Race report

The alarm blasted me awake at 5 a.m. sharp and I groaned and flung myself out of bed, surly and cursing the day I agreed to do this. I ate a whole wheat English muffin toasted with some all-natural peanut butter. I put on my swimsuit and grabbed my goggles and swim cap and stumbled out the door.

I arrived at 5:45 and a large bald man drew my team number on my arms and legs with a big black permanent marker. I picked up my chip and attached it via velcro to my ankle. I squinted in the darkness, trying to spot my friends, but there was no sight of them. I stepped into the brightness of the indoor pool where I had been swimming a grand total of three times in the past two weeks to "train" for this event. There was nary a soul in there yet but a young guy in a black and white referee outfit. "Good morning!" he chirped cheerfully. I went to the bathroom and took a few deep breaths. A few swimmers were getting in the pool to start warming up when I came out.

I headed back outside, and it was still dark but getting a little lighter, and I spotted my friends arriving. They went to set up their bikes. The rest of the pre-race period is kind of a blur. The sun came up. The crowd got bigger. The lines got longer. I noticed that most of the women had on biking shorts and I was seized by a panicky moment of self consciousness that I would be one of the few women to be swimming without them. I am more self conscious about my bottom half in a swimsuit than I am about any other part of my body, and I rarely, if ever, expose it to the public. I tried to ignore that panic.

I put my swim cap on and we lined up, self-seeding ourselves based on how long we thought it would take us to swim 350 meters. Since I am not the world's most confident athlete and hadn't been timing my practice swims, I put myself with the 10-minute swimmers, farther back than I should have, it turns out. We huddled shoulder to shoulder and back to back and bottom to bottom alongside the pool, waiting and waiting and waiting to go in. The minutes crawled by. I kept picking my knees up to keep the blood flowing as we stood there on the damp tile, willing myself to stop thinking "foot fungus, foot fungus" over and over again. My pink swim cap was so tight I could feel my brain throbbing through my forehead and I couldn't really hear anything around me and I had to rip it off for a few minutes. Finally it was our turn and I learned quickly that I should have put myself farther up in the line because I kept having to swim around people. Not that I'm super fast by any stretch of the imagination, I was just faster than the people who happened to be in front of me. The most maddening turn of events of the entire day was realizing that a lot of people were actually swimming on the left, not just passing on the left, so if I needed to pass the swimmer in front of me, I was blocked by the left-sided swimmer and essentially stuck because the space between them was too narrow to swim through. I tried to be zen about this and remind myself I wasn't there to set any records and for more of the race than not, I could just swim. The traffic jams were a drag because they took me out of the moment and out of the zone, if you will, but I had to let it go.

By the time I got to the end, my goggles were totally clouded over and luckily two strong guys grabbed me by the arms and pulled me out. I said, "Thanks, I can't see!" They were friendly and then I pulled off my goggles and took off running out of the building in bare feet wearing nothing but my swimsuit and my swimcap. I ran through a crowd of people cheering me on as I hauled ass to the transition area through the grass. I felt like a complete moron, naked and exposed and bouncing and crazy, but just wanted to get there as fast as I could for my teammate, who was waiting by her bike. I still cannot believe I did this but it was part of the deal, and luckily the distance between the pool and the bikes was fairly short.

I wasn't sure what to do with myself after that since my part of the race was over, so I threw on shorts and my race shirt over my soaking wet suit and exited on foot out the bike exit with a couple of other swimmers and hoofed the two miles of the running route in my Tevas. I never thought to bring running shoes. Luckily these Tevas are comfortable and well broken in. I felt silly walking in sandals while the runners who finished the biking portion caught up with us and zoomed past us, but I wanted to walk so I could wait for my teammate near the finish line. She showed up eventually and we ran the last 100 yards or so together and got our medals at the same time. We slapped her little boys' hands on the way in. It was all very celebratory and fun. The bananas, the oranges, the clapping, the cheering. I was proud of myself and of my friends.

I came home and showered and collapsed on the couch for a few hours. Soon it was time to be fetched for an afternoon festival with M. and her girls. We had a good time, enjoying Italian ices and face painting before it started raining buckets. With no other choice but to set off in the rain for the car where we'd left the umbrella, M. carried her 2-year-old toddler in a baby backpack, and I carried the 5-year-old on my back so she could bury her face in my shoulder and use her hair to protect her newly painted dalmatian face from the downpour. Somehow this worked, and her face art remained relatively intact. I have to say that running through the rain with a couple of very game young girls -- the 2-year-old was laughing and saying, "It's RAINING!" -- was more enjoyable than I anticipated. We went out for turkey burgers and fries and had a merry time. Perhaps my favorite moment of this whole excursion was walking ahead of the 5-year-old after we ate as she carried a giant black umbrella to protect her face paint and hearing her sing out in a very Julie Andrews way, "I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in raaaaain!" To be around a couple of little girls who have just discovered The Sound of Music in the past few weeks, knowing the magic that will now be with them the rest of their lives, is a pretty remarkable experience. They already know pretty much every word of every song by heart, and the four of us had a rousing singalong, sans the CD, in the car. ("A captain with 7 children, what's so fearsome about that?" piped a tiny but sure accapella voice from the backseat. Exactly! What's so fearsome about that? I might need to adopt that as my new life motto.) It made me really happy.

The whole day, really, was a joyous celebration of women. Elite athletes and cancer survivors and mothers of newborns, young and old and fit and not-so-fit. I can swim, but I couldn't have climbed on a bike and ridden 12 miles. My friend couldn't have swum 350 meters, but she could bike and run and has lost a lot of weight after bearing three sons and is totally embracing fitness and succeeding, and we were a team. More than three hundred women signed up and did this race in some form or fashion, fast or slow or in teams or solo, and I think that is amazing. Then I hung out with three more of my favorite females all afternoon, and we had confidence in sunshine and in rain, and isn't that something.