leaving it behind. I think that's what I was trying to tell myself. Make up your mind. "If you want to dream big, then dream big. But for god's sake stop puttering around and whining like a confused child trying to find their mother because I for one am sick of watching it. Get on with it already."
I can't blame my sub conscious, I'm pretty sick of listening to myself too.
Everyone at my age believes that time is infinite for us. In reality, we know that's not true, but we assume we have so much time ahead of us that we feel we can dilly dally about. We treat time as a luxury. I'm pretty sure that's going to come back and bite us in the end, but the alternative - facing the grim reality that our days are very numbered - is too depressing to let in on a daily basis. In my attempt to get a grip on the passing days and my abhorrent way of wasting them lately, I've decided it's time to use my most trusted method of getting me back on track. Making lists. It's the best way to organize my thoughts and get them on paper so I can see them all at once and assess the chaos I've created. I'll come back and post said list when I have it, but right now I'm just glad to be getting my butt in gear enough to blog agin for the first time in weeks. Time to connect back in with reality and shake myself from this lazy vacation I've sent myself on for the past three weeks.   

Hi 2011, Nice to Meet You

Hearing Lucie's voice on Christmas Day was like a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure if it is the British accent or hearing about how the cats are doing on the raw food diet, but the conversation puts a huge smile on my face and lifts my mood considerably. Not that it isn't wonderful to be back in Philadelphia with my friends and family, but it's nice to reconnect with the people in Italy that made such an impact on me.
Philly is then hit the next day with a massive snowstorm that snarls the east coast and cancels the Philadelphia Eagles game my parents and I are supposed to attend (a present I gave my father for his birthday back in June). Most of my well laid plans for the trip home are shot as we hunker in and wait for the storm to pass. In the end we will have had nine inches of snow and as a result, I will only see two of my closest friends, Sweeney and Besters, once while I am home. While once is better than none, it's still not enough time to be with these people. There are just not enough hours in a day sometimes.
After wrapping up my time at home, I head back to Austin to tackle my least favorite holiday of the year - New Year's. New Year's Eve has always been cursed for me in one way or another, ever since I was a teenager. This year turns out to be one of the exceptions though, and surrounded by some of my closest friends we ring in the promise of a new start with a fine dinner and excellent music. I can't say it could have been much better.
Now comes the real test - getting back to the grind. All of the old routines start creeping in, the social calendar starts filling up and the amount of time to just sit and be slowly slips away as if you had nothing to do with the fact that you have now scheduled out your life for the next two months. So while I don't do new year's resolutions - what's the point, I never keep them - I will say that I'll be striving to push against the current that sweeps us up so easily. I don't want to say to myself "there's got to be more to life than this" anymore. If I could do that, I would be a happy camper.

Dew Point

I'm not sure when it happened, but it happened. I worked so hard to try to cement the things I learned in Italy into my brain, but it all seems to have evaporated. The lofty goals for myself? Haven't been able to accomplish any of them. And it's my fault, no two ways about it. I get back into my "American" habits and find myself depressed and back in the same spot all over again.
At work, I am now surrounded by completely new people with a whole new realm of politics to maneuver. And while it is a vast improvement over my last position, it is still sitting in a cube making a big corporation more money. At the end of the day, all I can think about is that humans were not meant to be like this. I miss moving like I did naturally with my chores in Italy. I miss so much about Italy, it's painful.
With the evaporation of yet another relationship, I am once again, alone. In Italy when I was alone - which was very often - I knew why I was alone. I was in a foreign country, my friends and family no where to be found. I had no roots there to grow from, no ties to the area to build off of. I had a an excuse to be alone and that was manageable. Here, it's a different game. Everywhere seems to be a reminder of that void. And while I am the one giving this panic energy, I still have a hard time stopping it.
In an effort to divert some of my obsessive nature, I have decided to take up training for a rookie triathlon. Maybe I can take all the negative relentless pounding I do on myself about my personal life and turn it into something positive. A fit body and a sprint triathlon to add to my resume. I hope to god this works, because the alternatives are not so positive. I find myself back watching TV more than I would like to admit in a way to make the hours go by faster and without me noticing them quite so much. And while I still (thankfully) do not have the tolerance for alcohol that I once had, it still creeps into my social life with alarming frequency and with a promise every time of making me forget that I am not happy with where things are. I can't control it. I can't control my love life, that's obvious. I can't force someone to walk into my life. I can control my career and while I still want to give this new position a chance, I know it is not my dream job. The problem is, I don't know what I want to do. This whole writing thing is awesome and I love it - when I have something to write about that interests people. Some people kept up with my blog and I am happy that I could provide some entertainment for them in that way. Coming back was quite  a different experience and I didn't prepare myself for people not really wanting to hear about all the cool things I did over there. Of all the culture shock I experienced, that was the worst and by far the biggest disappointment and left a quite bitter taste in my mouth. So again, best I just write about it - assuming "it" is happening. Do I send myself off on another trip? Do I somehow do travel writing? I'm not sure, but writing about my everyday life isn't going to intrigue anyone. And then I end up right where I started - what do I do with my life, my career. I have no more of an answer than I did before I left.
At this moment, right now, other than the friends I made in Italy, it almost feels like it never happened.

A Christmas Carol

Over the weekend I caught a glimpse of Bill Murray’s version of A Christmas Carol called Scrooged during one of my rare TV sessions these days. It’s one of those 80’s flicks with terrible action shots and way overdone hair and makeup, but it did get me thinking about life perceived through the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Mostly the past is nothing but looking down memory lane, remembering the highs and the lows and seeing how far you’ve come since that geeky kid in high school. You remember lessons learned, love lost, the thrill of that promotion or a good friend’s baby being born. It’s remembering how you got to the here and now.

And if the ghost of Christmas present were to visit me today, it would paint a much different picture than if it visited me last week. Today is a day of firsts. A new job. An updated wardrobe. A clean(ish) slate. I look at my present and can only marvel at how pretty darn awesome it is. And although I have recently lost my best friend, I have five other good friends and an amazing family waiting in the wings to be there when I need them. I have a cat that runs to the door as soon I put my key in the lock as I come home and a stick shift car that I absolutely adore. My shower has water pressure, I have heat without throwing wood on a furnace and I don’t have to worry about where next month’s mortgage payment is going to come from. I have nothing to complain about.

I have no idea what the ghost of Christmas future would show me. A different career maybe, a different city. A husband and family – but maybe not. The thing about walking away from any relationship or friendship is that you are walking away from a life. Birthdays not celebrated, trips not taken, forgone late nights out and about, bitch sessions about this or that not held. That future that once had a framework is blank yet again. A new job where I have general expectations but am not entirely sure of produces about the same sort blank page. It takes every ounce of me not to flat out panic at the lack of structure of things to come. All I can do is take a deep breath, remember the horses grazing in the pasture, the peace and quiet of the farm, the warmth of the house after the wood stove is stoked and hold onto the calm I found in Italy. As the weeks go on, I think I’m going to be surprised at how much of an impact that trip had on me. And that I am really looking forward to.

Avoiding the Blue Screen of Death

Well now that certainly didn't go as planned.
Coming back to Austin certainly had a rocky start at Polvo's. I was slammed with a lot of news and events that I had missed while I was gone, some good and some not so good. And, to make matters worse, the margaritas didn't even taste good! My favorite drink in all of Austin and I can barely stand the stuff anymore. I have found that with several food items now - my taste buds seem to have done a grand 180 on me when it comes to very sweet or very spicy foods. The margaritas taste incredibly tart and artificially flavored (which they are) and salsa that I didn't even used to blink an eye at now have me downing water and flagging the waiter for a glass of milk (ok, so maybe it's not that bad, but it certainly feels like it). My tolerance for alcohol has also gone down considerably. Where before I left I was known to be able to hold my liquor quite well, now, if I have two glasses of wine, you might as well put me in a cab because I am down for the count.
These are actually really good things and I hope they stick with me. Pants fit better now. Blouses button a bit easier and I feel better about myself than I did before I left. But then again, there is the slide. The slippery, slippery slope back into what was my life before. It doesn't take much. Saying 'yes' to one or two more parties than you planned on, going out for lunch a little too regularly or allowing a friend to buy you just one more drink. There is also the more treacherous slide of slipping back into other far more damaging emotional habits, which are the demons I'm trying to avoid most - and doing quite poorly at, I might add.
I can beat myself up all I want. Call myself all the names I can possibly think of and have people poke holes in my personality and habits all day long. It's not going to change anything. All I can do is present the best version I can of myself and count on the bolstering of others to lift me up when that version just isn't available at the moment. And really, that's all any of us can do, take charge of and handle with care the things we hold in our control - and let the rest be what will be.