Did I shave my legs for this?

With respect to Deana Carter, I have been shaving my legs on a monthly basis. Like football players taping their ankles over their shoes — provides no real stability, but it's force of habit and part of gearing up for competition — I invested in discount girl razors, no doubt to the amusement of the clerks at Safeway. I've either got a deep, dark secret (which I don't, other than... the incident) or I drew the short straw from a significant other (which I didn't). It makes me feel faster, especially lying in bed the night before the race and sliding around like an Olympic luger. And with my season in a tailspin, I'll continue the habit in hopes of at least feeling fast if I can't actually be fast.

On July 8, I found a sock I'd been missing for more than a year-and-a-half. It was the other race sock from a set I bought at the Austin Tri-Cyclist in 2002, and I designated as my race socks — black with orange stripes and yellow smiley faces. Maybe, if I get it together and figure out this digital camera thingie, I'll take a picture of them and post them here. Anyway, I pulled a t-shirt off the massive stack and out rolled this sock, presumed missing at a Davenport, Iowa, laundromat in late 2008. I thought that would be the break I was looking for, since shit's been kind of stinky in 2010.

Alas, I rode the wave for a few days. On July 11, I won my age group at the Cheyenne Sprint Triathlon, with the same time as in 2009 on about half the training. I had a brief upturn in mood, since it felt like the $3K I spent on a bike was worth it. For a while, anyway. I bagged the Headwaters Triathlon in Montana because it would have put me on the road for a long time right before I went on vacation with my parents, so the next race would be the Rattlesnake Triathlons in Aurora, Colorado. That was to be a back-to-back weekend, with an international distance race on Saturday and a sprint on Sunday. I did Saturday's swim in a decent 26:16, then hopped on my bike, grooving along the shittiest roads in Colorado — rural Arapahoe County, in case you're wondering. I stayed on the white line because the roads were open to traffic when I looked up in time to see the white line disappear into gravel.

I successfully kept the bike upright but the loud pop told me there was more to worry about. Not one, but two flat tires. I changed them in about 20 minutes, but my mental state went south with every passing minute. There goes the 1-hour, 10-minute goal for the bike, the 1:15 goal, the 1:20 goal, the 2:30 overall goal. After a while I just stopped and reset my watch, figuring on being a tourist. Once I got the tubes changed (tossing the spent tubes in the ditch with the beer cans and cigarette butts), I went for the CO2 dispenser and learned the hard way that if you put a CO2 cartridge in there, it slow-leaks. I was deflated as those tires, and started walking with my bike toward the turnaround for the bike. I was done, even if somebody — like the official in the red pickup who ultimately gave me a ride back to the transition area — had a pump. My mental state was shot and I'd already checked out.

In fact, I bailed on the sprint the next day, choosing instead to run for an hour in hopes of boosting my ego, followed by retial therapy, Dave-style — the clearance racks at Sports Authority, Big 5, Dick's, Running Wild, and Performance Bike, because you can't have too many pairs of running or cycling shorts, or CO2s, or tubes, or pullovers, or synthetic, wicking shirts.

So that was the last time I rode my bike, choosing instead to get into a groove with my master's swimming group, and shore up the run miles in advance of the Portland Marathon. Meanwhile, we got another issue of the magazine to the mailboxes of our alumni, donors, and friends, and the come-to-Jesus meeting with my boss was tolerable, resulting in weekly progress reports, instead of the bi-weekly ones previously assigned.

The latest setback is health. I've been lucky so far, not being sick since last December's bout with vertigo, but over the Labor Day weekend I picked up a head cold (Warning: graphic description). For about 24 hours, there was this baseball-sized piece of phlegm stuck to the back of my throat, too far back to force up, and my throat felt like it had been sandpapered. I worked through it for a while, but ultimately got tired of walking down the hall to the bathroom repeatedly, so I called it a day at noon today. My cold solution is to drown it in fluids, hoping the liquid loosens things up. Pepsi, Gatorade, water, V8, apple juice, soup. Then pee, rinse, repeat.

The Harvest Moon Triathlon is Sunday, and I have a prepaid hotel room and everything, but between the lack of bike miles over the past month and this week's illness, there's no way I can fake a half-Ironman. A shorter race, certainly, but a half-Ironman would be the most excruciating six hours of 2010, this side of a stint in the doctor's office. In case you've lost track, I signed up for eight triathlons, DNSed four of them, DNFed one, and finished three, winning my age group twice. The offseason can't get here fast enough.

So the plan is to go down, stay the night on an unfamiliar bed, collect the Marriott points, and help out at the race.

And I'll still shave my legs.