Courtenay Brown

It’s been an eventful week, so much so that I can’t even remember what happened on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (my favourite) were all about Ben and helping him get better from afar. For those of you keeping track, his leptospirosis test came back negative, so we still don’t know what is wrong. He was discharged from the hospital yesterday but is still experiencing headaches and fever. It’s very frustrating, but he’s got a great attitude in the face of the unknown.

As if that weren’t dramatic enough, I had some adventures of my own . At noon on Thursday, Loren and I solved the world’s/Kelly’s problems over soup, salad, and a shared pizza appetizer at a fancy restaurant in Bellevue. The waiter really wanted us to shut up and leave already so he could seat some higher-spending folks! Then I swung by Microsoft Building 113 in Redmond to say hi to Chris, let him know he still isn’t forgiven for last week’s “Thai”, discuss Ben’s illness, verify that his hair is still wild and spiky (it is, ladies, it is, and it actually looks good!), oh and pick up a copy of Office for Mac.

Thursday night, I had dinner with my cousin and his family, which consists of his awesome wife Erica (a fellow U.Va. grad. Go Hoos!), their 2.5 year old son Wyatt, and 7 month old Calvin. I see them about once every 3 months, which is basically enough time for both kids to always think of me as a complete stranger, which doesn’t help my ability to deal with kids. “Does it sleep all night?” “Does it have teeth yet?” “How does daycare affect its demeanor at home?” I do have fun watching the boys though. Especially when one of their parents starts laughing, so one of the boys starts laughing, which makes the other boy laugh, and pretty soon the main reason why everyone is laughing so hard is, well, everyone is laughing. It’s pretty cute.

Then, Friday, at swimming, I dove off the blocks! Six times! Speaking of excitement! And I never lost my goggles! It was awesome! The coach said I did great! Especially since beforehand, she asked if I’d ever dove off the blocks, and I said once last year with disastrous results!

Final excitement of this week to report: arrival of new stuff! I got a big box from Lazer Helmets with my Tardiz and Helium helmets for this year. I’d gotten a tide-me-over shipment of two road helmets in Hawaii, which I reviewed here, and it looks like I’ll have to make a few updates - my new Helium helmets have a couple of sweet upgrades over the one I received a few months ago . I can’t wait to ride outside and test out the helmets! Soon enough… only 36 hours before I start driving to California!

And, this morning, I picked up my new LOOK 576! I love it! I spent several hours looking at it all googly-eyed, and also riding it. I wasn’t really able to test its handling and responsiveness because I rode the trainer. I am a weather-wimp here in Seattle and today’s mostly cloudy, 30% chance of rain, windy, mid-40’s weather was good enough for lots of cyclists to hit the pavement but NOT ME. My blood is still tropical, thank you. I hope to report more thoroughly on the bike’s rideability in the coming weeks but for now, my first impressions are good. Aesthetically, I love it - the colors and graphics are sharp, and the cables are routed more tidily than any bike I’ve had previously. I also like the matching blue cable housing, it’s a nice touch. Also, a BIG BONUS for me is that for the first time EVER, I have two bottle cages on my time trial bike! My three previous TT bikes all had only one bottle cage. I typically race with one bottle on the frame and an aero bottle mounted on the bars, but two frame-mounted cages will be awesome for long training rides. No more stowing extra bottles in my precious jersey pockets!

As for fit, so far so good. My bike is a size Small, the smallest they make, and before I pursued the sponsorship I spent what felt like hours with a calculator and a measuring tape, making sure it would actually fit. I am 5′4″, which is above average height for women in this country, but below average height for triathletes, so TT fit is always a challenge for me. Anyhow, the top tube length is just fine, but we did have a small scare with the seat tube. LOOK uses an integrated seat tube, which must be cut to rider specifications upon assembly, and there is a “maximum allowance” of 150mm to cut (an essentially meaningless figure when you are looking at geometry specs, but not when you are looking at the seat mechanism freaking out that your new bike won’t fit!). We needed to cut 165mm. I called the customer service desk at LOOK and received excellent customer service! On a Friday afternoon, no less! The person I talked to found a frame that was damaged in shipping but was intact in the seat tube area, cut the seat tube 165mm and assembled the seat mechanism to “see what would happen”, then reported back to me that it would be fine to cut it that much. Phew! So, no issues with the fit on the back end. Although I do need to swap out my saddle, it came with a fi’zi:k Arione, which I have used previously as a road saddle, but after 2.5 hours in the aero position today, I am on a mission to find a new saddle. Pronto. As for the front end, the bike came with Profile Design aero bars that are mounted on top of the base bar, which are a little too high up, despite a negative-rise stem mounted with no spacers. I think part of the issue is that the head tube on this bike is a little taller than on my Blue, but that style of aero bar adds about a centimeter and a half of height to the front-end setup. So, sometime this week I* will need to swap out the aero bars to my Ritchey Hammerheads that are currently on my Blue (* i.e. a nice mechanic who won’t charge me $251), and then I should be golden!

This is not my news, so I haven’t talked about it yet, but Ben is really sick. He’s in the hospital in Colorado Springs, here is his blog post about it. They still don’t know what’s wrong with him. I wish I could drop everything and fly out there right now, but instead, his parents are heading out there tomorrow, and I’m going to proceed with my plans, for now.

I spent the bulk of today navigating travel websites and class schedules and department faculty listings, coming up with the most efficient way to visit four schools in four states while still trying to have time for a run or a swim, or, gasp, a spin bike?!

Training tips for the travel-weary, anyone?

Here’s the plan (and, by the way, this is all starting from San Diego, I’m skipping the part about me getting from Seattle to San Diego because I already wrote about that, but it hasn’t happened yet.)

Sometime before Monday 3/22: FedEx Ground a bike to Colorado.

Monday 3/22:
6 a.m. flight from San Diego to JFK.
7 p.m. masters swim.
Staying with one of my brother’s friends somewhere in Manhattan (upper east side?).

Tuesday 3/23:
Early a.m. run
Spend the day at Columbia visiting SIPA
Evening flight to Boston
Stay at my little sister’s sublet in Somerville.

Wednesday 3/24:
a.m. run/swim somewhere
Spend day at Harvard
Evening flight to BWI
Spend the night at HOME in Maryland!

Thursday, 3/25:
Visit 8 a.m. class at SAIS
Tour campus and sound smart to people
Try to eek out some kind of exercise somewhere
7:25 p.m. flight from Reagan National to Raleigh/Durham
Overnighting with a TBD current Duke student.

Friday, 3/26:
Early a.m. run or swim
Then all day Open House at Duke
Evening reception
OMG overnight in the same place as last night! Oh the luxury!

Saturday, 3/27:
6 a.m. flight to Colorado Springs to play with Benjamin!

Friday, April 2:
4 pm flight to San Diego

Now, two of the schools I plan to visit have not sent out decisions yet, so no one get excited about Harvard or Johns Hopkins please. It’s just that I don’t feel like flying allll the way back out there to visit again if I get in, and after my unexpectedly awesome experience at Boulder I realized that there is no way I can make educated decisions about my education without first visiting each of my options. Of course it looks awesome on the website! Of course the professors sound smart! Of course this one is better than that one, U.S. News and World Report says so!

(And, if I find out I did not get accepted to Harvard or SAIS before my planned visits, then I will be more than happy to spend those two days training and sightseeing and chilling out!!)

Packing is going to be interesting.

…it just took me 15 minutes in the Goodwill donation drop-off line, with lots of honking cars behind me, to figure out that you have to depress the brake AND the power button in order to turn the car on and make it go anywhere. It’s obviously not my Prius.

I’ve made a lot of downsizing and packing progress, but I am going to delay my departure from Seattle for a few days. For one thing, I’m not feeling hurried to leave this view, but I’m also waiting on a super-extra special delivery. Plus, all this traveling and schlepping has left insufficient time for training. Last week I had my first single-digit-hours training week all year, and it wasn’t even restful! So, delaying my trip means that I can chill out a bit and get back towards a normal training routine. Yesterday I did a nice 14-mile run on the Burke Gilman Trail and a solid trainer session before several Goodwill trips and the Prius “lesson” and then going to an Oscar Party with a few too many relevance-seeking 30-somethings. Today I did a master’s swim workout that actually didn’t suck (?!)(thank you Lake Washington Masters!!), plus an aqua-jog, trips to the post office and storage unit and book-buying store, 2 hours of intervals on the trainer, and, finally for the first time in 2 weeks, core and stability! Not that I didn’t feel human last week, I just feel much moreso now. Life is good.

Life is also good because I am suddenly in surprised possession of a plane ticket to Colorado Springs to visit Ben in just 3 short weeks! That ten-week separation just went out the window, and March 30th can’t come soon enough - today we were video-chatting on gmail and I found myself hugging my laptop screen, it was weird.

Yes.

Yes I am standing on rocks. I am standing here, pretending to be kicking in place like everyone else, because I still can’t figure out how to do egg-beater kick and I whacked the crap out of my foot and cursed the stupid rocks until I realized that I could stand on them!

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So went my last morning in Honolulu, at the group swim at Kaimana. I actually whacked my foot in the same place on a completely different set of rocks during a different kickset. Kicking is not for me. Then I went for a last ride up Tantalus, packed my stuff, convinced my brother to “work off site” for the rest of the afternoon, and we went to Makapu’u to watch the waves!

Then I got on a plane to Seattle, via Dallas I thought, but also via St. Louis somehow. In the 48 hour period from 11 a.m. Monday to 11 a.m. Wednesday, I spent 26 hours on a plane to basically get from Boulder to Seattle - I don’t recommend it, but the upside is I got to spend the winter in Hawaii and a week in Boulder, and then I got to get a massage to help heal my travel-weary body . I also got a haircut (not pictured here but I am so glad I held off on the haircut until I could get back to Seattle and see Joey at Zero-Zero, she is amazing!), and met up with Chris Tremonte et al. for what was advertised as an evening of Thai Food on Thursday.

But as we sat down, starving, and looked at the menus… I gave Chris the LOOK of DEATH. This was NOT Thai. This was Chinese. The only cuisine I have encountered in this world that I cannot stand. Chris admitted that the emails about the evening were incredibly misleading and yes it was supposed to be Thai but, alas, it was not Thai. I complained via text/voicemail/videochat to Ben who pointed that I am only in town for a week, I shouldn’t go pissing everyone off, but from my standpoint, I am only in town for a week so I should NOT be wasting precious evening dinner time on Chinese food that I drove alllll the way to Redmond to unwittingly suffer through. (If Chris weren’t so entertaining, I would have gone home, but I do like Chris! And despite my whinings I did manage to get a not-entirely-gross meal.) I made up for it last night with blogless friends Hunter and Phil at Cafe Presse, delish!

Today I am “taking the day off from training” in order to “get organized”. I’m about to freak out. My grand plan is to leave Seattle on Wednesday, drive down to the Bay Area for a couple days, do the Madera Stage Race en route to San Diego, stay in SD for a month or so for the Superfrog Triathlon and then head up to Wildflower, then visit with Ben, then go to the family reunion in Maryland on Memorial Day weekend, then go wherever I am going to school, which could be starting at any time from June 1 to Sept. 23.

Here is what I have accomplished today: I have too much spandex for one Honda Civic.

The bittersweet portion of my weekend in Boulder has arrived. I just said goodbye to Ben, he is driving back to the Olympic Training Center and I am about to meet up with my good friend Sharon for an evening of chatting and catching up before flying back to Honolulu tomorrow (and then to Seattle via layover in Dallas on Tuesday).

This year is going to be really hard. Ben and I will be apart until early May, so just over two months, our longest separation yet. After that we may have a week together, and then another month or so apart, and then, it depends on decisions and qualifications we have yet to make and meet. I hate it, but it’s an unavoidable consequence of each of us having high standards, diverse talents, and fantastic opportunities. The good news is he got a new computer, a MacBook Pro like mine but a bit fancier, so we can video chat!

Last we spoke, I was enjoying a smoothie in the tropics on a Sunday afternoon. Monday presented more of the same, plus a Makaha Sons concert with my brother which was really awesome. Tuesday was a whirlwind of training, packing, and grad school acceptance. I got into Columbia and Duke! Which, since this news was in my most popular facebook status to date, you may already know that.

Then I hopped on a plane from Honolulu to L.A. on Tuesday night, from L.A. to Denver on Wednesday morning, supershuttle to Boulder, and good lord it is freezing here. I went to Rory’s and Mojdeh’s apartment and hid indoors until Ben arrived with the winter clothes he brought me from Seattle.

After he got here I suited up for nuclear winter/ a short run. I was so bundled up and the other runners I saw all were wearing shorts (in 40 degrees? are you kidding?). The run was actually good, no signs of altitude suffering. Then on Thursday, Ben and I went to the Flatiron Athletic Club to check out the facilities and get some guest passes. We did a master’s swim class with Dave Scott. I hung on OK, come to find out I wasn’t even in the slowest lane (although I wouldn’t have minded switching to that slow slow lane, I was hustling!). Then my run was a failure - I felt so heavy, and at slow speeds it’s so easy to just ratchet down one notch and walk. My achilles hurt. It wouldn’t stop hurting. My achilles hasn’t hurt in ages. It stressed me out and I cried. I was freezing, the skies were gray gray gray, and Boulder sucked.

Rory's dogs Lando and Topper have the right idea for winter - cuddle!

Which brings me to why I am even here. Last month, I was accepted into a graduate program in the Political Science Department at CU Boulder. They hosted a recruitment event this weekend, and here I am! I’ll be the first to admit that I arrived here with a bad attitude. Adjusting to the cold and gray was hard, as it usually is for me because snow does not mean “skiing!” to me, it means “trainer and treadmill”. Additionally, hearing about my acceptance at Columbia and Duke the morning before flying here was very distracting. I still feel incredibly confused about my graduate school process, about what will be the “right choice”, but on my way here I lapsed into Ivy League Hopefulness And Snobbery-mode and thought there was no way I would like Boulder.

Thursday afternoon marked the beginning of the recruitment events. I found the department building, met some current and prospective graduate students, met with one professor and worried she thought I was so stupid (she didn’t), and then headed to a welcome dinner with all the prospective and current students, no faculty. Dinner was at The Bombay Bistro, it was delicious. I started to have a lot of fun meeting everyone, some of my potential classmates have very interesting backgrounds, for example Stephen who wrote his 75-page undergraduate English Literature thesis on the presence of romantic aesthetic in modern music (he chose several underground bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor, and his thesis had a soundtrack which his panel had to listen to, and to this day three years later he still can’t listen to those bands!). Also they laughed at my jokes and stories and appeared interested in my non-scholarly life story.

Friday was a day full of interviews and being articulate and smart. I did start the day off with some mind-numbing activity in the form of another master’s swim workout. This one was ugly, even worse than the previous day’s “run”. I just could not breathe and had exactly 1 speed, “fairly slow”, as opposed to my usual three speeds of slow, moderately not-slow, and not-too-embarrassing-actually. Plus everyone in my lane seemed to want to go last, oh the politeness! “Go ahead!” “No you go, go ahead!” and so I’d go ahead and have someone hitting my feet as I just about died for the whole entire set. No really, you go ahead. I rationalized my early exit by saying my time would be much better spent showering and straightening my hair for the day’s interview sessions (Ben and Rory say I look less like a lesbian with straightened hair, so occasionally I’ll put out the effort).

Then, the day at campus. It was awesome. I did start out thinking “please no one talk to me” and sat way off in the corner for the morning information session, but soon I squeezed my chair in to be right across from the faculty members. I loved the program and was fully visualizing myself in school here for a full 5+ years. (I was accepted as an MA candidate, but after two days of hearing about nothing but PhD students and candidates, I asked the director of graduate studies what was up, she said I was the only MA candidate here this weekend but they thought “maybe she’ll want to stay for the PhD!” I’ll admit, it’s very actually appealing.) I met with some very interesting and motivated professors: Krister Anderssen, Steve Vanderheiden, and Sam Fitch. I think I talked a lot. After all the interviews and information, we had a reception (snacks! finally!) and did a lot more talking.

Basically now I am worried that I went about grad school all wrong. I applied only to master’s programs because I thought I didn’t have the academic nor work credentials for a PhD track. Also, I wasn’t sure about being in academia - I am doing this because I want my life to have some meaning, my work to make a difference and save the world. But now I’m not sure I took the right approach, maybe I am qualified for a PhD and probably I would excel in that kind of focused track, and being in academia is definitely a way to make a difference. Not to mention, you generally have to pay for a master’s and you get funded for a PhD. Doh. Dough. Lack thereof.

So that’s about it. I’m really REALLY glad I came here to visit, and I have a lot to figure out in these next months… I am of course still waiting to hear from 4 other schools, and I have to wait on financial aid info, and I have to come up with a life plan (teach? office? 80 hours a week in a giant city? where do i go? what do i do? how would i pay off a NINETY THOUSAND DOLLAR Columbia education? why didn’t i delve into this more in the fall? why didn’t i at least APPLY to Stanford or some other PhD programs that I was scared of?).

But yes, so glad I came here! Next up is a weekend of outside activities, I am borrowing Mojdeh’s bike for an attempted ride, where the high is 46 degrees today, I AM WEARING ALL MY CLOTHES. And I’ll attempt a run, and tomorrow I will bring a video camera for skiing, Nordic style !

I went on the most amazing bike ride yesterday. At first I was dreading it - long ride at the end of a long week, and ALL by mySELF. All my other 2+ hr rides here have been with at least one other person. But, when you’re by yourself, you can take photos! And go where you want!

I loaded a ride I did previously with Boca Hawaii onto my Garmin, I haven’t utilized the “course” feature before and it was great. I had a little route map on my screen and I just followed the path I rode before. Garmin would complain “off course! off course!” when I went the wrong way. I’d either turn around and get back on track, or say “I am adding extra miles!”, “I missed a photo op!”, or “i know but i need jamba juice nowww.”  My route took me over the Pali into various valleys and back roads on the windward side. I tried to push hard over all the climbs and short hills, but my heart rate data definitely shows that I was more in cruising mode than in hangontothatWHEELandSUFFER mode , typical for me on a solo ride in a great location. That’s ok. As my last long ride before heading back to the mainland, I really just wanted to enjoy myself and take photos while getting in the miles. I love this island so much, every ride makes me want stare at the ridges, scan the ocean for whales, herd chickens off the road (it’s baby chicken season here), breathe in every single rich tropical scent, and smile a lot as I pedal along.

Here is a photo album from my ride, starting off with an image of the route I took. Ride stats: 75 miles, 5 hours, 5300′ climbing (route based on a 62 mile ride with 4000′ of climbing that I did with a group in 3:40 last month). The Garmin Connect “embed map” feature still doesn’t seem to work, so I downloaded Google Earth, exported the ride, created a new email account specifically for Mac OSX Mail, set up Mac OSX Mail, emailed the Google Earth map image of my ride to myself, and then saved the image… there has to be a better way! You won’t get the interactive features of an embedded map, but you still get a view of my clockwise loop-de-loop.

 

Everything about my Hawaii Christmas Vacation is now winding down. Today was the last day of Team Jet cycling clinic, where I was a member of the coaching staff. The title phrase of this post, “Aloha means Goodbye”, was printed on the butt of the Team Jet cycling shorts a few years ago… Aloha! I am really going to miss everyone. We rode together 21 times over the past 7 weeks, which, as it turns out, was the perfect amount of time for me to give lots of great advice and get to know everyone without anyone (that I know of) getting tired of me .

We had a lot of fun characters in the clinic (with Chet the Jet at the helm, I’d expect nothing less!). We also had plenty of inspirational people - I’m quite the sucker for life-changing stories, and one of my favourites is that of my “boss”, head bike-clinic coach Charles. He went from being very overweight and unhealthy to a svelte athlete the old-fashioned way. He got on a bike and started riding it, got motivated to change his lifestyle, now he’s one of the top cyclists on the island. No crazy stomach-stapling or bariatric surgery. Pretty amazing. I don’t have a photo of me and Charles, just me and our very own Southern Belle, Ashley (I need to take some lessons from Ashley on how to look good midway through a hard ride! At least I have a sweet lid.)

Being an athlete is a choice, and a privilege. We are so lucky to live this lifestyle. Charles’ story definitely embodies this fact, but another thing that hammered it in for me was the post-race interview with Lindsey Vonn the other day after her impressive gold-medal run in the women’s downhill event at the Olympics. I’m sure I’m taking it out of context and being negative, unfair, hypercritical, etc., but hearing her say “I’ve given up everything for this” was a bit of a turn-off. I know she is incredibly dedicated, but I just don’t see how she can give up “everything”. And, would she be happy with the alternative?

In my Later Gator suit from Splish

Today I had a little encounter with “if you’re never going to be the best, then why bother trying.” It’s an encounter I’ve had many times, so thankfully I’ve learned to deal with it efficiently and effectively. 1. Call someone who won’t be available and leave a message, 2. (optional) post on twitter detailing how awful everything is, 3. maybe shed a tear, and then 4. get on with swimming (it’s always something to do with swimming). I bother trying because even though it sometimes sucks, it usually doesn’t suck. It’s usually fun, satisfying, and, until I get to my mom’s and have horses to ride, better than the alternative .

Somewhat related: Ben is at the place-for-important-athletes, the Olympic Training Center. I’d like to share with you some of the more amusing tidbits from his current stint there:

-He’s made friends with some of the women wrestlers, one of whom appears to have a giant crush on him.

-Did you know that male gymnasts smoke? Ben’s room was previously occupied by a male gymnast, and the room reeks, he says.

-Oh, he was complaining about how far away his room was from everything, and how it took forEVER (i.e. 8 minutes) to walk to sports med to get a massage, or to walk to the cafeteria for Valentine’s Day dinner of filet mignon and mashed potato martini’s. I was incredibly sympathetic.

-The other day he was mystified by a pack of girls who were all tall and thin and had their hair in really tight arrangements and wore a ton of makeup, what sport are they? I guessed rhythmic gymnastics! Then the next day he said he was still totally mystified, now they were walking around with props, what sport uses a HULA HOOP of all things? (Rhythmic Gymnastics, Ben, like what I said yesterday.) (I am an expert at random Olympic Sports and at dog breeds.)

I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be invited to take a peek at it all when I’m in Colorado next week. Failing that, I’m pinning all my hopes on the swim lesson I have scheduled in Seattle the week after. I’m going to get so fast and so good at swimming and then I will be worthy of a tour of the OTC.