Courtenay Brown

Am I too old to handle a new job, a birthday party, my regular training load, and discovery of a new awesome activity all in one week? Obwiously not. These four things plus a raw-food dinner on Thursday night that was essentially like “here, body, digest this giant pine tree! It will be great!”, that made things a little rougher than necessary, but clearly I survived .

Work rules. This is a pleasant surprise, I was bitching and moaning before I started, oh waa it’s going to be boring and everyone is going to be boring and I’m going to be so bored. But it’s not boring at all, and it’s kind of trippy to be working in a company that has 30,000 employees. I call the IT desk in our building to ask how to run a new program and suddenly I have 3 emails in my inbox documenting the question and resolution. I have an ID badge! And there is a whole email list for employees who are cyclists and bike commuters. On Friday I managed to ride into work (biggest instance of being lost was when I spent 10 minutes riding around the giant parking garage trying to find the bike cage). It was great because it’s a beautiful hour-plus ride each way, and I got to ride my favourite bike for the first time since I left Oakland in 2007! My Cannondale track bike. Which I bought because I was going to “try racing on the track” but honestly I just wanted a cool bike, the velodrome disinterests me entirely.

Another thing that happened was Ben’s birthday party, which was the best party ever because I got to go tubing for the first time ever! You string up two inflated inner tubes to the back of a motor boat and zoom around the lake trying to knock the other person off their tube (if you are Ben) or do synchronized wipeouts (if you are girls who have never gone tubing). It’s freaking awesome, and it’s also the reason I can barely unload the dishwasher. I spent a mere ten minutes hanging on for dear life, laughing hysterically, and flopping all over the place. I call myself an athlete but I was destroyed in 10 minutes! As for my lifelong, steadfast, vehement anti-motorboat stance? My disdain for all the noise and air pollution? Gone with the wind. My morals are fickle in the face of fun.

I’m leaving things out. It’s hard to condense a Seattle summer week into one blog post.

And finally: we are going to be a bit light on the photo documentation here for a while. At packet pickup before Eagleman, I kept telling Amy to stop splattering me with her beverage samples. She kept looking at me like I was high. Then finally I realized it was my completely flooded purse that was splattering me. Good job leaving the waterbottle full of precious Nuun open, good job… Yet another reason to get a waterproof camera, which is yet another item on my “what to do with my first PAYCHECK!” list, which is predictably ambitious. New pedals. A massage. iPhone 3Gs. Some cool sneakers. Some cool flip flops. Gloriously absent from this list, however, is a speed suit! I got a Rocket Science suit this weekend and it is FANTASTIC! I am already trying to plot a halloween costume around it. I hope all my races are non-wetsuit swims from now on. That thing is ridiculously more flattering than a wetsuit, and we’ve all heard a billion times where I stand on the look good vs. feel good debate.