Everyday is a snow day

He sat underneath the awning in the park rotunda. The opportunity to move had passed him by. So he sat, waiting for the next moment to move along. Snow was coming down pretty fiercely, and coming in a lot of different directions. He wandered out here to to watch the storm come in. To feel the nostalgia of a morning off. Instead of the radio he checked a website. To check and see if things were closed. Things were closed. City wide, in fact.

Its a little bit different now than it was then. Probably a lot different, actually. He gets mornings off when ever he likes. Not by choice. There wasn’t any one moment that said, “Things will be different now.” They just are. He just is.

But there he was, still sitting in the rotunda. He wandered out of an apartment that was both getting smaller and bigger. The burden was bigger. More to clean, more to to do, more to keep-up. More to pay for. Yet, smaller because there were now days on end when he didn’t leave. Funny, he didn’t feel like a hermit or some sort of social recluse. But, technically he had become one. There wasn’t any one moment that said, “You will be a hermit now.”

He started to draw some figures in the snow. Tracing tracks like a bird. He then imagined a fox chasing that bird. It was a hot pursuit of squiggles and lines in an imaginary game of cat and mouse. The bird won this one. But for how much longer?

There was lot of snow. It was coming faster now, and from every direction.

It had been seven months since she out out grew him. This was an instance when -- like on snow days -- the apartment seemed smaller. It would be another five months before she knew she had out grown him. Outgrown their love. It would be another eight months before he realized she was gone. It would be about another three on the eight on top of the five that she would actually get up and leave. There was nothing that said, “Time to leave now.” She just did.

Suddenly, the urge to stand had grown. A moment to move was fast approaching. He didn’t want to miss this one. In this moment he could go anywhere. Do anything. He’d start with a cup of coffee and a joke with a barista. Who knows what would happen after that? A new lead? A big adventure? This was a big city. The big city! Opportunity was in and around every corner. Just look at him. Outside. On a snow day!

Of course, they were all snow days. Now.

Bike

Bike
8:00 am - Transition is long by most standards. But not nearly long enough for me. The crowd, 10 deep at spots, was roaring. You still feel good at this point in the day and the smile won’t fade. I have complained at length to friends and family about the cost of this event. Suffice to say I won’t be demanding a refund. This is as close as you will ever come to being a celebrity athlete.

At the end of transition you grab your swim to bike bag. You dump it out on the ground of the tent and assemble yourself into a cyclist. I asked the guy next to me if this was his first event. He replied, “Coming out of the water is pretty crazy, huh?” It was his third. He knew exactly what I was feeling right then.

We just leave our belongings on our bags and the volunteers take them away wet suits and all. We run to our bikes. They are fetched for us. Valet for bikes, valet for wet suits. Such is the life of a celebrity athlete.

8:10 am - And now I am on a bike. We go through town. People are yelling. For me. For Brooklyn, which is on my jersey. For the sake of yelling, perhaps. Again, it is 8:10 AM! The energy is unreal. These people are well caffeinated or really inspired.

I have a race plan and it is to enjoy myself. Thoroughly. The hard work is behind me, race day was for the sheer enjoyment of being fit and being alive, and not falling apart. Part of executing on that plan is to allow all manner of folks to pass me on the first loop of the bike. This ended up being easier than I thought.

I am a man of incredible ego. I have always believed I could do just about anything, and believed that I would be the best in the room at it. The problem is persistence and follow through. This is how my wife has changed my life. She has taught me an incredible amount about marking a goal and meeting it. She has also tempered my ego -- it is far more likely that she is going to end up as the best in the room.

The bike is a particular week spot for my ego mania. I have been put in my place on hills many times. And I have always signed up for more. Lake Placid is proof positive of this, as it is well known as one of the hilliest ironman courses in the country and the world. I also have a hard time letting anyone pass me on the bike. So, letting people pass me on hills ... tough. But I try and hang back because, as Robert Frost said, “The woods of Placid are dark and deep, and I have a marathon to go before I sleep. A marathon to go before I sleep”. I may be misquoting, though. It was a long day.

9:00 am - I am through the first bit of hill. It has been all spin and all smiles. I have run into my friends Jonathan and Greg. Jonathan sang, “LIGHTNING MAN!” to me as he passed. It is an homage to a ridiculous bike I own. It has been a long and fun training period with these friends. Inside jokes have grown. We tease and support each other.

I am through the last bit of the hills and before the decent I see my sister-in-law and her fiancée. They are on their bikes in the middle of nowhere. It is amazing to see them. They shouldn’t have come this far for this boring race. But they did.

9:15 am - Descending for 10 miles. I would hit 48 mph on the way down. There is a little rain the first loop but it is mostly dry by the time I get there. I try not to let the inner 10 year old who is shouting, “FASTER, FASTER, FASTER” completely take over.

10:00am - This is the golden part of the bike. It is flat and it is fast. But even if you feel like you are getting speed without much effort, it is best to proceed with caution. The way I see it is thus: speed and time, these things can be made up. Effort once expended cannot. Not without a good night’s sleep anyway. And so, even though this is where ego man wants to say, “I could kill all of you right here”. Reality man says, “But I won’t.”

At this point I have seen just about all my training partners and everyone looks really great.

10:45am - I have been taking on food at regular intervals and doing a good job of hydrating. A. Really. Good. Job. No sir. Hydration, not a problem. So ... where to pee? Starting to become a problem. Peeing on the bike is an art I would say I have not yet quite mastered. It is hard to master, frankly. There is a lot of pressure that develops while sitting for 6+ hours in a bike saddle. And that makes relief a tricky thing. Oh. Yeah. And going 20+ mph on a bike with people behind you and having warm urine spray everywhere, that also makes it pretty tricky, too.

I did it. I did not poop on myself, though. And I did not wear diapers. And this officially concludes the poo-poo and pee-pee conversation. I had to get it out of the way. Immediately after: would you do it again? The most asked question is: did you pee on yourself/poop on yourself/wear diapers?

11:00am - The first real test of the day. We are beginning the climb back to town and if my legs have turned to cinder blocks things will not be looking good. I don’t just climb with ease, I ALSO still have the smile. I am spinning free, easy and clear.

And there is reason to smile. There are some very large dogs laying in some hay with a family ... wait, no ... those are billy goats. This is absurd. Thousands of dollars of bikes, ridden by lycra clad biker gangs and there are billy goats. This a David Lynch film. This is weird. But this is also a lot of fun.

We are approaching town and the final big climb, called Papa Bear, is packed. It is very much like the tour de france. Watching the tour I always think, “I would hate to have all those people in my way.” I was wrong. it. is. awesome. They make way for you and are cheering in your ear. They yell for Brooklyn. I fist pump. They yell for Shaun. I smile.

Just up and over the hill and around the bend is my family. Big colorful signs that say Go Uncle Shaun! and Run Chappy! T-Shirts. I want to put on a good show so I floor it through town. For the first time letting myself really work. I bank through town, the crowds still two or three deep. All yelling. My face is still bent in a smile, on a quick decent through town I even hit a few bumps that turn into “jumps”. I decide that this is probably not the best thing to do in the middle of an ironman. But the ten year old, he’s taken over for now.

I am off to the second loop of the bike.

11:30am - I have been doing a back and forth with my buddy Chipp on the bike. It is great to be out here with a friend. Chipp’s wife is extremely pregnant. I have heard people say that pregnancy is binary, not something that can happen in degrees. Whatever, she is due, like ... today. And her husband is 6 hrs by car away and doing an ironman. That makes her more pregnant. There is a very good chance that she is having a baby right ... freaking ... now. (Spoiler: The baby doesn’t arrive for four more days). Chipp tells me that he is starting to have a little bit of IT Band trouble. I tell him to hang in there. I mean it. I want him to hang in there, it is nice having him ride with me.

2:30pm - The rest of the ride goes shockingly well. There was something to all this prep-work. I am having an insane amount of fun. That is a theme for the whole darn day. I manage to negative split the bike. My first loop was faster than my second loop.

But the moment I am really nervous for is coming. I am about to get off the bike for the first time in over 6 hrs. This is when things tend to go wrong. You feel cramps and pinches in places you aren't expecting. What will happen for me?

I slip out of my shoes and a I feel ... nothing. No pinches. No cramps. No nothing. Not true, I feel something. Relief. I hand my very expensive (to me) and prized (to me) bike to a stranger I have never met who I trust will rack it as if it where his own. It's that kind of day.

And now to turn myself into a marathoner.

Swim

6:45 am - Floating in the water having a pee in the wet suit. There is a crowd of 3000 swimmers around me and another 6,000 plus on the beach. This officially makes it the most public act of urination for me by about 9,000 plus.

In spite of the peeing, and the guy with the bullhorn, and the forced adrenaline from the repeat plays of “Ironman” by Sabbath this moment is full of calm. It has been at least a year building til this point and for quite a few of us a great deal longer.

In 2000 I spent my summer working 50 - 60 hours weeks in food service. I smoked a pack a day (Camel Lights) and weighed 235 lbs. I spent my evenings with some fellas who cycled through jobs like this all the time. They killed them selves for middling pay, made car payments and rent (mostly), drank cheap beer. Repeat. This freaked me out. There was no way I was going to drink cheap beer for the next 40 to 60 years. At 20 years old I was having something that looked too much like a midlife crisis, complete with hacking cough, paunchy gut and a can of warm Miller Lite. What the hell was I doing with myself?

I had a conversation with my dad on one of those summers night. My father has never been accused of bending an ear so when he speaks it is to the point. In fact, to make things easier he comes armed with a handful simple choice turns of phrase, reusable for many occasions, “Everything perceived leaves an impression, the question is ‘how much’” or “Any job worth doing, is worth doing right”. At this point I wasn’t sure I was doing a job worth doing. And I certainly wasn’t doing it right. I told him as much.

He said, “The thing I was doing when I was 20, wasn’t what I was doing when I was 25. The thing I was doing when I was 25 wasn’t the thing I was doing when I was 30.” Out of context it doesn’t seem like much. But they were the right words at the right time.

My parents have always given me the freedom to choose my own path. Providing me with just enough opportunity to make things happen, but never so overbearing that I suffocate under the weight of expectation. I took his advice to mean that things could be different, it just had to be my choice. I quit the smokes and rejoined my college swim team. Oh and met met my wife.

The last part. That’s how I ended up in this water at 6:45 am on a Sunday morning in July.

7:00 am - Cannon. Gun. Bazooka. Loud. Not really sure what it was they shot off. It was a bit of a blur. But there was a big bang and then there was white. And fists. And feet.

It would have been easy for me to freak out. But I didn’t. I went with it. I didn’t try to fight anything. It is as close as I will ever come to being David Caradine. I felt like a Tai Chi master. Fist came my way: DODGE! Leg kick to the left: BLOCK! The swim is two loops of what is basically a rectangle. There is a somewhat visible golden line you can follow, but it is difficult with 3,000 other folks looking for the same thing, churning gallons of water as they go. On the way out things were certainly rough, but I never lost control. I held my ground without being so rigid that I bruised and broke in the washing machine that was the once calm Mirror Lake.

7:28 am - Done with a loop and sailing. In the water there is a muffled hum. You know that just beyond the water there is a buzz. You sense that it has rained a bit. You burst free and there is roaring thunder of 6,000+ fans and friends and family. They’ll have to wait another 30 minutes for me. Back to the muddled hum.

On the second loop I hugged the line and just floated as much as one can float in the middle of an extreme athletic event. I was coy about setting any goal times for the day. I knew about where I could be for each leg, and I knew about where I should be. But deep down inside I desperately wanted to break an hour in the swim. Not so much I was going to let it ruin my day. But I wanted to get there. And get there effortlessly.

I popped up at 59:47. 13 seconds to spare. A smile would come across my face. It would pretty much stay there for the next 12 hours.

Prep

Preparation:
The previous year - I started doing marathons in 2005 because I intended to someday do an iron distance triathlon. How I ended up at this iron event, on this day, took a bit of slight of hand.

One friend called another and said, “Everyone one is doing it. We have to. This is our last best chance.” Little did anyone know that the everyone that was doing it was also being told that everyone was doing it. My friend Jonathan said as much to me on the beach at Coney Island. Everyone was on board. It was a done deal.

We would have to go to Lake Placid to sign up. This was to guarantee entry. The week before I had my first and only ‘did not finish’. It was at a half iron distance. My stomach shut down. Two weeks before that my wife and I had had a strained conversation about the demands of training on our social life and marital bliss. For me, this was not quite done deal.

I went to Lake Placid anyway. Ironman weekend in Lake Placid is not a place to go ‘undecided’. There is no chance you make it out of town with your money or your life. By Monday morning it finally was a done deal for me. I would start having anxiety dreams two weeks later.

My official training plan started on December 28th, 2009. At the peak I put about 22 - 25 hrs a week into training. On big days I burned about 9,000 calories. My resting caloric burn rate came to about 2,700 a day. This is how many calories I would burn if I did nothing at all.

There were a few highlights of the preparation period. Strangely, many of the same incidents also sound a bit like lowlights.

There was the iron time trial in New Paltz, New York. This was four loops of a 28 mile course. You had to summit the Mohonk mountians to complete a loop. Twice. After the second loop I crashed my bike twice from fatigue and hunger. The worst of it is you pass by your car, which would gladly take you home or to a cheeseburger. I did not stop.

There was the 1.5+ mile San Francisco Bay swim. The water was 57 degrees. I wore no wet suit. I wore no wet suit. Children may not be in my future. I did not stop.

There was 18.5 miles at race pace (slow) in 95 degrees and 115% humidity (slight, but not unbelievable, exaggeration). This was done the day after I did my longest bike ride of 120 miles. I did not stop.

But mostly, when I think back on the training and the prep, it wasn’t so much a singular big day that proved my mettle. It was linking a lot of smaller events. Being consistent. Getting up, getting the rides in. Watching the food in take. Getting enough sleep so my body didn’t fail. Ignoring the please for social calls, and getting everything done so I didn’t get sick, or injured

By race day I felt fully prepared, even if I still didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t have a single anxiety dream (nightmare) in the final weeks. Done deal, indeed.

Lotto

Most days I get caught up in the hope that I will run into as little calamity as possible, looking to eek out another busy day. Our schedules (though admittedly my wife creates a busier day for herself than I do), mostly out of guilt and poor planning gets packed to the gills. We sometimes get to a warm, cozy spot where all is in balance...

And then your doorbell rings. It is destiny calling. And destiny, it seems, is a really flustered carpenter.

At about noon on a regular old Thursday afternoon, the folks doing renovation upstairs from us hit a water pipe. Now, I don't mean they "hit" a "water pipe" in the way Cheech and Choong would, though it may have been the case.

I mean hit the way Captain Smith would in regards to an iceberg.

The super and the owner of the construction company flew into our apartment at a pace that said: Trouble. Or, a very silly grown up game of hide and seek. Oddly I hoped for the later.

At this point there were no visible signs of apocalypse. So a part of me was kind of like, “Hey. Dude. You mind not knocking my stuff all around. I sort of like some of it”.

His urgency would soon be clear when a single bead of water hit my shoulder.

This lonely bead of water reminds me of the time I was playing the greatest game of racquetball of my life. It was against my much smaller, more nimble Japanese roommate. He was awesome (and may in fact still be awesome). I always played him tough, but failed to come up a winner in any of our matches. This particular day I was playing him hard. I mean real hard. I was ahead late in the game. Something like 19 – 16. I saw victory. I went for the kill. I hit one of those tough slam-the-ball-hard-into-the-back-wall shots. I gave it my all. In giving it my all I somehow I managed to catch my face. In the moment I don’t remember much of the pain. But I remember this: I dropped for me knees and for one second (a second that, like all moments such as these, felt much longer) I watched one deep, dark drop of blood hit the floor. As I looked at that one drop I thought two things:

Oh.

And

Shit.

Just like my face during the racquetball “event” as it would come to be known, our ceiling, on that quite Thursday afternoon, opened up like a really good bible story.

The calamity was complete and total. Our personal items were salvaged. The walls and ceilings of over 75% of the apartment were not.

We had just begun to get settled in this new place. It was almost feeling like “home”. The place now looks like, well, if I came home and say a homeless man crapping in the corner, I would not be all that surprised. Let’s be clear. This was someone else’s fault entirely. We were sitting at home enjoying breakfast one morning and by the same night not able to eat a meal for the stench and dust that covered everything. It really would not be all that different if you were eating a really yummy cupcake and some dude punched you in the face. But then was like, “Oh. I’m sorry that’s not what I meant at all. My mistake.”

But since that day I have been feeling overly positive. The Red Sox and Patriots both blew late leads to lose over the weekend. I got a fever. I missed a long run. A bike ride with the wife was interrupted over a stupid argument.

All of these are annoyances, sure. But they are just that; annoyances, nothing more.

At this stage in the game I have realized something pretty important: When it comes to winning lottery tickets, I am sitting on a big one. I am a straight, white, male, born during the most prosperous time, on the most prosperous continent of all time. Ever. We white males, straight, born in Massachusetts control an obscene amount of that wealth.

When bad things happen to me, like, enough water in my house to put out two Great Chicago Fires, they are merely inconvenient. There was someone fixing my house just minutes after the water stopped. No less than five friends have asked: need a place to stay? This happens when ever I get into even a little bit of trouble.

For most people on this planet this is not even close to the case. I could point you to a million sites that will tell you how bad life is for a lot of people. 80% of the world’s population is living on $10 a day. While 1.6 billion have never had any access to electricity, much less known what it is to be without it in a few rooms. Matt Shepard lost his life just ten years ago, in a real gross way, for liking men.

We could go over all of this ad nausea. I don’t blame myself for these troubles, but I sure am thankful to not count them amongst mine.

I’ll probably get busy again and take things for granted. But every once in a while it is real nice to be reminded why I don’t play the lottery. It’s because I’ve already won in so many ways.

GO! GO! GO! GOWANUS!

The Gowanus is upon us.

It shall be good to drink and swill
By the site of the great oil spill
And Katie will surely get her fill
Of the pickles, kosher dill.

The beer is sold cheaply
The trendies, dressed neatly
We'll all get drunk, completely
And skip work on monday, discretely.

Sealed with a bow

There is this charming trait that I learned by growing up in New England: If someone wrongs you, it is your right, nay, it is your duty to make sure that these people pay for it for the rest of their natural lives. This aggression is most commonly played out in my interaction with neighborhood service providers.

This behavior is a source of some contention with my dear Katie McGlynn, whose official motto is, "Can't we pay someone else to do that?" She works from about 8 am to 2 am. Her time is more precious than a baby's tears, which believe you me fetch a pretty penny on the black market. So she relies, a lot, on other people to do things for her. Unfortunately for her, at least once a week there is a new service provider in our neighborhood that has wronged me in some way.

"We can't go in there." I recently declared, referring now to our once favorite running store.

"Oh no..." Katie replies with an appropriately furrowed brow, her voice trailing off towards the end.

"The mean guy is in there."

"What mean guy?"

"The mean guy. I think he's a manager. He's always in there."

"Well, what did he say to you?"

"Nothing. That's the point."

"What?" She is confused. "So let me get this straight. Because the guy wasn't overly nice, he was mean? And now we can't go there?"

"Well I just think that they're our neighborhood running store. It should be friendly."

This happens with a lot of places. Blacklisted for things they didn't even know they didn't do. The internet was invented so people could complain about things. (Well for that and selling baby tears.)

One fall morning, when returning from a run, Katie stopped by our laundry to pick up the wash and fold. The total came to 26 dollars. She had, in her limited-pocket running outfit, just twenty five dollars. The lady wouldn't just give it to her. I mean we are in there all the time. At least twice a week. We'd get the stinkin' dollar to her. Katie became incensed. Vengeance, you see, is contagious.

When Katie came back to inform me it that was time to find a new laundry service, I fell in love all over again. She had been wronged by a service provider and she wasn't going to take it anymore.

"We'll show them!" We cried in unison.

The search was on. I asked a friend and neighbor where he gets his laundry done. His text message reply:

"United Laundry on Seventh. Ask for Judy, speak little English. She call you nice boy give you good deal."

Sold.

For a place that people take their things to be cleaned, United Laundry is a real fuckin' mess. The front part that welcomes the customer looks like a 1977 trophy shop, only, like, all the trophies have been stolen or sold to pay for drugs.

There is also some sort of broken religious shrine.

The counter is too high and unnecessary, and there is an outdated cash register, but you can't see how much anything costs. In fact, there is no price list of any kind, anywhere.

To the right of the counter there is a scale that weighs the bags of laundry. If you place your laundry on this scale it will weigh at least five to seven pounds less than if one of the ladies behind the counter adjusts it. Each one of them has an advance degree in physics specializing in centers of gravity.

Above the scale is perhaps the laundry's most curious attribute. There are a series of notes saying things like:

"Thank so much for finding my watch and not washing it. Another laundry might have sold it for drugs."

"Thanks for finding my wallet. Other people might have stolen. But not you."

All these notes are in the same hand writing, same paper, same black sharpie pen and the same not quite native English prose. They are a real comfort.

Your clothes are then taken from you. Literally. They are just taken from you. You get an unofficial looking sheet of paper that has some scribble on it and you are left wondering, "Will I ever see my lucky underpants again?"

But you return a day later with the scribbled note and your clothes are given to you. Actually your clothes. The ones that belong to you. It shouldn't surprise me every time, but it does. The clincher? It is really cheap. It is so cheap that we wonder if our clothes are actually being washed.

So despite the sketchy appearance, everything turns out pretty good. Once, Katie went in to pick up some dry cleaning and Judy says, "You have tear in your skirt so I don't clean. But I fix for you and wash."

"Sure, how much?" Katie asks.

"No charge. You the customer. I just wanted to make sure its okay with you first."

How neighborly.

So I was feeling pretty good when I went in this weekend to pick up our freshly washed and folded clothing. I lugged the 25 pounds up our fourth floor walk up and plopped it down, doing what I always do; wait for Katie to get home so she can sort the laundry. But something caught my eye.

Tied in a knot, sealing the mouth of the laundry bag shut was a rose embroidered, pink pair of women's panties. It would have been a small consolation if they were Katie's panties, but they were not. These were in fact a stranger's panties. Tied like pretty ribbon around what is an otherwise ugly, military green laundry bag.

Everything about this is totally baffling. We can begin, if you like, with: Whose panties are these? And then continue right down the list of reasonable questions like: Should we say something? Should we return them? What kind of person would tie panties to a laundry bag? Why would you tie them to the laundry bag? Where are the rubber gloves so I can remove them?

But the most obvious question is asked by Katie, "So we can't go back there, right?"

"Well, let's not jump to any conclusions." I say. The only thing the Chappie loves more than vengeance is a really good deal. And we got a free pair of panties to boot!