At Trader Joe's

I was at Trader Joe's a few weeks ago.  I had recently returned to Cambridge after a couple weeks worth of travel and a couple of months in Chicago.

And for just a moment, as I stood in an aisle filled with all of that reasonably priced white people's food, I had no idea what city I was in.

It could be my failing, aged brain.  In fact, it's probably my failing, aged brain.  Then again, I'd like to think it has something to do with our late-stage capitalist culture that's plagued with chain stores.  The thing about a chain store is that it's a corporate nowhere.  If I blinded you, knocked you out, flew you somewhere, and dropped you down in a Trader Joe's (in a strip mall with a Best Buy, Staples, and Office Depot), you'd have no idea where you were.  Could be outside of Atlanta, could be upper state New York, could be in Arizona.  Trader Joe's all have the same decor, the same workers in strange Hawaiian shirts, the same perfect indoor temperature, the same products, the same lighting.  Maybe I didn't know where I was because I was nowhere.

Triathloning

Well, I realize I shouldn't be writing a post about the triathlon I just completed.  Why?  Because it's self-important.  Boring to hear about.  Really boring to hear about.  Maybe other sports have interesting tale to tells, but what can you say about a triathlon?  It was long.  I swam.  I biked.  I ran.  I felt tired.

As my favorite triathlon joke goes (and there aren't many), when an athlete was asked why he didn't want to do a triathlon, he said "because I don't need to be the best at exercise."  

And, as I said in a previous post, The Onion has already put me in my place:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/im-truly-sorry-for-this-but-youre-about-to-hear-al,28995/

But, who cares.  I'll bravely forge on anyway.  If you read long enough, I'll use the phrase "cube of urine" at some point.  That's something.

So here goes.  With headings!

Two Numbers

Triathlon officials write two numbers on your body.  They use a heavy black marker to write your race ID on your right arm, and your age on your left calf.  I like the arm number a lot—it's like a temporary tattoo of athletic coolness.  Mine started to fade right away, and the next day I was tempted to keep filling it back in with my own marker so people would notice it weeks later, and I'd get to say “What?  This old number?  I’m a triathlete you see . . .”  Kind of like leaving your lift-ticket tags on your winter coat so people know you went skiing.

The age on the calf is another story.  When I was biking most people passed me up.  The bike portion is my weakest event, mostly because I ride a used steel bike I bought from a guy in Lowell (the Peoria of Massachusetts) while $5,000 bikes zoom past me.  I also neglect a lot of bike training because it’s my least favorite part.  And I just might not be good.  So as people passed me, I would immediately look at their calves to see how old they were.  I'd be thinking “Dammit! A 57 year-old woman that just passed me” or “How can that 68 year-old man be so damn fast?”

Triathlete or Homeless Person

So I really run a low-budget triathlon operation.  Take my water bottles.  Lots of serious triathletes have some sort of complicated set-up where a hose runs from their water bottles up to the handle bars, and then said hose sits right in front of their mouth as they lean over to ride, and they only have to dip their head to take a sip, expending almost no extra energy.  I, on the other hand, bought two Aquafina bottles.  When I wanted to take a sip of water, I had to unscrew the cap, hold it in my hand, lift up the bottle, drink, put it back in the rack, and then twist the top back on.  Then I lost the cap so the water started splash all over me with every bump.

I asked my friend who drove me there if I was the only person in the entire race who was competing in cut-off shorts, and she said absolutely, which made me more than a little proud.  My running hat was an old, smeared baseball cap with a drawing of a knife through a skull, and the words “Death Before Dishonor” (for some reason).  My shirt had the sleeves cut off.  My shoes were blown-out.  

I may not have won the race but I did look the most homeless.

Still Young

In case you're in your forties and you think think you’re old, you’re not.  A whole slew of fifty, sixty, and seventy somethings were crushing it on this course.  Energy, stamina, strength, muscle tone—it’s all still available to us for decades to come.  It's just in the doing.  And if you don't do it, it doesn't get done.

A Cube of Urine

Triathletes love to talk about the minutia of triathloning.  They can argue for hours about the best place for your thumbs on your bike handlebars to reduce drag.  Or how dark your swim goggles should be on a sunny day.  Or how many millimeters your heel drop should be in your new running shoes.

But mostly they want to talk about urine.  About how you can pee in your wetsuit on a long swim, because it warms you up.  Or how you pee on the long bike ride (very common), but it's hard because working muscles lock up your bladder and it’s hard to let go, so you have to wait until you get to a big hill which provides a long downhill coast, and then you can stop your pumping legs and try to relax and see if you can get the urine to flow.

I’ve never done either of those things.  I’ll stay just this other side of being a serious triathlete thank you very much, since it means I never have to pee myself.

But urine did cross my mine in this race.  Let me back up for a moment.  One of the problems in a long triathlon is dehydration and sodium depletion.  The triathlete has about two hours of racing in them before they need to fill the tank with more fluids and calories and salt.  There’s all kinds of ways to get this done during the race, from solutions in your water bottle to special goo you squirt in your mouth.  I prefer shot blocks, which are gel/gummy cubes you can eat while biking.  This time I chose the lemon-lime flavor because it has an extra dose of sodium, which I knew I would need on a hot day.

So there I am, biking away on a 28 mile course when I feel my tank start to empty, so I pull out my first shot block.  I open the wrapper, squeeze out a yellow cube, and pop it in my mouth.  A warm, salty, gummy, squishy, yellow cube.  It was impossible not to think that this is what eating a cube of urine might be like.

White People Enjoy the Fall Colors

This race was in the Myles Standish State Park, and I can't imagine a better place for a race:  New England trees just turning into their fall colors, the pond placid and pristine and cool, the biking on smooth roads with nary a bump, blue skies, the ideal temperature (70s), running on narrow paved paths through woods, hills big enough to make it interesting but not so big that it kills you . . . on and on.

Oh, Right, I Have a Body

It’s hard to explain why one is eager to start the triathlon on race day.  It’s three-plus hours of aerobic exercise, and most of it experienced in a state of mild to extreme fatigue. 

But for me, the race feels like stepping back into my body.  Most of us neglect our corporeal selves, since it’s so easy to live in a world of intellect, words, memory, anxiety, planning, thinking, reading, etc.  Living from the neck up and forgetting everything below it.  Or maybe it's like you’re always 3 feet away from your real body, forgetting it’s there, but still thinking all your thoughts.  But when you do a triathlon you step back into your body and feel every part of it, a reentry into every last cell you have.

I figure most people only remember they have a body when they get sick, which makes your physical existence seem like a nasty necessity.   But triathloning is more about the body as celebration--the joy of movement, the five senses registering, all your systems hitting on all cylinders.  And then there's the fatigue.  The glorious, gratifying fatigue that comes after a day's hard work.  It's exhaustion as companion, a companion I truly miss when I'm not training.

This is what you want when you get into your forties.  The biggest age demographic in most triathlons is 40-45, the classic mid-life crisis range.  But it's not that surprising:  when you're a fortysomething you're aware of your own mortality since life is about half over, but you're still young enough to have a functioning body.  Death is in view but you've still got a lot of time left.  So you take up triathloning to make it count. 

The War

It’s pretty fun to see your mind wrestle with your body.  When you’re a young athlete, the only thing that holds you back is your own will, since your body can handle most anything.  When you're forty-three it's your body that holds you back with all kinds of injuries, even though your will is ready to do much more. 

And then your body starts to protest late in a 3 hour race.  When I was running my right foot went numb, and my left ankle suddenly started to throw out searing jolts of pain.  But I just ran through it, and it all went away in a mile or two.  But it’s like my body was saying “hey!  What are we doing?!  I don’t want to do this.  Stop!  Here’s a numb foot and a painful ankle.  Now stop already!  What?  You’re still running?  You’re not going to stop?  Sigh . . . O.K., O.K. I’ll cut out the foot trouble.  Just get this thing over with as soon as possible.”

Sugar Sugar

A lot of my high school students have terrible eating habits, like most American teenagers.  And I mean terrible.  Mostly because of all the sugar.

How much sugar?  Here are just two examples.  One student told me that every morning he wakes up and has bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and two Mountain Dews.  Now I like my sweets as much as anyone, but Cinnamon Toast Crunch is too much sweet for me to handle.  And Mountain Dew has more grams of sugar than Coke or Pepsi.  And that's breakfast.  Not quite the breakfast of champions.

And one morning I saw a student eating breakfast at her desk before school started.  She had Honey Nut Cheerios (already sugary--don't let the "Cheerios" part fool you), and she was pouring in chocolate milk instead of regular milk.  First of all, gross.  Second of all, you're clashing flavors here. The sugary honey-coated Cheerios are their own sweet flavor experience, and it shouldn't be muddled with the whole other flavor experience of chocolate.  Though she would probably claim a simple logic:  I like sweet things, these are two sweet things, and two sweet things are better than one.

But the very best was when I saw a student, again in the morning, open up two sugar packets and pour them into her mouth.  I thought sure, why not.  Cut out the middle man.  What a hassle to get your sugar through your Gatorade and Coke and Pop Tarts and Twix bars. Why the whole sugar delivery system?  Why not just go straight to the source?


***Special note.  You know how everyone is trying to figure out how to transform those schools in the most violent, depressed, disenfranchised, desperate neighborhoods?  Here's something that might work:  take one of those schools and control a student's entire diet to only include healthy, low-fat, low-sugar foods.  And then institute daily meditation for good measure.  I guarantee you'd see results.

******Here's what I say to my students who eat loads of sugar but are also pride themselves as athletes:  "You love soccer, right?  You want to be the best, right?  It fills your time and your thoughts and it's a big part of your identity, is it not?  Well if it's that important, then why don't you have a better diet?  I know the blast of salt and sugar and fat tastes great, but is that minor and temporary pleasure worth a diminished athletic performance?  Is the brief gustatory thrill you get worth a worse performance on the field?  Do a simple cost benefit analysis.  Cost:  you get a little less pleasure not eating junk food.  Benefit:  you are a better athlete in the sport you are claiming to love and care so much about.

Typewriter at the Coffee Shop

When I was at my dear local coffee shop the other day, someone in the corner was typing on a typewriter.  Yes, a typewriter.  A good old, honest to goodness, pop! pop! pop! typewriter.  Must have been tough to carry it all the way there.

I felt like saying "O.K., we know, it's an anomaly.  It's unusual, this is a spectacle, we're looking at you, you're making some kind of statement about modernity, we get it.  It got tiresome after about 10 seconds."

And she was being selfish.  Immanuel Kant suggested that before we take an action we should imagine everyone else doing the same, and then ask if the world would still function or not.  If it wouldn't, it's the wrong thing to do.  If everyone brought an old-school typewriter to the coffee shop, and all 30 people were typing, it would be popping chaos.

So it's the wrong thing to do.

Hipsters.

Being a Kid

Last summer my niece took a glorious trip to Wisconsin.  She stayed on a farm, played with her cousins, ate ice cream, and visited too many parks to count.

When she got back home I picked her up and we headed to the beach.

When we were in the car I said, "Wow, you had that fun week in Wisconsin, and now your uncle is taking you to the beach.  It must be great to be a kid."

She replied,  "It's exhausting."