The Residual Sugar

By Tuesday evening some of the soreness from the weekend's activities had subsided enough that I thought I should get out and do some cleaning up. I got my work clothes on and reconnected the side porch bib sleeve and got the garden hose hooked up. I hosed off my mud-caked bike shoes that had been slowly rotting on the porch and got them drying by the fire. I pulled the bike out of the barn and did a proper cleaning and lube on that. Then I tucked in to the inside of the Subaru. After Mudslinger, the nice off-white upholstery looked like it had fallen victim to some Spring Break mud wrestling. Sadly, it wasn't "Girls Gone Wild" so much as "Jonathan started to die from hypothermia and was losing muscle control" that left all the mud streaks on the seats, doors and ceiling.  I hadn't planned the getting out of muddy kit part of Sunday very well. Aside from ruining the upholstery in the car, I may be the first person in human history to injure themselves …

There are always two races. There's the race - the event. The course, the people who make it happen.  All the gear, the logistics - the things that make up what one shows up for and all that leads up to it. There's also the race that plays out in the heads of those who compete. The dense, emotional collage of what racers feel, what they see, the arc of the short story every racer writes for themselves as soon as someone says "Go!"

Yesterday I did my first triathlon. Today I did a 22 mile mountain bike race. As things go, this was quite a weekend and I will tell you about my two days of racing - it was funny, hard, disappointing, amazingly redemptive, and unspeakably muddy - But I want to tell you about what I saw at the triathlon first.

The "Beaver Freezer" is a wildly popular, if horribly named, sprint triathlon down in Corvallis. It's put on by the OSU triathlon club. Carin Norris was riding with them when she died last November. We decided that a bun…

I actually did do the Red to Red race on Saturday. I probably should have written that report as soon as I finished the pre-race post. I gave it a day or two and ended up overwhelmed getting ready for the "Freezer" triathlon next Saturday. I doubled up on the swimming. I started running. I pulled my right calf almost as soon as I started running. I stopped running. Still more swimming. Then the pool closed for Spring Break. I stopped swimming. Got on the bike a few times trying not to make my injury any worse. Somewhere in the midst of all this, right about when we were ready to put the house on the market out of sheer exhaustion with the damp grey weather, Oregon turned around and threw us one of those glorious weeks of warm sunny days, so we charged outside to knock out as much yard work as we could before the weather changed again. It's still nice out and I need to go take the road bike out for a spin and try a short run right after. So I'm afraid my race report …